On December 18th, at Turning Point's Winter in West Palm Beach Activist Retreat, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe. From labels to ACORN, O'Keefe gave us a look at his operation, his goals with Veritas, and what he sees as the future of the media.
"We live not in a nation of laws, but in a nation of political will." — James O'Keefe
If nothing else can be said of Mr. O'Keefe, it should be noted that even at his most exhausted he is energetic. I'm not sure if that's the affect Project Veritas has on him or just the product of doing what he loves, and what O'Keefe loves is the truth.
"When you live in a world where you see how information is presented to you and then you see reality differently ... there is something inside of you that seeks to re-calibrate the difference between what the media presents and the way things really are," O'Keefe told me.
Pursuing the truth can take several forms; for O'Keefe and Project Veritas, that form is video. To taking a line from O'Keefe's presentation that weekend, "Pics or it didn't happen." Video is, to some degree, always what people either said or didn't say, did or didn't do. To claims of heavy editing, O'Keefe has two answers. First, opponents will always choose to hit him where it hurts most, but he said that even soundbites carry truth. Second, all media is self-selected. If what he gives out is narrowed down in any way, it's not any worse than what the news media does.
During the discussion, O'Keefe talked about the future for Project Veritas. Right now, his inbox gets a few thousand "tips" every week, often times leading nowhere. Of the good tips that they receive, choices must be made regarding what is targeted and covered. Asked if he sees himself as someone with a political agenda, O'Keefe responded, "not anymore." For a man often seen as targeting liberals and Democrats, this may seem hard to believe but, O'Keefe sees labels as useless in the search for truth. You could call him "king jellyfish" but as long as he's presenting the truth, he doesn't care. His mission is to further truth, not play some political role.
Following tips is a question of where it leads and how well it's otherwise being covered by other outlets. Sometimes their best tips are what-ifs, as was the case with the controversial ACORN videos. Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a non-profit organization that was both privately and publicly funded. The organization was intended to focus on voter registration and community activism.
O'Keefe told that a simple question led to him dressing as a pimp during a visit to ACORN: "What if you went inside ACORN dressed as a prostitute?"
The person posing the question, a young woman named Hannah Giles, received a simple answer from O'Keefe: "Would you be willing to play the prostitute?"
O'Keefe and Giles went in looking for evidence of dirty work within ACORN — tax evasion, fraud and more. The videos they released of conversations with ACORN employees resulted in the defunding of ACORN and the loss of several private donors.
ACORN is by far O'Keefe's most famous endeavor. But he has other plans. As for changing the game and moving forward, O'Keefe is interested in pursuing a campus operation: mailing cameras out to students nationwide, who would film their classes and activities for the semester and forward the footage to Project Veritas. Veritas would condense these into soundbites. The professor who calls Trump's election terrorism, verbal attacks for wearing certain political gear, the teacher who kicks you out of class for voting Trump — all of them caught and filmed and broadcast through the digital world. Privacy, in a Veritas-minded world, is a thing of the past. "The government would lose their expectation of privacy, just as many Americans have lost theirs," O'Keefe says.
James O'Keefe is one man, albeit the man that marks a turning point. I agree with him: the news media is not where people are looking to get their news anymore. People are looking for unfiltered sources to get their information, sources that spend less time commentating and more time presenting fact. This is a world where Wikileaks and DCLeaks influenced elections. This is a world where people debate whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor. This is a time where the media was more surprised than the American people about an election they thought they had in the bag. Knowing this, America will keep moving forward. How we do it remains to be seen.
Until then,
Good luck, America.