A new poll shows a growing number of Americans oppose President Joe Biden's plan to nominate only black women to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. And Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe talks about being targeted by the Deep State.
00:00:54.000We begin with our brand new poll with Ipsos.
00:00:57.000It shows big challenges for President Biden heading into this year's midterm elections.
00:01:01.000Three out of four Americans are pessimistic about the state of the economy.
00:01:06.000Only 29% support deploying troops to counter the Russian threat to Ukraine.
00:01:11.000And more than three quarters of all Americans questioned the president's pledge to consider only black women to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, saying he should consider all possible nominees.
00:01:26.000Well, there you have it right from the Mount Rushmore of the mainstream media.
00:01:30.000Joe Biden's paradigm to only consider black women for the Supreme Court is deeply unpopular with more than three fourths of Americans.
00:01:39.000But Republicans aren't standing up against it.
00:01:42.000Frankly, too many are tacitly embracing it.
00:01:46.000Can you just imagine telling a woman of Hispanic descent, maybe a Native American male that they just haven't experienced enough oppression?
00:01:55.000They just don't have the right identity even to be considered to serve in the highest court on the land.
00:02:02.000What's happening to us as a country where people's identity is just conflated inexplicably with their experience?
00:02:11.000See, I think people have diverse ideologies and experiences and viewpoints of all races, of both genders.
00:02:20.000And so I think that we ought to take a tougher stand.
00:02:23.000Republicans in the United States Senate should vote no against a nominee who is only selected through a corrupt, racist, and un-American process.
00:02:33.000We talk a lot about how critical race theory is now affecting decisions all throughout government.
00:02:39.000Make sure to check that out in our prior episode.
00:02:42.000This week, we have an exclusive interview with James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas.
00:02:49.000And it'll help you connect a lot of dots.
00:02:52.000When the Department of Justice wanted to smear me, predictably, they went to the New York Times.
00:02:59.000But there's another part of that loop.
00:03:02.000When the New York Times fears losses in court, when they couldn't get their motion to dismiss Project Veritas' litigation granted,
00:03:10.000who did the New York Times turn to to stick it to James O'Keefe?
00:03:18.000And it's increasingly concerning that corporate media, like the New York Times, have become incapable of honest reporting,
00:03:27.000yet highly capable to influence the next location of an FBI raid.
00:03:33.000In my interview with James O'Keefe in just moments, he discusses being targeted, being raided, handcuffed, all while remaining determined and optimistic as an American journalist.
00:03:45.000He lets you know who might be deposed or exposed next.
00:03:51.000Is it the DOD or the DOJ that have their own insiders and whistleblowers working with Project Veritas?
00:03:58.000See if you can catch the hint that James O'Keefe drops on that.
00:04:03.000I caught up with James at the iconic Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami Beach.
00:04:07.000We had celebrated the inspirational courage of whistleblowers who exposed big pharma, big tech, and big business.
00:04:15.000We honored the journalists who brought us the truth.
00:04:55.000Journalists these days only print what the powers that be want disclosed.
00:05:00.000And really, journalism is supposed to be printing information that they don't want disclosed.
00:05:04.000So in a world where the FBI and the New York Times and pharmaceutical companies are sort of acting in concert with one another, that's not how it should be.
00:05:13.000And this book talks about these different themes, privacy, propaganda, ethics, secrecy, surrounding this genre of publishing unauthorized information.
00:05:24.000Well, you have been breaking the big stories that I think expose those intricacies with power and then the way narrative is portrayed to the American people.
00:05:34.000And one of the ways people try to criticize you, diminish you, deplatform you is to say that you're not a journalist.
00:05:43.000I have spent now the last couple of days meeting with the dedicated journalists of Project Veritas and the thorough work they do to develop leads and review reporting.
00:05:54.000And they're very, very detailed, far more than the press corps that we interact with on Capitol Hill that have to spit out 21 stories in the next hour or they don't get paid.
00:06:04.000And so, you know, what do you say in defense of these folks who really put it all on the line when you're smeared in that way?
00:06:11.000Well, I think that, you know, journalism is distinguished from propaganda because you verify the information.
00:06:17.000And there's a chapter in this book called Deception.
00:06:19.000Yeah, we do use undercover techniques and we use whistleblowers.
00:06:22.000And whistleblowers sometimes have to violate their own nondisclosure agreements with their organizations.
00:06:26.000But the only way to get the truth to the people, to the millions of people out there, is to use these techniques.
00:06:33.000If you present yourself as a journalist to the Department of Defense, if you say, hi, I'm from the Washington Post, tell me all the fraud you're committing.
00:06:40.000You're not going to get an honest truth.
00:06:44.000You're going to get a kind of authorized statement.
00:06:47.000Well, and it's access journalism, right?
00:06:49.000Yes. And in Beat Reporting, there's this tension between access and autonomy.
00:06:53.000And that's a tension that's always existed.
00:06:56.000We've gotten to a place now where due to the consolidation of these companies and, you know, few tech companies,
00:07:02.000and you basically have an oligarchy with the Washington Post and the New York Times, that's basically it.
00:07:51.000The ability to have raw, verifiable information to allow the consumer of that media to make their own judgment about the information.
00:07:58.000And like it strikes me that there's a certain arrogance with modern mainstream journalism where they don't really give us the raw information to analyze.
00:09:24.000And I'm not opposed to anonymous sources.
00:09:27.000But we have no reason to trust these institutions because every time you actually look at the sources and see what they said, it never matches up.
00:09:36.000And furthermore, the people in the government that are leaking this information, it's effectively a form of counterintelligence propaganda because they're giving the newspapers information.
00:10:31.000But they do this to us because we're telling the truth, not despite it.
00:10:35.000And I also believe that in some regard, it's emboldened us.
00:10:39.000In other words, the sources that come to me, we had a source come to us with documents inside the Pentagon.
00:10:46.000Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by the U.S. Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA fellow.
00:10:56.000Major Murphy makes claims in his report to the Inspector General that if true could be damning to the official narrative that has been played out to the world over the past two years.
00:11:06.000Major Murphy's report states that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct gain-of-function research of bat-borne coronaviruses.
00:11:16.000The proposal was named Project Diffuse.
00:11:19.000DARPA rejected the proposal because the work was too dangerous and could violate the gain-of-function moratorium, despite EcoHealth's position that it would not.
00:11:28.000According to the documents, the NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, did not reject the proposal.
00:11:34.000They went ahead with the research at Wuhan and several sites across the U.S.
00:11:38.000Those people come to us because we are attacked.
00:11:43.000They trust me because they say you must be doing something right if the powers that be are trying to silence you all the time.
00:11:48.000And you are always making the pitch to whistleblowers out there that if folks are in a corrupt organization and feel compelled to speak out, that you have an infrastructure that you've built with this brave team and Project Veritas to ensure that that does get out.
00:12:02.000I had a chance to meet with several of your whistleblowers and Project Veritas was not typically the first place they went with information.
00:12:11.000They would typically try to go to a mainstream media outlet and they'd get rejected, laughed out of the room.
00:12:17.000But then when they brought their evidence here and when it was thoroughly vetted, then it seemed they had a burden lifted.
00:12:23.000I mean, talk about the most inspirational whistleblowers that you still think about that you might use to inspire someone else.
00:13:26.000What's the point of living if you're not following your conscience?
00:13:30.000And I think as our society drifts towards whatever dystopian reality we're already living in and maybe headed worse towards, people put more emphasis on that.
00:13:39.000That is to say, what is the meaning of life?
00:13:42.000Because I do think we all struggle and go through pain.
00:13:45.000And even if you do nothing, you go through pain, maybe more so.
00:13:49.000So I find more people are following Eric's lead.
00:16:11.000It's something that we all know so much about in our day-to-day lives, the consolidation of these tech companies.
00:16:18.000And you've done some good work with Facebook.
00:16:20.000We did a story on some of the censorship that the human algorithms combine with machine learning.
00:16:26.000You have previously given testimony to the Congress saying that there is not editorial manipulation that disadvantages conservatives.
00:16:33.000And just like in the case of Google, there have been whistleblowers from Facebook that not only have offered evidence indicating their testimony was not truthful,
00:16:42.000but there's even video that suggests that content moderators that you employ.
00:16:47.000If you read the game, it could work on the left side.
00:16:51.000I'm wondering if you are familiar with the experiences of Zach McElroy.
00:16:55.000The truth is more powerful than any NDA.
00:16:58.000I've seen them interfering on a global level in elections.
00:17:01.000Two people who participated in Facebook content review.
00:17:04.000I saw a stark contrast between Republicans versus Democrats in that queue.
00:17:08.000I saw upwards of 75 to 80 percent of the posts in that queue were from Republican pages.
00:17:14.000Politicians, journalists, and pages that supported the president or supported conservatives.
00:17:22.000I think both in the case of these content moderators and in the case of the testimony you just gave regarding Mr. Lucky and firing people over their politics,
00:17:29.000there is serious question as to whether or not you're giving truthful testimony here or whether it's lying before Congress.
00:17:36.000I'm not a member of Congress. I don't know what the solutions are.
00:17:39.000And that's your job and you're good at it.
00:17:41.000My job is to expose what's happening and what are they keeping secret.
00:17:45.000And in the beginning, they were kind of shadow banning. They were de-boosting.
00:17:48.000Morgan Comm and a Facebook whistleblower even released documents showing vaccine hesitancy.
00:17:54.000Facebook uses classifiers in their algorithms to determine certain content to be what they call vaccine hesitant,
00:21:11.000There shouldn't be any disagreement on this.
00:21:13.000Well, you talked about the remedy being in the purview of the Congress, and you're right.
00:21:17.000And frankly, it's an area where we have bipartisan agreement and bipartisan disagreement.
00:21:21.000I have some colleagues who say, well, if we reform Section 230, peel away a few immunities,
00:21:26.000we can leave these companies intact, and that will resolve these free speech issues that Project Veritas certainly champions.
00:21:34.000And there are others of us who believe that these companies have grown more powerful than the most powerful nations in all of human history.
00:21:42.000And that the only way to deal with them is to reshape them, is to break them up, is to force Google to alienate YouTube,
00:21:49.000to create more voices and more opportunities.
00:21:52.000And I'm not going to ask you to weigh in on what the right policy choice is,
00:21:56.000but talk about how it will affect journalism going forward if Alphabet, if Twitter, if the metaverse continue on this kind of transhumanist path
00:22:08.000with the ability to define the nature of truth itself.
00:22:12.000The meta experiment is something that I've, you know, Zuckerberg is now calling it meta,
00:22:17.000and we're going to live in a world, they say, the predictors say, in five years where we're all just living in this virtual reality.
00:22:23.000Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space.
00:22:29.000It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually, it has things that are only possible virtually,
00:22:34.000and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful.
00:22:39.000I'm not going, Jay. Actual reality has been too good to me.
00:26:04.000What you write about, though, is that it's, you know, these entities used to just exist for profit.
00:26:09.000And now it's about the power as much as the profit.
00:26:12.000I think as long as you are living in a world where, at least politically, if you want to speak about politics, that Congress is so divided on things they should.
00:26:22.000I feel like they shouldn't be divided on.
00:26:24.000I mean, if you don't, if people don't agree on facts, there can't be consensus.
00:26:29.000How do you, I mean, our political system is, the Senate is tied 50-50 and an obscure senator from West Virginia dictates the national agenda.
00:26:49.000Well, but it's actually one of the areas, the way that the consumer interacts with the digital world is a place where we see some fissures and just kind of the red team versus the blue team stuff.
00:27:00.000And I'm not pessimistic about how strident that is because you look at how Trump really reshaped policy paradigms with a more populist realignment.
00:27:08.000So, you know, I don't think we're forever married to, well, it's a 50-50 country.
00:27:12.000We can never shift kind of views or thoughts on things.
00:27:15.000I mean, you look at this Ukraine conflict now, you've got more and more Republicans cautioning against, you know, a war first strategy.
00:27:23.000That wouldn't even have happened in the 90s.
00:27:26.000But you fight these fronts, not just against big media, not just against big tech and big government, but really against all those institutions aligned.
00:27:36.000And that's something that a lot of journalists don't have the courage to do.
00:27:40.000And so I just wanted to give you a moment.
00:27:42.000And there's a great review of this in the litigation chapter of the book.
00:27:45.000But talk about the cases that Project Veritas has maybe been involved in or the matters that you think are the most important to journalism.
00:27:54.000I mean, there's a whole chapter called litigation, and I believe you're an attorney, correct?
00:28:13.000I never, we've never settled a lawsuit.
00:28:16.000And if you don't settle, you go through the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
00:28:20.000And that means you get to depose, you know, the other side and they get to depose me.
00:28:23.000What I learned in my life after a decade of doing this is that they, i.e., our opponents, the opponents of freedom and information, they tend to keep secrets.
00:28:34.000I don't really keep that many secrets, Matt.
00:28:36.000I mean, I do keep the identity of our donors secret.
00:28:39.000That's a freedom of association issue under 5.1c3 regulations.
00:28:42.000It's essentially the source code of your organization.
00:28:45.000And also the freedom of association right under the First Amendment.
00:28:49.000Now donors don't tell us what to do, but 100,000 people donate to us.
00:28:53.000And it would create a constitutional crisis if we were to identify those people.
00:28:58.000And then you have the identity of whistleblowers.
00:29:00.000But other than that, I don't keep secrets.
00:29:02.000So in a deposition, I love being deposed.
00:29:05.000Please do interview me and ask me all these questions about what motivates me and what you're not going to find anything incriminating.
00:29:14.000So in the beginning, they would sue me thinking they would break my will and get me to fold like a cheap suit because they're projecting onto me their own insecurity.
00:29:48.000And it got to a jury verdict and the federal judge in North Carolina looked at the seven lawyers representing Shirley Teeter and said, why on earth are we here?
00:29:59.000Because if you sued Mike Wallace for what you're suing O'Keefe for, everyone would laugh at you.
00:30:03.000It somehow got past summary judgment, probably because my reputation is so sullen in Wikipedia.
00:30:09.000And then after that, they stopped suing me because they realized we don't settle.
00:30:13.000And now recently, Matt, we sued the New York Times for defamation.
00:30:19.000And on Christmas Eve of this past year, the judge ordered the New York Times to sequester these memos.
00:30:25.000Who are you looking forward to deposing most in the New York Times case that now goes to discovery?
00:30:29.000I think Maggie Astor, the reporter that wrote the article.
00:30:32.000She in the first sentence of this article, she wrote deceptive videos released by, you know, and she and she her defense in the answer to the complaint was, your honor, that was just our opinion.
00:30:43.000And the judge said, well, then, well, then why was it in the A section in a news article?
00:30:59.000And he said it was the New York Times that engaged in disinformation and deception by injecting their opinion in a news article as they're claiming.
00:31:07.000So it's really, and by the way, Matt, after that article that came out in the New York Times, this is about our Minnesota voter fraud videos, they said that we were using disinformation and Facebook banned the video because Facebook uses the New York Times as their fact checking, you know, source.
00:31:27.000It's an oligarchy between tech and the newspapers.
00:31:30.000And then they say there's no voter fraud.
00:31:31.000Now, I don't know if there was enough, you know, I don't I don't I don't have enough information to say whether there was enough voter fraud to overturn that election.
00:33:40.000But in doing so, I think they woke people up.
00:33:43.000There was a significant moment for me last night, James.
00:33:46.000I was at the Project Veritas experience.
00:33:49.000And I got to meet the journalist who did the Charlie Chester interviews and who in many ways vindicated what I was telling people.
00:33:58.000That CNN was trying to propagandize my life because I'm an effective congressman.
00:34:03.000And I always dreamed that I might be able to meet this person and express my gratitude to them.
00:34:09.000And the fact that the Project Veritas event here in Miami gave me the opportunity to do that and to share how grateful I was that someone showed that courage.
00:34:18.000When you are in the barrel and you feel like everything's against you and you just want to get some elements of truth out.
00:34:37.000I wanted to thank you just from the bottom of my heart for giving people that platform, for inspiring that courage in folks doing that.
00:34:45.000And I am hopeful that there will be more Project Veritas-styled entities.
00:34:50.000I'm sure you love cornering the market, but I worry that the fact that your organization is the only organization in America that does what you do, it brings a certain frailty to it.
00:35:01.000And that's what I fear most is that something could happen to Project Veritas and then there would almost be no way to get corruption out.
00:35:10.000There would be no platform for whistleblowers.
00:35:12.000And so I just wonder, what do you fear most as you wake up every day with the burden of managing this organization, inspiring these whistleblowers, being the caretakers of their stories?
00:35:45.000Like Veritas has like 70 employees now and quite a budget that's given to all these, you know, by these generous people, thousands and thousands of people.
00:35:56.000It's hard, you know, it's, it's hard commanding respect from, you know, being in the office and running an organization, running a company.