Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - How James O'Keefe Became the Enemy of the State | The TRUTH Podcast #39

00:00:00.000 The FBI arrested me.

00:00:01.000 Is that right?

00:00:02.000 Yeah.

00:00:03.000 I spent two nights in a federal prison cell.

00:00:05.000 I was arraigned working for Pfizer and talking about Jordan Tristan Walker was his name.

00:00:11.000 I'm kind of terrified.

00:00:12.000 This guy then assaults my cameraman.

00:00:15.000 Don't let anybody hold you back.

00:00:16.000 Amen.

00:00:17.000 Just do it.

00:00:17.000 Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:00:22.000 We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.

00:00:27.000 Let's talk truth.

00:00:29.000 Man, I've been looking forward to meeting in person for a long time.

00:00:32.000 Great to be with you.

00:00:33.000 James O'Keefe, you know, the slogan of my campaign is truth.

00:00:40.000 And you're a guy who I know has gone to great lengths to get to the truth on some things that people didn't really want the public knowing the truth about.

00:00:52.000 Is that a fair description of you?

00:00:53.000 Yeah, I think that's a fair description of the role of a truth seeker, which is to expose things that people do not want published.

00:01:02.000 So tell me about your journey a little bit.

00:01:05.000 I'm familiar with what I read, but you know what?

00:01:08.000 Sometimes it's best to get it from the original source.

00:01:12.000 What led you up to the point of founding Project Veritas?

00:01:17.000 I mean, that takes quite motivation to do.

00:01:21.000 What's the backstory of how you got to that point?

00:01:25.000 And I think we're the same, similar age.

00:01:27.000 You're 38, I'm 39 or so.

00:01:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:29.000 And not to ask you the question, but weren't you some type of, in Harvard, weren't you like an artistic, or you rapped, or you did some poetry?

00:01:37.000 Yeah, I mean, I did all kinds of stuff.

00:01:38.000 Yeah, I did spoken.

00:01:39.000 We have that a little bit in common.

00:01:40.000 I was a thespian in high school, so for me it was like a desire to show people things in an artistic way, and I wanted to perform and produce this material so people could wake up.

00:01:54.000 9-11 was my senior year.

00:01:56.000 September 11th in high school.

00:01:58.000 I remember just reading the paper every day, reading the New York Times every day in college, and that really brought out something in me.

00:02:06.000 I thought that the news was not being honest.

00:02:10.000 There were coloring information.

00:02:11.000 There were packaging information.

00:02:13.000 I felt differently than it should be.

00:02:15.000 So I became a columnist at my Rutgers paper called The Targum when I was 18. And then they removed me as columnist.

00:02:24.000 I wrote a column that they didn't like.

00:02:26.000 So I started a little newspaper called The Centurion when I was 19. What was it about?

00:02:30.000 Do you remember?

00:02:30.000 The column, The Targum, was about the ratio of voting Democrats to Republicans amongst the professor staff.

00:02:38.000 It was like 104 to 1 is the ratio.

00:02:41.000 Factual.

00:02:42.000 Factual, FEC data.

00:02:44.000 And I wrote this column.

00:02:45.000 I think it was called like the conservative manifesto or something like that.

00:02:49.000 And I wasn't really even that right wing or conservative.

00:02:52.000 I just felt there was an imbalance and I needed to change it to become more balanced.

00:02:57.000 Yeah.

00:02:57.000 And they didn't like that.

00:02:59.000 Apparently not.

00:03:00.000 So they told you to leave?

00:03:01.000 They didn't renew the column.

00:03:03.000 They didn't renew it.

00:03:05.000 Although, if I did a hidden camera behind the scenes, maybe they would tell the truth about why they removed it.

00:03:10.000 Anyway, so you went and you did your own thing.

00:03:11.000 I did my own thing.

00:03:12.000 Started my own little newspaper with $500 and we produced this sort of monthly newspaper magazine called The Centurion.

00:03:20.000 Cool.

00:03:21.000 And you did that through your college years?

00:03:23.000 I did that until I was senior in college, and it was some of the best years of my life.

00:03:26.000 I went to Rutgers, sprawling like Ohio State, although it's not called New Jersey State.

00:03:30.000 It's the only state university just called Rutgers.

00:03:33.000 And I had a little staff, and I grew it into kind of a local muckraking newspaper where we were looking into things, you know, and doing gonzo journalism.

00:03:42.000 And then what happened after that?

00:03:45.000 Path from there to Project Veritas.

00:03:47.000 Senior year, I was 21. I graduated and I worked for a non-profit.

00:03:53.000 We're going around the country helping them with their student newspapers.

00:03:56.000 I did that for a year.

00:03:58.000 Then I went to law school, dropped out.

00:04:00.000 Then I went to business school and dropped out.

00:04:02.000 And then I did a story on Acorn when I was 24. And that became a national sensation.

00:04:12.000 Right.

00:04:13.000 Oh, in the interim, I did do some stories on Planned Parenthood with a girl named Lila Rose.

00:04:18.000 But you got to know Andrew Bightbart, I think, personally, right?

00:04:21.000 Very well.

00:04:21.000 Not a lot of people today, you know, remember him as a person.

00:04:25.000 I never met him.

00:04:26.000 Heard a lot about him.

00:04:27.000 What was your relationship with him like and what did you take away from that guy?

00:04:32.000 First of all, that guy was a force of nature.

00:04:33.000 He knew everyone.

00:04:35.000 I can't tell you how many people I meet.

00:04:36.000 I was his best friend.

00:04:37.000 So maybe that's so.

00:04:39.000 But we did speak every day.

00:04:41.000 He was a force of nature.

00:04:43.000 I met him September 2009. He died March 1st, 2012. When he died, I thought it was a joke.

00:04:49.000 I got a call from The Daily Call.

00:04:51.000 It's like, Andrew Bipart's dead.

00:04:52.000 I thought it was a practical joke.

00:04:53.000 He was only 42 years old.

00:04:54.000 He was a young guy, yeah.

00:04:55.000 42, 43 years old.

00:04:57.000 He was so enmeshed in the media ecosystem.

00:05:02.000 In 2011, it was a different world.

00:05:05.000 Nowadays, we're Manichaean, we're so polarized that the Washington Post thinks of me as the other.

00:05:12.000 But back in the day, Someone like Dave Weigel, we'd actually tweet back and forth.

00:05:17.000 So Andrew lived in that twilight of reality where you still could be friends with reporters but also hold them accountable.

00:05:23.000 And what he taught me, he was an editor of the Drudge Report.

00:05:26.000 In fact, when I went to his house, he was actually editing Drudge Report.

00:05:30.000 It was wild to see.

00:05:32.000 He had the HTML up on his screen.

00:05:34.000 He was just a guy who knew how to play the media and how to choreograph the media and get covered by the media.

00:05:44.000 And he was a force of nature.

00:05:46.000 He tweeted hundreds of times a day while running his company.

00:05:49.000 I don't know how he did it.

00:05:50.000 And he was quite an intellectual, it seemed to me, as well.

00:05:53.000 Yeah, yes.

00:05:54.000 He was a great writer.

00:05:56.000 He went to Tulane.

00:05:58.000 Yeah.

00:05:58.000 Clarence Thomas was the thing that really inspired him.

00:06:01.000 And him and I were very different people, so I was more introverted.

00:06:05.000 He was more extroverted.

00:06:07.000 And you picked up some of what you put out.

00:06:09.000 That story about Acorn was probably the big one, huh?

00:06:11.000 Yeah.

00:06:12.000 I went to, I knocked on his door.

00:06:14.000 I went down to his basement.

00:06:15.000 I opened up my laptop and I showed him the video of this Baltimore Acorn woman telling me I disguised this illicit prostitution money. 0.98

00:06:22.000 I'm undercover as a pimp and I'm telling this lady, hey, I've got all these underage girls and This ACORN official is like, oh, don't put that on the tax forms or disguise this on your tax forms. 1.00

00:06:33.000 I mean, I've heard of it.

00:06:34.000 I know this predecessor group to a lot of the groups today, but what is ACORN? ACORN was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and they helped with housing and loan opportunities for low-income people.

00:06:48.000 They also did voter registration drives, so they got out the vote.

00:06:51.000 It was founded by a guy named Wade Rathke in Arkansas.

00:06:54.000 And there were allegations that they were embezzling money and doing improper things.

00:06:58.000 So we did a sting to try to see if ACORN would go along with an illicit, immoral, illegal thing.

00:07:08.000 And they did.

00:07:09.000 And it was wildly entertaining.

00:07:10.000 The camera was in a tie.

00:07:12.000 And it was a wire going, I sell them on my website, a button camera goes into your pocket, a little SD chip.

00:07:18.000 So I get all these videos and I show the first to Andrew and I say, now there's another one.

00:07:24.000 And I show him the one in New York where they tell me to disguise the money in a tin can to get away from the pimp.

00:07:29.000 And then I show the one in DC where the Acorn official says, we're not going to tell the police this.

00:07:34.000 And Andrew says, I've seen enough.

00:07:36.000 And then he takes a step back and his whole complexion changes and he goes, This is going to embarrass the mainstream media like you can never believe.

00:07:44.000 And I said, what do you mean?

00:07:45.000 And they said, because we're going to put out the first tape and say nothing and they're going to call it an isolated incident.

00:07:52.000 And then we're going to put out the second tape catching CNN and The New York Times in their lives.

00:07:56.000 Calling it an isolated incident.

00:07:57.000 And lo and behold, just a month later, we did this.

00:07:59.000 And and after all was said and done, The New York Times printed an apology.

00:08:03.000 This is extraordinary.

00:08:05.000 That is good.

00:08:05.000 You don't see that anymore.

00:08:06.000 Clark Hoyt, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, published a column saying we were too slow to tune in and admitted that they should have covered the story.

00:08:17.000 In fact, Congress voted to defund Acorn before the New York Times even assigned a reporter on the story.

00:08:23.000 Wow.

00:08:24.000 It was Democrats voted to defund Acorn.

00:08:26.000 So they were getting public funding.

00:08:28.000 Yeah.

00:08:29.000 They were going to get billions.

00:08:30.000 Unbelievable.

00:08:31.000 They were going to get billions.

00:08:33.000 They were receiving, I think, $100 million in public money.

00:08:35.000 Unbelievable.

00:08:37.000 Yeah.

00:08:37.000 So this was just two kids from the cast of High School Musical 3 with the video camera and the grandmother's chinchilla coat.

00:08:42.000 So it was an it was an indictment on everything.

00:08:45.000 So then you started taking this approach to... 0.99

00:08:48.000 Well, everyone before that thought I was crazy and stupid, and I had shared this vision with people, and they thought I was nuts. 0.98

00:08:55.000 And then everyone thought, this is the best thing ever. 0.99

00:08:58.000 Suddenly, everyone believed in it.

00:09:00.000 And then I was arrested just a few months later for being in a senator's office.

00:09:04.000 I was asking Mary Landrieu, then-Senator Mary Landrieu, some questions, her staff some questions.

00:09:10.000 And they realized who I was and they sort of charged me with a crime I didn't commit.

00:09:14.000 Oh really?

00:09:15.000 What was the crime?

00:09:16.000 Tampering with phones.

00:09:17.000 So I was there to ask about the phones.

00:09:21.000 What phones?

00:09:22.000 The phones belonging to then U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu because this was during the so-called Louisiana Purchase with Obamacare.

00:09:31.000 So apparently Landrieu was a moderate Democrat and she voted for Obamacare in exchange for some goodies. 1.00

00:09:39.000 Okay.

00:09:40.000 So the constituents were lighting up her phones and sources were telling me that she had disconnected her phone so that the constituents could not reach her.

00:09:48.000 So I thought it would be funny if me and a bunch of guys were in there dressed as telephone repairmen.

00:09:54.000 Saying, hey, do you need help fixing your phones?

00:09:57.000 Oh, clearly we're not there to do anything.

00:09:58.000 We were just making a funny YouTube video.

00:10:00.000 The FBI arrested me.

00:10:02.000 Is that right?

00:10:03.000 Yeah.

00:10:04.000 I wrote a book about it.

00:10:05.000 It's kind of funny that 15 years later, no one remembers this.

00:10:08.000 And at the time, this was like, I thought it was the end of my life.

00:10:12.000 I spent two nights in a federal prison cell.

00:10:15.000 I was arraigned.

00:10:16.000 And then they gave me a misdemeanor for entry by false pretenses.

00:10:20.000 I see.

00:10:21.000 For a journalist.

00:10:22.000 Even though there was no false pretense, I showed my driver's license.

00:10:25.000 But I pled guilty to a misdemeanor and spent three years on federal probation.

00:10:29.000 How was that?

00:10:30.000 I couldn't travel without permission from a probation officer and a judge.

00:10:35.000 I thought it wasn't going to be as bad as it was.

00:10:38.000 Three years?

00:10:39.000 Three years.

00:10:40.000 Well, three and a half years if you include pretrial release.

00:10:42.000 And so were you able to continue your journalism during those three years?

00:10:46.000 Well, that's a very interesting question.

00:10:48.000 It's under federal surveillance.

00:10:49.000 It's kind of an interesting form of journalism.

00:10:51.000 I thought probation was just don't break the law.

00:10:53.000 But I'm an enemy of the state.

00:10:54.000 So my probation, they would come up to my house.

00:10:57.000 And we did a story in New Hampshire, actually, in January of 2012. And I couldn't go to New Hampshire.

00:11:04.000 The probation officer told me strangely, and I think the probation officer is a fan of mine, this guy named Pat Hattersley out of Patterson, New Jersey, which is not the best place to be.

00:11:15.000 He goes, listen, you can do your work, but it has to be in New Jersey.

00:11:19.000 I'm like, what?

00:11:20.000 That's a violation of the first...

00:11:22.000 I mean, it's just so, like, Stalinist.

00:11:25.000 Yeah, but nobody cared.

00:11:27.000 Nobody supported me.

00:11:28.000 There was no money at the time.

00:11:31.000 I was sort of my office was in this sort of carriage house, makeshift sort of halfway carriage house sort of structure.

00:11:38.000 And I kept going and and my little team went around this country and we And that's how Veritas began.

00:11:46.000 Veritas was started while I was on probation.

00:11:50.000 Oh, that's fascinating.

00:11:51.000 So I know what it's like to have nothing.

00:11:52.000 I know what it's like to have no money.

00:11:54.000 I know what it's like to have everyone think that you're a failure and you'll never succeed.

00:11:57.000 So there's been these sort of ups and downs in my life.

00:11:59.000 And all that really matters is you keep putting out stories.

00:12:03.000 Yeah.

00:12:04.000 That's your motivation.

00:12:05.000 Yes.

00:12:05.000 Clearly not making money.

00:12:06.000 I mean, you're not running a business on this stuff.

00:12:08.000 No.

00:12:09.000 It's interesting.

00:12:10.000 You have this whole conservative media ecosystem.

00:12:12.000 For some people in this podcasting world, it's proven to be a profitable line of business.

00:12:16.000 Well, they tend to project their own biases and motivations onto you because if they're all about money, they're going to say that you're all about money because that's what they're all about.

00:12:24.000 For me, it was like – I was thinking back to those days in the Carriage House.

00:12:28.000 Okay, I have nothing.

00:12:30.000 But in order to get this laptop, I have to get the money.

00:12:33.000 So I have to go ask them, oh, now I need an attorney because they're suing me.

00:12:37.000 And I realized I had to be...

00:12:39.000 I had...

00:12:40.000 And you're like in your 20s now?

00:12:42.000 We're talking like early 30s?

00:12:43.000 I was 25. 25?

00:12:46.000 So one donor became 10, became 200, became 1,000.

00:12:50.000 And what are the profile of these donors and like what kind of money are they putting up?

00:12:53.000 You know, it's interesting.

00:12:55.000 First of all, you know, I paraphrase Howard Rourke from The Fountainhead.

00:13:00.000 I don't have, don't do things in order to get donors.

00:13:04.000 I get the donors in order to do things.

00:13:06.000 Yes.

00:13:07.000 And I do things the way that I want to do them.

00:13:08.000 So if a donor isn't...

00:13:09.000 You should teach the politicians, actually.

00:13:11.000 That'd be pretty nice.

00:13:11.000 I don't know if there's any saving those people.

00:13:14.000 Yeah.

00:13:14.000 But in order to, I would never let a donor tell me what to do.

00:13:19.000 So if a donor tries to do that, I'm like, I'm walking out.

00:13:23.000 And the donors, eventually, the people that wanted to support me did.

00:13:27.000 In the very beginning, it was very few people.

00:13:29.000 I mean, I think it was maybe a handful of people.

00:13:32.000 And then the first year, I want to say 2011, I think we maybe raised $200,000, which covered a few salaries and whatnot.

00:13:39.000 And then the next year, it was $600,000.

00:13:41.000 And the next year, it was $1 million.

00:13:42.000 And the following year, it was $2 million.

00:13:44.000 It was almost linear progression, 50% each year.

00:13:49.000 Um, but it was never about that.

00:13:51.000 It was about, I need to do as much as I can in the limited amount of time that I can do it.

00:13:57.000 And time was always, um, I know that you're a busy man.

00:14:01.000 Your schedule is insane.

00:14:02.000 So for you, it's about maximizing time and getting as much investigative journalism.

00:14:07.000 Investigative journalism is hard.

00:14:08.000 Oh yeah.

00:14:09.000 You never know what you're going to find something that's interesting.

00:14:11.000 And you get, sometimes you get nothing.

00:14:12.000 So you spend a million dollars and get nothing.

00:14:14.000 I know that feeling.

00:14:15.000 I mean, it actually was actually one of the things I was going to ask you about is it reminds me weirdly of my first career where you would never draw this analogy, but was actually drug hunting, right?

00:14:26.000 Developing medicines.

00:14:27.000 You never know in advance which one's actually going to be the one that works, which means for everyone that works, you need, there's like a whole footprint of like multiples more behind it that nobody ever sees.

00:14:40.000 And I've got to imagine that's what your life was actually like, and all of them require courage.

00:14:45.000 You're taking risks, and my line of work is more capital risk, but you're taking deep personal risk, which is even more significant.

00:14:53.000 In the beginning, there was one thing we did in New Hampshire where the attorney general, or I don't remember, it was the associate attorney general, I think he raided or came to the home of the reporter who did the story, and his name was...

00:15:06.000 You can't make this stuff up.

00:15:07.000 The Attorney General's name is Richard W. Head, a.k.a.

00:15:10.000 Dickhead.

00:15:11.000 This is New Hampshire.

00:15:12.000 And he sent this guy with photos and sort of terrorizing the family.

00:15:16.000 You have to remember how surreal the circumstances are.

00:15:19.000 He's terrorizing the family of the mother and the sisters of the journalist who did that story, who resides in New Hampshire.

00:15:26.000 Who is part of your group?

00:15:27.000 Working for me.

00:15:28.000 Part of my group.

00:15:28.000 And what story was he doing exactly?

00:15:30.000 This was a story involving...

00:15:32.000 We had gone to the poll locations of people who were dead, deceased voters.

00:15:38.000 And say, hey, do you have Susan Jones there, who's a deceased voter? 0.97

00:15:42.000 And the poll worker goes, oh, here you go.

00:15:44.000 Here's Susan. 1.00

00:15:44.000 Here's your ballot. 1.00

00:15:45.000 They were giving out the ballots.

00:15:47.000 And it was all on video.

00:15:48.000 And this was like a lightning rod issue.

00:15:51.000 And not that it matters, but like this guy could either be a Republican or Democrat.

00:15:55.000 But I'm just curious if this is a partisan.

00:15:56.000 The videographer?

00:15:57.000 No, no, no.

00:15:58.000 Both.

00:15:59.000 They were giving out Republican ballots and Democrat ballots.

00:16:02.000 The Attorney General was a Democrat.

00:16:03.000 Okay, got it.

00:16:04.000 Richard Head is his name.

00:16:05.000 Yeah.

00:16:07.000 So you have to understand, like, the circumstances are I'm on federal probation.

00:16:11.000 I've got virtually no money.

00:16:12.000 No lawyer wants to work for me because they all want $600 an hour at the time. 0.99

00:16:16.000 Now it's $1,200 an hour.

00:16:17.000 And, you know, you're living on a prayer.

00:16:20.000 You have no safety net, right?

00:16:21.000 It's all risk.

00:16:23.000 And that's been my life, basically, since I started.

00:16:28.000 Even to this day, even the Pfizer story, when I confronted that guy, the cops came, the NYPD came.

00:16:33.000 That was the recent one, right?

00:16:36.000 That was the one in February where I confront this guy, and it's me.

00:16:40.000 This is like the guy who's working for Pfizer and talking about...

00:16:44.000 Jordan Tristan Walker was his name, and he was the mRNA scientific planning guy.

00:16:50.000 Like Chris Hansen or Mike Wallace, I usually confront these people with the footage.

00:16:55.000 And what happened was he called the NYPD. Now we don't, we probably should, we don't cloud the footage while we're recording.

00:17:04.000 So I'm coming from a context where people destroy my recordings and then falsely accuse me of crimes.

00:17:11.000 So I'm kind of terrified.

00:17:14.000 This guy then assaults my cameraman.

00:17:17.000 He starts going nuts.

00:17:18.000 Have you seen this video?

00:17:19.000 Yeah, I did see this.

00:17:20.000 He's on the floor.

00:17:21.000 He's grabbing the ankles.

00:17:22.000 I mean, these are the leaders that decide public policy in this country.

00:17:26.000 On the floor, it's salting.

00:17:27.000 And I'm backing up because I've seen this rodeo in Louisiana.

00:17:32.000 They destroyed my SD chips.

00:17:34.000 So I'm like, we have to get this SD chip out of here.

00:17:38.000 So you're always on the frontier.

00:17:40.000 You're always just one step away from The abyss.

00:17:45.000 You took risks in the capital markets.

00:17:47.000 I take risks.

00:17:49.000 Much more personal risk you're taking.

00:17:50.000 In a different way.

00:17:53.000 And so that was the one that ultimately then got you booted from your own organization that you founded.

00:18:03.000 Is that nominally what happened?

00:18:05.000 The timing is a matter of fact.

00:18:07.000 People don't like it when I say this.

00:18:09.000 I don't know.

00:18:10.000 I mean, it's just factually the case that we broke that story on January 27th, I believe, give or take a day.

00:18:16.000 Of this year, right?

00:18:16.000 Yeah.

00:18:17.000 Of this year.

00:18:18.000 And there was a board meeting on February 6th, and I was removed on February 10th. 0.99

00:18:22.000 So the timing was at least really stupid. 1.00

00:18:26.000 On their part, yeah. 1.00

00:18:27.000 And that's what people were so outraged by.

00:18:32.000 It's like, why would they do that?

00:18:35.000 I was responsible for raising about $25 million a year.

00:18:39.000 We had a bare bones development team.

00:18:41.000 My expense account was $200,000.

00:18:43.000 I had to travel around in an SUV, you know, because I'm on the phone with sources, and I'm on the phone with donors, and you have to protect those people's identity.

00:18:52.000 So it was really bizarre, the timing.

00:18:58.000 And I'm not so sure that someone was bribed or something like that.

00:19:03.000 I don't know that.

00:19:04.000 I don't have any evidence.

00:19:06.000 I know that one board member liked to say, we don't need James O'Keefe anymore in this organization.

00:19:15.000 I don't think they've done too well without you, it doesn't seem so far.

00:19:18.000 Well, when I left, they had about $8 million cash on hand or so, $10 million cash on hand, and they spent all of it in the last six months.

00:19:26.000 Interesting.

00:19:26.000 And I was running around the country raising money to make sure all these people got paid.

00:19:31.000 Yeah.

00:19:31.000 And it was almost an impossibility.

00:19:34.000 You're the face of the company.

00:19:35.000 You're running around.

00:19:36.000 I mean, you run around the country.

00:19:37.000 I think you have a private plane, though.

00:19:38.000 Yeah, it makes it easier.

00:19:39.000 I'm on jet flights until midnight.

00:19:41.000 I'm dizzy from the lack of sleep.

00:19:45.000 But I think the Pfizer story, it was a big deal.

00:19:49.000 Yes.

00:19:49.000 It was probably the biggest story.

00:19:51.000 Oh, I remember that.

00:19:52.000 Yeah.

00:19:52.000 It affected people.

00:19:54.000 And the funny thing is that story exploded in part because only a small handful of people who had reach in conventional media actually picked it up, right?

00:20:04.000 I mean, I saw it on Tucker.

00:20:06.000 Tucker was all over it.

00:20:08.000 He did a phenomenal job.

00:20:09.000 He did a great piece.

00:20:10.000 That was amazing.

00:20:11.000 He did a phenomenal job.

00:20:12.000 One of the things I love about him is he doesn't view himself as competitive with other journalists doing good work.

00:20:16.000 He actually gives them a chance to elevate what they do.

00:20:20.000 We'll dive into the story in a minute.

00:20:21.000 But again, it wasn't so much that I have evidence or information that someone paid someone off.

00:20:25.000 It was that the story was such a big deal.

00:20:27.000 Yes.

00:20:27.000 And it elevated Veritas and my name to heights, never seen before, that there was a board member who said, this is our opportunity to get rid of James O'Keefe.

00:20:38.000 I mean, what is going on in that person's brain?

00:20:40.000 I'm not a psychologist.

00:20:41.000 Right, but I think you should ask that person that question.

00:20:43.000 Just a basic business judgment or organizational judgment to say that, okay, we usually want to double down on success, not to take the legs out from under it.

00:20:53.000 Well, seven years ago- It's amazing.

00:20:54.000 The same thing happens in corporate America, by the way, all the time.

00:20:56.000 I've heard that.

00:20:57.000 Yeah, it's kind of fascinating.

00:20:59.000 With these people, I just don't get them.

00:21:02.000 I got calls from people saying, this guy is telling us that James O'Keefe had nothing to do with the success of the story.

00:21:11.000 And one of my board members, you know, had me over his house in Connecticut, and I said, where are you getting that from?

00:21:16.000 And he goes, well, that's what this guy told me.

00:21:18.000 I'm like, so if this guy told you to jump off a bridge, you'd do that?

00:21:21.000 Yeah, maybe, maybe he would.

00:21:23.000 And I said, this is me in the video.

00:21:25.000 What do you mean I have nothing to do with the story?

00:21:27.000 He's like, well, you're not the one who recorded it.

00:21:30.000 You're the leader of the organization.

00:21:32.000 But I'm the leader.

00:21:32.000 I'm taking all the risks.

00:21:33.000 I'm being raided by the feds.

00:21:35.000 I'm being sued personally.

00:21:37.000 I have to raise $20 million to pay all these people.

00:21:40.000 The logic was so...

00:21:42.000 This is the thing that kind of frustrates me at times, even in the conservative movement, is stuff doesn't get off the ground that much because of all of the BS of the infighting and whatever, where...

00:21:58.000 You know, people on the left have mastered Their capture of universities, corporate America, Hollywood, and otherwise.

00:22:06.000 And there are always this bright-eyed conservative vision that will start on day one. 1.00

00:22:12.000 And very few things are able to actually get the traction to hit critical velocity because of stupid stuff like this. 0.99

00:22:19.000 There'll be some sort of animus of a battle between personalities. 0.93

00:22:24.000 And I think part of it, I don't know if this is true in your situation, but part of it is that when your actual principal motivation is to make money, right, there's pros and cons to that, right?

00:22:36.000 But a lot of people in the ESG movement or otherwise, their motive is to make money.

00:22:41.000 And they're using the smokescreen of caring about some sort of social agenda and cause is just like woke smoke to deflect from the fact that, look, at the end of the day, we're in this to make an extra buck.

00:22:52.000 And I'm going to be disciplined because that's the metric that matters.

00:22:55.000 Whereas what I see in a lot of the so-called alt economy, and I know yours was nonprofit, but it's a similar mentality is they'll tell themselves that their motivation was actually that they're business people and they want to make money.

00:23:10.000 But actually, their motivation was actually.

00:23:13.000 Self-regard.

00:23:18.000 I guess.

00:23:19.000 So you're saying this guy wasn't a donor or something like this to you.

00:23:23.000 It's not like money was his motivation.

00:23:25.000 I'm sure he's watching this right now and he'll tweet about it.

00:23:27.000 But it's like self-esteem.

00:23:28.000 I don't even know who this guy is.

00:23:30.000 It's not a personal thing.

00:23:31.000 It's a system.

00:23:32.000 I hate to even talk about it because what I've found in my life, I've been called a fraud for 20 years.

00:23:37.000 This is not new.

00:23:38.000 I've been through worse than this.

00:23:41.000 Defamation that makes you question your own sense of reality.

00:23:45.000 Gaslighting, jail, raids, lawsuits.

00:23:47.000 It almost doesn't matter who the individual is.

00:23:51.000 But I am going to talk about it because I think you're right.

00:23:54.000 I think it's the issue at hand that it was that seven years ago or so, a board member Who got off the board.

00:24:02.000 Great guy.

00:24:02.000 Still talk to him.

00:24:03.000 He's an advisor of mine.

00:24:04.000 I won't say his name because people have a freedom of association right under the First Amendment to associate freely with a nonprofit without being doxxed.

00:24:11.000 But this guy gave half a million dollars to Veritas and he pulled me aside.

00:24:17.000 It's a lot of money.

00:24:18.000 It was a lot of money.

00:24:20.000 We had a few people that gave that much.

00:24:21.000 Half of our budget came from $100 donors, $50 donors.

00:24:24.000 This guy pulled me aside and said, you've got to get this guy off your board.

00:24:28.000 I said, why?

00:24:29.000 Oh, he said, this guy who gave you $500,000, the guy who's actually writing the check, says the guy who's not writing the check, you might want to watch out for him.

00:24:36.000 I said, why?

00:24:37.000 He said, because he's envious of you.

00:24:39.000 He said, because he wants to be you.

00:24:42.000 And ultimately, he'll work to replace you.

00:24:45.000 And nobody can be you.

00:24:46.000 Nobody can be you.

00:24:47.000 We're all our own person.

00:24:48.000 That's right.

00:24:49.000 And I found that there was some of that.

00:24:53.000 And I don't look at the world that way.

00:24:54.000 I guess I've never been much of a jealous person.

00:24:58.000 When I look at my heroes or people, that inspires me.

00:25:02.000 I remember seeing Little Shop of Horrors in high school.

00:25:05.000 I saw Seymour.

00:25:05.000 I'm like, that's amazing.

00:25:06.000 I want to be in a musical.

00:25:08.000 It's not so there was that and I and it was inconceivable to me when I when that guy told me that it was so outside my experience that I did nothing with the information.

00:25:19.000 And in other words, I didn't take the I didn't take the warning seriously.

00:25:23.000 And then when the Pfizer story broke, it was like, here's our chance to get rid of O'Keefe.

00:25:28.000 And it was so painful.

00:25:31.000 I went through so much pain the first week, I don't think I ate any food.

00:25:34.000 I think we've all been there in life once or twice.

00:25:37.000 But I realized as soon as it happened, no use crying over spilled milk.

00:25:43.000 Bizarrely, I had more DMs and more people reaching out to me.

00:25:47.000 Debbie Bernal was this Pfizer whistleblower who provided some of the documents inside Pfizer that corroborated Jordan Walker.

00:25:55.000 She was previously unwilling to go public, and then after what happened, she was inspired to go public.

00:26:02.000 So it strangely helped me journalistically, and that more people kind of trusted me when you go through these sorts of trials and tribulations.

00:26:12.000 That's pretty interesting.

00:26:14.000 Now, the only problem is you don't have the infrastructure to capture all of the inbound.

00:26:18.000 So you build again.

00:26:18.000 So you build it again.

00:26:19.000 So how have you been funding that?

00:26:21.000 How by funding the rebuild?

00:26:22.000 Well, it's OMG. More donors, I suppose.

00:26:23.000 OMG is not a non-profit.

00:26:26.000 OMG is the new thing.

00:26:27.000 We do not have a board.

00:26:30.000 Just a company.

00:26:31.000 I question the efficacy of these sorts of boards.

00:26:34.000 Yeah, I seriously question the efficacy of these sorts of boards.

00:26:36.000 When I interview you, I'm going to ask you about that because I want to hear your take.

00:26:40.000 Sure.

00:26:41.000 It seems to me there was a piece by Dr. Robert Malone who wrote a great piece about this called The Institutional Pathology That Removed James O'Keefe.

00:26:48.000 And it's all about sort of churches and hospitals and boards who don't necessarily own the company.

00:26:53.000 And they question when you are successful, they seem to go back and question the success.

00:26:58.000 They take a backward-looking focus.

00:27:03.000 Why do we take all these risks in the first place?

00:27:06.000 I could have done this differently. 0.98

00:27:07.000 And it's like, are you nuts? 0.98

00:27:10.000 Why don't you go out and do it? 0.99

00:27:12.000 Why don't you go out and build it?

00:27:13.000 It's very hard to build things.

00:27:16.000 Oh, it is.

00:27:16.000 It's very easy to destroy things.

00:27:18.000 It's very easy to sit on a board.

00:27:20.000 It's a very passive verb for a reason.

00:27:22.000 You're right about that.

00:27:22.000 Sit.

00:27:23.000 And I hired this Goldman Sachs guy who is part of the so-called managerial class who you speak about.

00:27:29.000 No offense to investment bankers, but I'm probably never going to hire an investment banker again as a manager.

00:27:35.000 And I learned a lot.

00:27:37.000 And I think that what I take from this experience is that I think it's a blessing because I I made some mistakes.

00:27:47.000 I put some people on my board I should not have.

00:27:50.000 Okay.

00:27:50.000 And I learned from this.

00:27:51.000 You own that.

00:27:52.000 Accountability.

00:27:52.000 I learned it.

00:27:53.000 I like that.

00:27:53.000 And next time, I hope to not make that mistake.

00:27:56.000 So the new thing is set up more as a company.

00:27:59.000 Yeah, it's a company.

00:28:00.000 I think it's better.

00:28:01.000 Yeah, we have subscriptions.

00:28:02.000 We sell the cameras now.

00:28:04.000 We don't just give them away.

00:28:05.000 And there's four cameras that we use.

00:28:07.000 We sell them.

00:28:08.000 We sell a class, which I'm going to do a shameless plug for the O'Keefe masterclass.

00:28:13.000 There's five hour-long masterclasses on journalism, and we're charging for them.

00:28:19.000 We've already sold 1,000 of them.

00:28:20.000 Good for you.

00:28:21.000 And if we sell 4,000, we break even on the air.

00:28:24.000 Oh good.

00:28:24.000 That seems doable.

00:28:25.000 Given that you just got started.

00:28:27.000 Yes.

00:28:27.000 And we put out the stories and we're putting out a lot of school board stories right now and eventually hope to monetize that.

00:28:34.000 Well, I mean, that's just the mechanics.

00:28:36.000 Your passion is what you want to do.

00:28:38.000 You've got another plumbing for how you set it up.

00:28:40.000 You can't save the world unless you can pay the rent to your point.

00:28:41.000 Yeah, of course.

00:28:42.000 You've got to be practical.

00:28:43.000 But my passion is always the story.

00:28:46.000 Like, the only thing that keeps me going is, oh, man, I've got to expose that guy.

00:28:51.000 I can't wait to go.

00:28:51.000 I can see that in you.

00:28:52.000 And, you know, that's the Howard Rourke in you.

00:28:54.000 I mean, for him, it was designing buildings.

00:28:55.000 For you, it's designing and telling the story.

00:28:59.000 You know, for me, it's a different motivation.

00:29:01.000 But...

00:29:02.000 You're not looking for unsolicited advice, but friendly reaction is, I think you need someone who can do the plumbing for you so you're not focused on it.

00:29:17.000 I think that there's...

00:29:19.000 In the early stages, I wouldn't necessarily say that's necessary on day one.

00:29:22.000 You kind of want to have the architecture set up.

00:29:26.000 But the only thing is, when I see a rare...

00:29:29.000 Talent is an understatement, but a rare...

00:29:32.000 Soul, like you, who has a calling.

00:29:36.000 I don't know if you're religious.

00:29:38.000 Are you religious?

00:29:38.000 Okay.

00:29:39.000 I mean, God puts you here for a reason.

00:29:41.000 That's my view.

00:29:43.000 And so pursue the purpose for which God put you here.

00:29:50.000 Not something else that takes away even an iota of time from that.

00:29:54.000 But it's a hard thing to do because get that wrong and you ruin...

00:29:58.000 Get that wrong and you ruin your company.

00:29:59.000 You ruin the whole thing, right?

00:30:01.000 And so it's a hard thing.

00:30:03.000 I've been there.

00:30:04.000 It's a tough balance.

00:30:06.000 And there's an element, I will say this on a positive side, this is probably the stage you're in now, where in the early phase of building the plumbing, I've made this mistake in other settings before, Is you fall into the trap of thinking that like, okay, there's the plumbing and there's the substance, right?

00:30:24.000 You're bringing the fluid and somebody else needs to build the piping.

00:30:28.000 In the early stages of getting any new thing off the ground, those two are actually inextricably linked.

00:30:34.000 That's right.

00:30:35.000 But then there comes a point in time when you have to say that, okay...

00:30:41.000 The fluid is different from the piping.

00:30:45.000 Well said.

00:30:47.000 You're probably not there yet in this journey because this is so recent.

00:30:50.000 This is so on point.

00:30:52.000 You're the only person who's actually said it in the way that you have.

00:30:56.000 I've lived it.

00:30:56.000 I'd like to ask you about that.

00:30:59.000 My mind goes right to, for example, managing lawyers.

00:31:02.000 I get sued so much, and in your book you write about LLCs and liability.

00:31:08.000 I'm named personally in investigations that I had nothing to do with.

00:31:12.000 I'm only the leader of the company, and they sued me.

00:31:14.000 They didn't even sue the reporter.

00:31:15.000 Unbelievable.

00:31:16.000 They sued me.

00:31:17.000 So now I'm still having to indemnify myself.

00:31:20.000 But the point I'm thinking about as you went there is I'm like, I realized early on in my life that if I want to do the right thing, I have to be the chief decision maker.

00:31:28.000 I have to be the ultimate decision maker.

00:31:30.000 I think Steve Jobs said something like that.

00:31:32.000 Like, I have to be the person in charge.

00:31:35.000 Not because I want power.

00:31:38.000 It's because in order for me to do my art, I can't settle that lawsuit.

00:31:44.000 I can't bear false witness.

00:31:46.000 And if I work for somebody else, the system will make me bear false witness.

00:31:50.000 It'll make me compromise on my ethics.

00:31:52.000 And if I compromise on my ethics, to borrow the Howard Rourke metaphor, then I have to destroy the building because it's not the building I want to build.

00:31:58.000 Which he did.

00:31:59.000 Which he did.

00:32:00.000 He blew it up.

00:32:02.000 So that's the tough part in my deal.

00:32:07.000 And I think there are certain people that wanted me to be the gopher.

00:32:09.000 Oh, you just go raise that $30 million and you just do your art.

00:32:12.000 Well, it doesn't work that way.

00:32:14.000 You can't give me all of the responsibility but none of the authority.

00:32:17.000 Mm-hmm.

00:32:18.000 I have to have the authority in order to...

00:32:20.000 Separation of responsibility and authority is a funny thing.

00:32:23.000 Yes.

00:32:24.000 Actually.

00:32:24.000 I'm still learning that.

00:32:25.000 Maybe you can give me some pointers.

00:32:26.000 I'll give you my two cents.

00:32:27.000 It's not the same for every person, but I'm just making an observation of what I see in you.

00:32:34.000 I think the number one question for you is, you know why God put you here.

00:32:41.000 You know what your purpose is, what your calling and your passion is.

00:32:44.000 First of all, let's just pause on that for a second.

00:32:47.000 That's a beautiful thing to know.

00:32:48.000 When you're young, you know, we're similar age category, but most people our age, most people any age are lucky to ever figure that out for themselves.

00:32:56.000 You figured that out at a much younger age, right?

00:32:59.000 Like over a decade ago.

00:33:00.000 So you already got a head start.

00:33:03.000 Let's just start on the really positive side here.

00:33:07.000 I mean, what a head start to have at a relatively young age in your 20s already to know this is your calling.

00:33:15.000 This is what self-realization looks like.

00:33:18.000 Well, boy, is that a head start.

00:33:20.000 Now everything we're going to talk about is like easy by comparison, right?

00:33:24.000 Like that's the hard question.

00:33:26.000 Who am I? I mean, that's a hard freaking question to get to the answer to.

00:33:30.000 I think most people never get there over the course of their entire life.

00:33:34.000 Let alone over the course of, you know, middle age.

00:33:38.000 You're there at a young age.

00:33:39.000 So, like, let's just put things in context here.

00:33:43.000 Notwithstanding all the trial and tribulation you've been through, I'm saying this, you don't need my pep talk, but I'm saying this for the people who are watching to see, right?

00:33:51.000 Because there's a version of looking at your story that can leave.

00:33:55.000 I mean, there's part of me that feels this way sad to see what a guy like you has gone through and what our country does.

00:34:03.000 Censor, silent, jail, arrest.

00:34:07.000 Kick out of organization.

00:34:08.000 It's the same managerial class doing the same thing in different ways.

00:34:11.000 There's a sad version of that story, but let's not do that one.

00:34:14.000 Let's do that.

00:34:15.000 Let's do the version where this is a talent that was put on this earth to do this thing that needs to be done.

00:34:22.000 Uncover things, stories that weren't told and just tell them literally without a filter with like directly just by putting up the footage that he gathered directly and allow you to see it.

00:34:34.000 Cool place to be.

00:34:35.000 Now it's just the implementation question, right?

00:34:37.000 And so we could, I could give you my two cents on the implementation and how to think about that, but it might At least for me as an observer, I don't know for you, but it takes the pressure off to see that you've got like seven tenths of it already under your belt.

00:34:52.000 That's a good point.

00:34:52.000 It's an astute observation.

00:34:54.000 I definitely know the why.

00:34:56.000 I've got the why down.

00:34:57.000 You definitely know the why.

00:34:58.000 And some people are not driven by that and motivated by that.

00:35:01.000 Or don't know it even.

00:35:03.000 Or don't even understand.

00:35:04.000 Like you say, in the political world, which I'm very curious to ask you about this when I interview you, but it's just like...

00:35:11.000 People are projecting onto you all of their demons.

00:35:15.000 Exactly.

00:35:15.000 So you really have to be confident in your constitution.

00:35:18.000 Yes.

00:35:19.000 And you can't trust anybody.

00:35:21.000 That's the other thing.

00:35:22.000 In the journalism business, you have to trust.

00:35:24.000 You have to open your heart to people to get them to trust you.

00:35:28.000 Trust is a two-way relationship.

00:35:29.000 It is.

00:35:31.000 But what I've also learned is, wow, it's hard to trust anybody.

00:35:35.000 And everyone always asks me, how do you, James O'Keefe, they say, aren't you worried someone's going to infiltrate you?

00:35:40.000 And I would always say, no, I'm not worried because there's nothing that I'm doing.

00:35:45.000 Yeah, but that's not how they see the world.

00:35:47.000 Because they've got a million things to hide.

00:35:49.000 They've got skeletons in their closet up the wazoo.

00:35:52.000 Or, in a more demonic way, they'll falsely accuse you of things.

00:35:56.000 So let's say there is no camera recording your encounter.

00:35:59.000 They'll just make something up about you.

00:36:01.000 Yeah.

00:36:01.000 Which is why I always told my staff, please do record me.

00:36:04.000 Right.

00:36:05.000 Because the recording, I want the recording versus the...

00:36:08.000 The artificial telling.

00:36:10.000 Yes.

00:36:10.000 The artificial telling is far worse than the recording.

00:36:12.000 See, it's interesting you say that.

00:36:17.000 Embarrassment is a choice, actually.

00:36:20.000 I think that that's kind of one of the many lessons that I learned from watching your professional journey.

00:36:29.000 One of the morals that I take away from that story is that what happens happens.

00:36:36.000 What's true is true.

00:36:39.000 How you feel about it is a choice, right?

00:36:42.000 And so I think that people view you as somebody who embarrasses other people by showing things they've done behind closed doors that they wouldn't do behind doing public.

00:36:54.000 But even that Pfizer guy or whoever it was, The act of being embarrassed and humiliated, like that's a choice by what you said.

00:37:04.000 Own it, right?

00:37:05.000 And I think that what you're calling out is an element of our human nature that's fundamentally fallen, insecure, to say that there are things that I'm willing to do That I don't want to acknowledge that I'm willing to do or things I'm willing to say that I don't want to acknowledge that I'm willing to say.

00:37:24.000 And that gap, that doesn't fall on you.

00:37:26.000 It doesn't fall on the camera.

00:37:28.000 It falls within each of us as a human being.

00:37:31.000 And I think because you're in the position you're in, You've realized that, hey, tape everything you do, and that's the way you would live your life.

00:37:37.000 Something to the effect of democracy, health of a democracy is determined whether people can say the quiet part out loud.

00:37:42.000 Yes, yes.

00:37:43.000 Just speak, say in public what you will say in private.

00:37:45.000 And we would be so much more united as a country, by the way, if everybody did that.

00:37:49.000 But the reason you'd be more united as a country, and I loved your earlier use of the word constitution, right?

00:37:56.000 You referred to your personal constitution.

00:37:59.000 But there's an analogy to a nation that's insecure at a similar level, too.

00:38:03.000 You got to know who you are.

00:38:05.000 Then you don't need to apologize for it at the individual level, at the level of a nation.

00:38:10.000 But today, the reason why we're as divided as we are, I think, is because people don't feel free to say in public what they'll otherwise say in private.

00:38:21.000 And that's a loss of self-confidence that we need to somehow rediscover.

00:38:27.000 I guess my question, I got a question for you is, this is a hard question, so I mean it in a challenging way.

00:38:34.000 I'm not sure what my bias is on this.

00:38:37.000 Do you think in the mode you've chosen to do this, right?

00:38:41.000 I have no doubt you're doing useful service for the, you've done a useful service for the country, opening people like my eyes, who've seen the things you've exposed, I can speak to that personally, that you're doing a value for the external world.

00:38:52.000 But for that person, or for the person who's on the receiving end of it, Do you think you're making it more or less likely for them to live the rest of their life afterwards in the direction that You strive to live your own life.

00:39:12.000 Do you think that guy from Pfizer is more likely to be even more embarrassed the next time that thing happens?

00:39:17.000 Or do you think that having gone through this experience, he's now at the level of an individual on the other side of that?

00:39:23.000 I don't know if you have a view on that.

00:39:25.000 That's an interesting question.

00:39:28.000 That question seems to cut to the very heart of what the First Amendment stands for.

00:39:32.000 I go back to the, because you say, because I think you mean Like hidden camera exposing someone who's behind closed doors.

00:39:40.000 Yeah.

00:39:40.000 He wasn't behind closed doors.

00:39:42.000 He's in a public restaurant, but nevertheless, he doesn't know that he's being recorded.

00:39:46.000 Yeah.

00:39:47.000 But that really speaks to, I mean, before hidden cameras, there was pencil and paper.

00:39:50.000 Like Upton Sinclair, when he infiltrated the jungle, he didn't record it, but he, you know, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quips, you know, are we going to get upset at Upton Sinclair for smuggling his pencil in?

00:40:01.000 Yeah.

00:40:02.000 So there are written accounts, submersion journalism, newspaper journalism, muckraking of 100 years ago.

00:40:08.000 But the camera is more telling, isn't it?

00:40:10.000 It picks up on things that the pencil does not, right?

00:40:13.000 Yeah.

00:40:13.000 It almost damages someone's dignity.

00:40:19.000 More.

00:40:20.000 Dignity.

00:40:20.000 People feel violated because their dignity.

00:40:23.000 But this is the paradigm that we're entering.

00:40:26.000 And as Scott McNeely once famously said, you've lost your expectation of privacy a long time ago.

00:40:32.000 So it really cuts to the heart of the First Amendment and why it exists, to inform the people.

00:40:37.000 People have a, you know, this is a cliche, but a right to know certain things.

00:40:42.000 And I don't think I would use these cameras in certain places.

00:40:46.000 For example, I've never gone into someone's bedroom.

00:40:49.000 I've redacted very private things about things that we've recorded.

00:40:55.000 Out of respect for the subject.

00:40:56.000 Yeah.

00:40:57.000 Like there was a story on NPR we did where an NPR official brought up the name of a Libyan reporter in their newsroom, and I redacted that.

00:41:04.000 And then people attack me for doctoring footage.

00:41:06.000 It's like, I can't win!

00:41:07.000 But it's a judgment that you make, right?

00:41:10.000 It's a judgment and that's the most important part of being a journalist.

00:41:15.000 It's the judgment.

00:41:16.000 It's the discernment and the ethics.

00:41:21.000 People follow people.

00:41:23.000 I've always said content is king, which means the story is big enough.

00:41:27.000 But what I learned recently, I learned this in the last year, is actually content Content isn't king.

00:41:34.000 People follow people.

00:41:36.000 People trust people.

00:41:38.000 And a lot of people trust me because of what I've been through.

00:41:42.000 I thought the jail and the defamation and the harassment.

00:41:45.000 That feels closer to the flame to me.

00:41:46.000 Because you do hear this content is king thing.

00:41:48.000 It always kind of lands flat with me.

00:41:50.000 I think you're right.

00:41:51.000 The Viacom founder once said that.

00:41:54.000 But I said that because in the beginning of my trajectory, I mean, and the reason I'm saying this to you, you might say, let's focus on the positive.

00:42:01.000 But I think it's important to focus on the suffering a little bit.

00:42:04.000 Also, it's both part of the truth.

00:42:07.000 Because it was...

00:42:10.000 Because it makes an ordinary man question his sense of reality.

00:42:15.000 When you are, when you're Wikipedia, and I know your Wikipedia page, all the Wikipedia pages are pretty nasty, but like, it is so bad.

00:42:22.000 It is like he doctors tapes, he's a felon.

00:42:24.000 I'm not a felony. 0.99

00:42:25.000 Like he rapes women. 1.00

00:42:27.000 I mean, just like he hates black people. 1.00

00:42:31.000 I remember reading that as a 25-year-old. 0.98

00:42:34.000 I mean, nothing...

00:42:35.000 That's not me.

00:42:36.000 It's unrecognizable.

00:42:37.000 It's almost like combat.

00:42:38.000 Yeah.

00:42:39.000 It's PTSD. Oh, but it's literally like combat.

00:42:42.000 I mean, I can tell you even in a political campaign or whatever.

00:42:44.000 Yeah.

00:42:45.000 Like, people, I mean, much less derisive, but just to the level of inaccuracy, stuff will show up saying that I was born in India, has the wrong last name of my wife.

00:42:56.000 I mean, it's just people who can just...

00:42:57.000 You know, edit and say anything, that's fine.

00:42:59.000 The answer to, I don't think that we should have a systematic suppression engine of that.

00:43:03.000 But what it does do to the level of a person, I think, is interesting.

00:43:08.000 And it sounds like it's worn on you a little bit.

00:43:10.000 And I bring that up because I think that is why it is so important to use hidden cameras in certain contexts.

00:43:16.000 And I write in my book, American Muckraker, it's a question of relative deception.

00:43:19.000 We have a Washington Post, to borrow an example, who did a front page story in 2009 when the Acorn story came out.

00:43:27.000 And they said, James O'Keefe went after Acorn because he doesn't like black people that vote.

00:43:32.000 She just made it up.

00:43:33.000 It's like the headline.

00:43:34.000 She won the Pulitzer Prize and then she had to print a front page retraction because I never said that.

00:43:40.000 Unbelievable.

00:43:40.000 Can you imagine if I did that or you did that?

00:43:42.000 No chance.

00:43:43.000 We would rightfully be crucified.

00:43:44.000 So when you live in a world where that happens on a daily, and by the way, that's just the stuff that I called out, happens a hundred times a day and they get away with it.

00:43:53.000 When you live in that world, it's not just morally permissible to record people without them knowing.

00:44:02.000 It's a necessity.

00:44:04.000 And, you know, that's the world that we have to live in.

00:44:08.000 Now, what effect that has, if you want to live in a different country or a different world, which does not place a primary emphasis on the First Amendment, then go live in that country.

00:44:16.000 Yeah, they exist.

00:44:16.000 Most countries are that way.

00:44:18.000 Most of them are that way.

00:44:18.000 I think our Article III courts still, generally speaking, protect the First Amendment, which is why I'm still here and not in prison.

00:44:25.000 Thank God.

00:44:26.000 Although, who knows what will happen, and I think over the next five years we'll find out.

00:44:30.000 That's part of why I'm in this game.

00:44:32.000 We're going to keep it that way.

00:44:33.000 Yeah.

00:44:33.000 And the Article III courts generally protect the First Amendment because the same journalists that want to point a gun on me, like when the FBI raided us, they were like, whoa.

00:44:40.000 Yep.

00:44:40.000 They're like, whoa, we don't want to be raided by the...

00:44:42.000 It's self-preservation.

00:44:43.000 That's right.

00:44:43.000 The ACLU is defending or filing amicus in my case because the FBI raided me and they never released the probable cause.

00:44:49.000 And the law stipulates that if you want to raid journalists and point guns at them and take their notes, Society needs to see what the probable cause is.

00:44:57.000 Absolutely.

00:44:58.000 So that currently sits on the federal judge's desk, and she has to rule on it.

00:45:01.000 I think she'll come...

00:45:01.000 I mean, most federal judges, I think, were still at a place where they will come out on the right side of this, and if not, the Supreme Court will.

00:45:07.000 The current Supreme Court understands this.

00:45:09.000 It's sad that we have to...

00:45:10.000 But that's the last bastion, and it's a thin line of defense.

00:45:12.000 It's sad that we have to say who's the judge or who appointed the judge.

00:45:15.000 Yeah, but it is where we are.

00:45:17.000 It is where we are now.

00:45:19.000 So what is...

00:45:22.000 Your view on our way out, or do you have one?

00:45:26.000 So I was an extreme.

00:45:27.000 I am an optimist.

00:45:28.000 I was an extreme optimist for the last 14 years, almost to the point where everyone else would be a doomsayer to me.

00:45:34.000 And they would say, you know, the country's done.

00:45:37.000 It's over.

00:45:38.000 And I would always be, no, there's hope.

00:45:42.000 What happened to me at Veritas was extremely disheartening.

00:45:45.000 And if you're not careful, you can get twisted pretty fast.

00:45:48.000 Because it's one thing, you're taking arrows from the front.

00:45:51.000 Like, imagine you're in a battlefield, to borrow an old metaphor, and you're getting arrows thrown at you and swords thrown at you.

00:45:57.000 But imagine the people behind you start shooting arrows in your back.

00:46:01.000 It's just dizzying.

00:46:04.000 You can get twisted.

00:46:06.000 Yeah.

00:46:06.000 So I think you have to surround yourself with strong people, discerning people, good people.

00:46:13.000 You have to be very careful if you're going to do this work Who you have on your team.

00:46:19.000 But I am an optimist.

00:46:20.000 I think miracles can happen.

00:46:23.000 Tides can turn.

00:46:24.000 And I think that what I've seen in the work that we've done, I'm a bias towards the work that I'm doing.

00:46:29.000 Most recently in New Jersey this past week, we did a few stories on school boards.

00:46:33.000 Every mother in every municipality is contacting me and wants me to go to her school and give a hidden camera.

00:46:39.000 And I think that's a really beautiful thing.

00:46:41.000 I think that's a hopeful thing.

00:46:42.000 It is.

00:46:43.000 And I think more people than would admit agree with someone like you and what you're saying, but they're afraid to say it.

00:46:49.000 Yes.

00:46:50.000 So it's like the Soviet Union.

00:46:52.000 Are we going to just cow down in our homes and be afraid to say the truth and lie to our children so that we can survive at any price?

00:46:59.000 Or are we going to be brave?

00:47:02.000 And being brave means sacrifice.

00:47:04.000 It means the founders said lives, fortune, sacred honor to each other.

00:47:10.000 More people agree with us than don't.

00:47:13.000 They're just afraid to admit it.

00:47:15.000 And that still keeps me as an optimist and keeps me as a hopeful person.

00:47:19.000 and i think the tide can turn if people know what's going on if they know what's happening at the irs and the fbi if people could see what's happening inside schools inside government bureaus and and how they talk about you the taxpayer if they could see that for themselves it would change people's whole perceptions and it would save the country i think I think so, too.

00:47:43.000 And I think the reason it would save the country is that 80 percent of people or more in this country would have the same reaction, which is not what we're taught to believe.

00:47:53.000 Right.

00:47:54.000 You know, we're taught to believe we live in a divided partisan time and, you know, somebody, you know, 50 percent of the country is going to agree with one thing and 50 percent another.

00:48:03.000 I don't see it that way.

00:48:04.000 Not in the kinds of questions that you're putting your finger on the pulse of, which is just straight-up corruption, lying, dishonesty.

00:48:10.000 I mean, I don't know whether you're Democrat or Republican or left-wing or right-wing or what you thought in the Iraq war or high taxes or low taxes, but you want to know the truth about what Pfizer is or isn't saying about the vaccine.

00:48:22.000 You want to know the truth about what you're saying.

00:48:25.000 Media is or is not telling you about an organization that's getting boatloads of federal funding in the name of promoting civil rights in the form of the ACORN example.

00:48:35.000 I think that when it comes to the basic values, free speech, honesty in government, self-governance as opposed to elite aristocracy, most Americans agree on the basic rules of the road.

00:48:48.000 They might be divided on abortion or whether corporate tax rates should be high or low.

00:48:54.000 Those are questions that people might want to debate vigorously, but that's not the Kind of thing you're putting your finger on the pulse of.

00:49:01.000 I think it'd be difficult for you to find my political views anywhere on the internet.

00:49:04.000 I don't, I don't never...

00:49:04.000 I'm not sure I know what they are.

00:49:05.000 I don't espouse a public...

00:49:07.000 I believe in reality.

00:49:08.000 Yeah, but is that...

00:49:09.000 You're allowed to have political beliefs, but it's irrelevant to it.

00:49:11.000 But do we even agree on that?

00:49:12.000 In other words, are you entitled to more than one truth?

00:49:14.000 That's what's on the table.

00:49:15.000 Because that's my belief.

00:49:16.000 That's what's on the table.

00:49:17.000 I believe that two plus two equals four, and that we're sitting...

00:49:19.000 Or two plus two equals four is racist.

00:49:21.000 Those are the questions.

00:49:22.000 And this is a microphone and this is a cup of coffee.

00:49:23.000 I'm not actually sure that as Americans we can agree on that.

00:49:26.000 So that's my baseline.

00:49:27.000 Well, here's what I would say.

00:49:28.000 Here's my view on this.

00:49:29.000 Because I do have a strong view on this.

00:49:31.000 Maybe you'll disagree with me on this.

00:49:32.000 This comes from traveling the country, not through the filters that were fed through cameras and social media algorithms and otherwise.

00:49:40.000 But that is what I'm doing right now is traveling the country with roomfuls of people from tents in Wisconsin to farmers in Iowa to people in New Hampshire or whatever it is.

00:49:51.000 I believe that most people in this country, like the overwhelming majority, easily over 80% of this country, can agree on those things.

00:49:58.000 That that is a mug of coffee.

00:50:00.000 80%?

00:50:00.000 At least 80% can agree on those things.

00:50:02.000 That's still relatively low, but it starts somewhere.

00:50:04.000 No, it is.

00:50:04.000 It is.

00:50:04.000 But I'm just telling you what I see.

00:50:06.000 I mean, it's sad that it's only 80. But it's not 50%, right, as we're taught to believe.

00:50:12.000 It's easily over 80%.

00:50:14.000 And half of the 20, half of the 20, are people younger than you and I Who never learned the tools of discernment in the first place.

00:50:26.000 Right?

00:50:26.000 You and I were both in latter half of high school when those two planes hit the Twin Towers.

00:50:31.000 When I gave the commencement address at my high school two years ago, that was the first year where not a single one of those kids was born on the date that those two planes hit the Twin Towers.

00:50:42.000 And so I think half the people never really learned what those values, most importantly, the tools of discernment to get to truth, were in the first place.

00:50:51.000 Who we can bring along to agree with us.

00:50:55.000 Not in corporate tax rates being high or low, but that's a cup of coffee, right?

00:51:00.000 For lack of a better description, just grounded on certain things that are true in the world, agreeing that what your camera capture really happened.

00:51:07.000 What went wrong, you know?

00:51:09.000 Well, I think that...

00:51:11.000 Well, this gets into a deeper discussion.

00:51:13.000 I think that we as human beings, especially young people, need to be grounded by something.

00:51:19.000 Because we need to be able to believe in something bigger than ourselves.

00:51:24.000 I believe this, at least.

00:51:25.000 I think we need to be able to believe in something bigger than ourselves to see what is true in front of us.

00:51:29.000 I see.

00:51:30.000 And so there's a role played by faith.

00:51:32.000 There's a role played by family or hard work.

00:51:37.000 I think it can play a role here too.

00:51:39.000 You don't need all those things, but you need like one of them.

00:51:42.000 I would say faith, family, hard work, patriotism, pick two.

00:51:47.000 And then you have enough grounding in your sense of self to say that, okay, I am me and I can recognize that to be true.

00:51:54.000 But when those things all go missing...

00:51:58.000 Then you're lost, right?

00:51:59.000 You're a vacuum.

00:52:00.000 You have a vacuum in your heart.

00:52:02.000 Then you're going to just believe you're going to believe anything because you have a vacuum and something's going to fill the void.

00:52:07.000 If it's not the true thing, it'll be the fake thing.

00:52:10.000 And so that's a much longer discussion.

00:52:12.000 But to bring back to where we are right now as a country, I share some elements of your pessimism, but I do think that 80 plus percent, and it could be half the remaining 20 coming along with us too after we fill that void and bring them along, generally people younger than you and I, I don't think that we're actually as divided on the basic questions of truth as we're taught to believe.

00:52:41.000 And the way we call the bluff on that is by Frankly, people like you, man, doing what you're doing, right?

00:52:48.000 Let people react to it and close that gap between what people are willing to say in public and what they're willing to say in private.

00:52:54.000 That calls the bluff on a division that I think is mostly manufactured.

00:52:58.000 There was a recent, just real quick, there was a recent example last week of a story we did.

00:53:01.000 It wasn't an undercover journalist.

00:53:03.000 It was a police officer at Body Cambridge.

00:53:05.000 Body camera footage.

00:53:06.000 And the school board officials called the police on citizens and myself.

00:53:11.000 And I did a FOIA request.

00:53:13.000 I got the body camera footage.

00:53:15.000 And the cop was talking to the superintendent.

00:53:17.000 And you could see the psychology of these people and what they actually believed.

00:53:20.000 That woke up.

00:53:22.000 I encourage your audience to watch that.

00:53:23.000 That was not a big story.

00:53:25.000 It's a municipal story.

00:53:26.000 But it was fascinating.

00:53:27.000 Because one of the superintendents goes, let's scan the license plates.

00:53:31.000 It was like a little mini tyrant in action.

00:53:33.000 And the superintendent was like, They're citizens and they've come from all over the place and they're here.

00:53:39.000 Where's the cops?

00:53:40.000 It was like a sketch comedy of what these people are actually like behind closed doors.

00:53:45.000 And I think more things like that revealing real human nature because human nature is pretty nasty.

00:53:54.000 So we need to expose it and understand the truth.

00:53:57.000 And then I have an infinite faith in the power of the American people.

00:54:01.000 They can, if they elect you or whoever else they want to elect and Congress can You know, we have all these people in Congress are supposed to make decisions, but people don't have access to the information.

00:54:11.000 So that's my job.

00:54:12.000 I think there's a version of what you're doing that gives me some inspiration and ideas for how to do this in the federal government as well.

00:54:22.000 I mean, we're talking about taking on the deep state.

00:54:24.000 Okay.

00:54:25.000 What is that?

00:54:25.000 The managerial class, the administrative state, right?

00:54:28.000 The people who were never elected to be in a policymaking function that are functionally in a policymaking function, even though we say they're not.

00:54:35.000 I think exposition is a big part of the key to success.

00:54:41.000 It's at least the first step.

00:54:43.000 I think one of the things that Musk did at Twitter that I thought was pretty good, simple first step, is just publish the files of what the government actors pressured this one private company to do.

00:54:55.000 I think there's a version of this for what I'll call the state action files.

00:54:58.000 I want to do this pretty early on, is just anytime a government official in the federal government has pressured a private party or a private actor to do something that the government couldn't do directly, I think there are all kinds of ways in which that's illegal and we need to deliver accountability.

00:55:12.000 But let's just start with step one, just publish it.

00:55:16.000 Let's just see it.

00:55:16.000 You got to roll the log over, see what crawls out.

00:55:20.000 There's an element to this that I think is harder in certain settings than others.

00:55:25.000 Actually, maybe you've seen a version of this too, literally.

00:55:28.000 I think the way it works in the federal government, this is what I think happened to Trump a little bit, is you roll that log over, you see what crawls out.

00:55:34.000 You strike the swamp, the swamp strikes back.

00:55:37.000 So I think if you're going to roll the log over, you've got to be ready and willing to bring the pesticide.

00:55:43.000 I think that's the equivalent of quite literally the guy coming, beating up you and your staff, trying to, like, break your card.

00:55:49.000 They'll try to put you in jail.

00:55:50.000 Yeah, that's what they'll do.

00:55:52.000 Does that scare you?

00:55:53.000 You know, I think that at times the idea of an apparatus this deep, taking it on, can be daunting.

00:56:03.000 But less so over time, because no question is like, what's the alternative?

00:56:09.000 One of the things I think about is Let's just try the alternative like a set of clothes.

00:56:14.000 Let's roll that forward.

00:56:17.000 20 years from now, that's the generation our kids are going to grow up in anyway. 0.91

00:56:23.000 Right?

00:56:23.000 Not unique to my kids.

00:56:24.000 All of our kids.

00:56:26.000 And so, I guess it's like the instinct of...

00:56:29.000 I don't know.

00:56:31.000 I say this as somebody who's a parent of two sons.

00:56:34.000 God forbid there's a moment where there's like a car about to crash into your child.

00:56:41.000 You're just going to...

00:56:43.000 You're going to put your body in there and just get in the way, not because you know it isn't going to hurt them, but it's still your best chance of ensuring it.

00:56:52.000 You're doing it to protect your family, whereas it's counterintuitive because most people don't do it so that they could not be away from their family.

00:57:00.000 You're doing it to protect your family.

00:57:02.000 It's sort of, yeah, familial instinct.

00:57:04.000 It's not unique to my family, obviously, but if you think about...

00:57:09.000 Our relationship to one another, like our relationship to our family members, like that's the impulse for me is, are we taking some risk by going on the path that we're going on?

00:57:20.000 Like a lot of risk?

00:57:21.000 Absolutely.

00:57:23.000 But we're doing it at a time where the alternative...

00:57:27.000 There may not be a country in 10 years.

00:57:28.000 Is really, exactly.

00:57:30.000 And therefore your children.

00:57:30.000 That's my talking point.

00:57:31.000 When I meet with people and they're like, or talking point, it's what I've come to say.

00:57:35.000 Yeah.

00:57:36.000 But aren't you worried about your children?

00:57:38.000 It's like, you know, I'm talking about their children.

00:57:40.000 And I say, well, if you want to care about your children, you have to be involved.

00:57:44.000 Yeah.

00:57:45.000 Which alternative?

00:57:46.000 There's no country left.

00:57:47.000 Where your six-year-old live in 10 years from now.

00:57:48.000 Yeah.

00:57:49.000 I think that's where we are.

00:57:50.000 I think that's where we are right now.

00:57:53.000 And so that makes the choice a lot easier.

00:57:57.000 I think it's also why you see sometimes a positive change doesn't happen gradually.

00:58:03.000 I think negative decline often happens gradually, actually.

00:58:08.000 It's infinitesimally small pieces of a downward slide.

00:58:13.000 You don't see ascent happen in the same way.

00:58:17.000 You get to the depths of where you're at the precipice and then that just selects for either ultimate decline and then it's all gone and you're done and history relegated what was once good to the dustbin of history.

00:58:33.000 Or it selects for a quantum leap of just saying, okay, We're not going to gradually find our way out of this, but we will leap our way out of this.

00:58:41.000 And I think that's one of the moments we're in.

00:58:43.000 And you're one of the people who's lighting the match.

00:58:47.000 And the question is, do you combust a good kind of reaction where you cause a rocket ship to take off or doesn't it?

00:58:54.000 In which case, we're all done and that's the ballgame.

00:58:56.000 My team and I force people into these boxes where they're required to make a decision.

00:59:02.000 Like when I've been in court and federal court and the jury verdict, it forces all this hyperbole and innuendo melts away.

00:59:08.000 And it's like, do you want to live in a world where you...

00:59:12.000 And I've been in court many times, and I've won, all but one, where there's logic prevailed.

00:59:18.000 You force people into this, make this decision.

00:59:20.000 There was a case in North Carolina where logic prevailed.

00:59:22.000 The federal judge is like, I've watched the video, ma'am.

00:59:25.000 There's no edit.

00:59:26.000 She's like, but where's the edit, ma'am?

00:59:29.000 And she's like, okay, case dismissed.

00:59:32.000 I force people into that, as you say, you get down, down, down, down, and a miracle can happen.

00:59:37.000 You can turn the tide.

00:59:39.000 But you got to get people there where they're confronting the reality and there's no BS. That's right.

00:59:44.000 The media is filled with BS. That's why I use cameras, because I don't think the artificial intelligence is there quite yet.

00:59:51.000 I saw the Indiana Jones movie with Harrison Ford and I couldn't pay attention.

00:59:55.000 It's just not.

00:59:56.000 I'd rather not watch it.

00:59:57.000 Yeah.

00:59:57.000 I mean, is this what AI is supposed to be like?

00:59:59.000 His face looks mangled.

01:00:01.000 We're not there yet to create the paradigms and circumstances that my reporting does with police body cam footage and superintendents and people calling.

01:00:09.000 So I don't think AI is a threat to me yet.

01:00:12.000 But yeah, we force people into that moment you just described where they're required to grapple with the questions.

01:00:21.000 Yes.

01:00:21.000 And there is only one truth.

01:00:23.000 And when I say truth, I heard a joke recently.

01:00:25.000 And truth is beauty is truth.

01:00:26.000 Talent is truth.

01:00:27.000 Art is truth.

01:00:28.000 So like this Lizzo, this woman, you know, obese woman on the front of magazines. 0.99

01:00:34.000 She's so beautiful.

01:00:34.000 It's a joke.

01:00:35.000 If you want to upset your girlfriend, tell her she looks like Lizzo today. 0.50

01:00:39.000 There's a truth in each and every one of us.

01:00:43.000 And there's only one truth.

01:00:45.000 Yeah.

01:00:45.000 So we're trying to wake people up.

01:00:47.000 We're trying to shake people awake.

01:00:50.000 And I'm confident that we will do that.

01:00:53.000 But the First Amendment is under attack in this country.

01:00:56.000 It is.

01:00:56.000 In a serious way.

01:00:57.000 We still have it.

01:00:58.000 It is.

01:00:59.000 But not for long unless we do something about it.

01:01:02.000 The FBI still has my devices.

01:01:04.000 You know, three years ago.

01:01:05.000 It's one of the greatest violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States for them to raid journalists' homes over a story I never even did.

01:01:13.000 Unbelievable.

01:01:14.000 So, shameless plug there. 1.00

01:01:17.000 Not shameless because I have to pay the legal bills of my journalists.

01:01:19.000 No, it's not shameless at all.

01:01:21.000 But Private Citizen is the 501c3.

01:01:23.000 It's tax deductible.

01:01:24.000 It helps fund our citizens' legal bills.

01:01:28.000 Private Citizen 501c3 if you want to support our First Amendment rights there.

01:01:33.000 James, I appreciate what you do.

01:01:36.000 I think you set an example for young people who, I think the most important moral of the story isn't any of the implications for the country, all of which is important, but for maybe a younger person watching this, at least being somebody who found his calling, who's pursuing it, who's doing it without apology.

01:01:55.000 A modern-day Howard Rourke and his discipline.

01:01:58.000 And I mean that as high praise.

01:02:00.000 Thank you.

01:02:00.000 And I hope you take it that way.

01:02:02.000 Thank you very much for having me.

01:02:04.000 Appreciate you being here, man.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - September 27, 2023

How James O'Keefe Became the Enemy of the State | The TRUTH Podcast #39

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