Sleep did not come easily that night, but I wasn’t needing much. Four hours would prove plenty. Adrenaline served as a useful substitute. I got to my office next morning and did a radio interview with the fearless Laura Ingraham. She was not afraid to say what we were up against. It wasn’t just about winning, she explained: “They are in this to humiliate and crush Republican opposition.” It was the first opportunity I had to thank Hannity on the air. “Credit Sean Hannity,” I told her. “He’s a good man for doing what he did. They fired Scott Foval.” We owed Hannity a major debt. The man put his reputation on the line for a story no one else wanted to touch.
After Ingraham, I did radio interviews with Rusty Humphries and Salem’s Mike Gallagher—both good and reliable guys. “I need your audience to tweet this video at the media and say, ‘cover this,’ ” I told Rusty about part two of the “Rigging” series, which we were just about to drop. “What tape [the media] choose to air is going to determine who wins the election.” On certain stories in the past I would have begged to get on the radio shows whose producers, today, were calling us. Most of them I had to turn down. I hated to do it, but there was much to be done.
I spent a good deal of time that morning chewing over a decision that I never expected to face. Trump’s people had called. They wanted us in Las Vegas for the third and final debate. That debate was tomorrow. Vegas was at least five hours away. I called in my senior staff. These guys had seen more of the world than I did, and I needed their advice. I had two major questions to answer: should I go and, if I did go, how the hell would I get there?
My one concern was of seeming too partisan. Yes, of course, just about all of us were pulling for Trump to win. All politics aside, the way we figured it, our enemy’s enemy was our friend. Then too, Trump had been a donor—not a big one, but all our donors were our friends.
The guys who had been to debates before described just how much media exposure I would get as a guest in the Spin Room at a presidential debate, especially given the fact that the first “Rigging” video had been the most-watched video in the world during these last twenty-four hours. They convinced me I could not turn the opportunity down.
While this debate was going on, CNN called. It was reporter Drew Griffin. From the tone of his voice, he sounded like he would rather be covering school board meetings in Prince George’s County than talking to me. He objected immediately to being on speakerphone. He wanted to see raw tape. He was sure those involved would say that their words were taken out of context. Yes, yeah, yeah! I had little patience for his demands. Still, as annoying as the call was, I could hear in Griffin’s snark the fissures in the dam cracking open. It took twenty-three hours to get the attention of the non-Fox media, but now they were calling.
Part two in the “Rigging” series dropped at noon. And good things really started happening. Drudge kicked in with seven separate links, all of them above the mast, several in red. Drawing my attention away from Drudge was the memorable opening theme music from The Rush Limbaugh Show. I headed out to the common area where the show was being streamed on a large overhead monitor. As soon as I heard my name mentioned, I shouted out, “Turn it up.”
Now just about the entire staff gathered in front of the monitor. Rush began by replaying his own broadcast from last March during which he speculated that the violence at the Chicago Trump Rally had been staged. “Make no mistake. This is all on the Democrats,” he had said back then. “This mob had been bought and paid for.”18 He was feeling vindicated.
“Let’s go now to the Project Veritas video,” said Rush, and our people spontaneously cheered. Over the last year, eight of these journalists had put everything into this effort. This was a risky business. Unlike other journalists, for them there was no guarantee of a byline. In fact, when they started, there was no guarantee there would be a story worth telling. But they had pulled it off. I could see in their faces the joy, the pride, the relief. The work they had done for the last year, the career they had chosen, just got a whole lot easier to explain to friends and family.
The day kept getting more and more interesting. Although Foval was history, Robert Creamer clung to his job. Earlier we speculated that the Dems would not dare ditch Creamer given his congresswoman wife and his White House connections. An email I received that afternoon would prove us wrong.
The email came from Madelin Fuerste, a local TV producer in Chicago. She wanted me to respond to a statement by Creamer. The statement read, “I am unwilling to become a distraction to the important task of electing Hillary Clinton, and defeating Donald Trump in the upcoming election. As a result, I have indicated to the Democratic National Committee that I am stepping back from my responsibilities working with the campaign.” DNC head Donna Brazile later offhandedly told me she fired Creamer, but that afternoon I was totally okay with “stepping back.” A scalp is a scalp.
“Creamer fired!” I shouted throughout our newsroom. Before I even responded to Fuerste, I took a screenshot of the Creamer statement and tweeted it out. The Veritas twitter feed lit up like a slot machine in jackpot mode, buzzing, popping, and clicking so frequently I could scarcely keep track. Two top Democratic officials had been fired for getting nabbed trying to rig the election, and, to this point at least, no one in the mainstream news media had reported on the story.
That was about to change. The sacking of Creamer forced the media to cover a story most were hoping to avoid. I looked up at the six monitors inside the Project Veritas newsroom. Each was turned to a different station. And every broadcast—Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, even local media—were playing video clips and discussing our “Rigging the Election” series.
Even CNN’s Anderson Cooper got dragged into it. Broadcasting from Las Vegas that evening, Cooper said without a trace of enthusiasm, “Video emerging of a group of pro-Clinton political operatives talking about stirring up trouble and provoking violence at Trump rallies.” That got our attention. He added the mandatory mainstream caveat that I had a “less than stellar reputation for accuracy.” That established, Cooper conceded, “Some of the things you’ll hear on the tape are certainly hard to ignore, enough we’re learning for one person to be fired, so far another to resign.”19
Every one of the staff members inside Veritas at 8:00 p.m. was frozen in place. As hopeful as we were, it shocked us to witness such a turn of events. “Angela Brandt” stared up at Cooper shaking her head in awe. “All the nights transcribing video,” she said quietly, “all the days writing after-action reports leads to this. Even Van Jones is defending us. Van Jones!” True, Jones did refer to me as “Pinocchio,” but he called out Foval’s activities as “horrific.”
Cooper and his crew were broadcasting outside in a public space. As sweet as Cooper’s words were, one single image that evening was sweeter still. To this day, I choke up when I think about it. Clearly visible behind Cooper was a citizen whose name I will likely never know. He was surely one of the 14 million who watched the videos on YouTube, and I suspect he tweeted out at least a few of the “Rigging” series’ 100 million tweets. Proudly and defiantly, the man walked back and forth behind Cooper in full view of the millions of CNN viewers. He was holding a sign above his head. The sign said simply, “#ProjectVeritas.”
Weaponized Autism
In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, our geek allies had a ton of nervous energy they hoped to put to good use. During elections past, all they could have done was to consume news or at best redistribute it. By 2016, they could help create it. Perhaps the most usefully creative of all sites was Reddit.
Although most Americans over thirty have not even heard of it, Reddit has quietly become the eighth most popular online destination in the United States. Its methodology is a mystery, and its internet-amped collection of memes and verbal mischief is incomprehensible to all but its legion of “redditors.” Despite those seeming limitations, Reddit is changing the culture.
What registered redditors do is post text and/or a direct link to an article and see if they can generate a community of users around their post. Other users vote the item up or down. Those posts that gather the most “up” votes ascend the page. Users can add their comments to the post, often playing off one another. Most conversations do not get much beyond commentary, some of it less enlightened than others, but our redditors wanted to do more than talk. Many found their voice on what is called a “subreddit,” an interest community on which people communicate with one another.
Specifically, it was on the subreddit “The_Donald” where the self-described “online mob of rabid self-organized supporters” became a genuine countercultural force. On a daily—no, hourly—basis, they gleefully subverted the cultural institutions the left holds dear. When, for instance, WikiLeaks dumped the John Podesta emails late in the campaign, the redditors scrambled through them like rats at the city dump looking for a choice morsel or two. If it took one rat a thousand hours to find everything worth finding, it would take a thousand rats just one hour. In today’s media, time is everything.
Among other self-descriptions, the redditors call themselves “weaponized autists” and “centipedes.” The social media geek who came up with the phrase “weaponized autism” meant no offense to the autistic. If anything, he was celebrating the hidden virtue of having a singular focus in a world of distractions.
One of the most accomplished autists, Charles Johnson of GotNews, admits to being “neuroatypical,” which is somewhere on the autism spectrum.1 Another borderline case was my mentor, Andrew Breitbart. He would tell me the internet “cured” his ADD because it put his wandering mind to good use navigating tabs and Twitter text boxes. His shortcoming was now a virtue.
The idea of the “centipede” suggests a hundred individual agents working together as one, feeding off each other, boosting each other’s spirits, occasionally correcting the redditor who takes a wrong turn. At their best, redditors can outperform any newsroom in America. They pore obsessively over publicly available data and connect dots. The internet, of course, makes all this possible. The fact that virtually every other newsroom is looking in another direction or not looking at all makes their job that much more satisfying.
In the lead-up to the launch of our “Rigging” series, we came up with the idea of teasing the release on Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) forum. Redditors describe this no-man’s-land as a place “where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal.”2 I think of the place as a hive for angry, motivated bees, all hot to pollinate. With less than a month to go before the election, the hive was buzzing. The Twitter ban on my account had stirred them up. The redditors, in fact, were instrumental in getting Twitter to undo the ban.
These were my cyber-Contras ready to subvert the collectivist establishment wherever they could find an opening. I needed to live up to their expectations. I announced we were planning on doing an AMA on Friday evening. Typically, people do not do AMAs unless, as one sage told me, “they have something to say.” What I was promising was huge, and I could not afford to disappoint. If I did disappoint, the redditors would never let me forget it.
I wrote that our videos directly involved Hillary. I was referring here to Creamer’s admission that Hillary was the one who insisted on putting “ducks on the ground.” I wrote, “I know people want me to clarify that the footage directly involves HRC. Again, the answer is yes. And it’s more than that. We’ve exposed the whole network. The dirty tricks, how they commit the voter fraud, illegal coordination—is delegated from the top down. And we have all that on tape. And we’re releasing different tapes every day.” If Hillary was not pulling the strings herself, it was people very close to her.
The redditors’ appetite could not be satisfied so quickly, especially after the teases they had seen in the weeks prior. On September 28, for instance, I put in a plug for the power of visuals: “Congressional hearings, IG investigations and other Govt spectacles are a waste of time. Catching the bastards on tape is all that matters!” Their hopes raised, they wanted action. One user wrote, “This is the only important question. If it’s not directly involving Hillary (i.e., her own words) then it’s literally nothing.”3
Another followed in the same spirit, “Look, ‘this guy from Hillary’s camp is doing corrupt things’ trash won’t stick. Stop hyping this trash up, it won’t even dent Hillary’s campaign. If it’s not Hillary’s own words, it’s not shit.”4
I knew we had the goods. It may not have been exactly what the redditors wanted, but I was confident that they would not be disappointed. Days earlier, October 10, right before we dropped the New York elections commissioner video, I tweeted, “Our first tape drops tomorrow.”5
“Don’t fuck with me James, better be good,” Cybork91 snapped.6
I responded, “This week we drop smaller bombs across the country. Next week we drop atomic bombs.”7 The plan was to lower expectations on the current releases and build anticipation for the next one. This was happening under the very noses of a major media that scarcely knew the subreddit thread “The_Donald” existed, but our people were paying attention.
Many redditors despaired nonetheless. Melissa Gott from North Carolina tweeted back that in Hillary Clinton’s case, “even a video or paper trail does not matter.”8 I reassured her that in a country as free as ours, however unlevel the playing field, the game was far from over. In a rare direct reply I wrote, “Wrong. We have tape of them demeaning and disparaging black people in the worst ways. That will matter. Coming in October.”9
The tweet went viral. Twelve hundred retweets at the time was a near record for me. After the first two “Rigging” videos were released, however, I came to expect that many retweets every five minutes. In retrospect, I should have been more precise. I did not mean to imply that Hillary had been caught disparaging black people. That honor went to a major Democratic donor at an event for US Senate candidate Deborah Ross in North Carolina. In a conversation about Ben Carson with one of our undercover journalists, the donor said, “You know the issue of the Holocaust? Do you know the SonderKommandos? Jewish guards who, in effect, helped murder Jews in the camps so they could live a little longer? So blacks who are helping the other side are seriously fucked in the head.”10 The donor pointed to his head to get the message across.
Ben Carson, of course, was the pediatric neurosurgeon who ran for president as a Republican and is, as of this writing, secretary of housing and urban development. The donor in question, Benjamin Barber, was no ordinary yahoo. He was a Harvard grad and political theorist, best known for his 1995 bestseller Jihad vs. McWorld. True to form, he had a glass of chardonnay in his hand when he slandered Carson and the million-plus African Americans who voted for Donald Trump.
Even without Hillary Clinton, the footage was powerful. At Veritas we use a “content spectrum”—the weaker the target, the more powerful the content has to be. This was a relatively weak target, but the content was insanely powerful. If a Republican had said what Barber did, it would have been a career ender.
In that we had not yet released the Sonderkommando video, the redditors were free to imagine what was on it. Quickly, it became the “Hillary N-word” tape on Reddit, Free Republic, TigerDroppings.com, Twitter, and 4chan. There is a deep hunger for content that runs contrary to mainstream media narratives. Even the notion that such content existed created a news buzz in the pro-Trump counterculture.
The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman likes to describe the internet as an “open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information.”11 His take on the internet was pretty much the norm in America’s newsrooms, especially after the election. What these critics fail to understand, however, is that the interactive forums on the right almost inevitably self-correct. “O’Keefe said he has a clip of someone in the Clinton campaign disparaging black voters that’s what he said. He never said Hillary, neve
r said nigger.”12 Yes, thank you! In any event, I did not want to let these guys down for the Ask Me Anything forum. After the release of the “Rigging” videos, I was confident they would not let me down, and I was right.
To begin, I held up a whiteboard with the time of day and my picture to verify that I was, in fact, James O’Keefe. User PrinceCamelton quickly confirmed, “This is verified to be James O’Keefe.” We logged in and wrote a headline, “TONIGHT: James O’Keefe, award winning journalist and writer, will be joining us for AMA at 7:30 PM EDT!!”13
At 7:30 p.m., I promptly logged in, first to thank the redditors for spreading the word about my Twitter situation. The pressure they helped bring ended my lockout after twelve hours. From the very beginning of this AMA, I felt at home with this community. The “weaponized autists” greeted me with a steady stream of strong, encouraging messages. I had been knocking around the internet in a major way these last seven years, but I had never before seen a right-of-center community show a will and energy comparable to that of the political left. Some sample greetings:
“Doing God’s work good sir. We are going to win . . . The whole world is against us.”
“this is information warfare!”
“Based Acorn destroyer!!! Dude, just drop all of them. Let us autists take care of the rest.”
“were breaking the conditioning.”14
What the redditors called “conditioning” others might call the “Overton Window,” the range of facts and policies that are viewed as politically acceptable to discuss. We were breaking that window indeed. The_Donald redditors were a force to be reckoned with, and whether Trump won or lost, the redditors in many ways had already won. Despite the pounding propaganda from the major media and the peer pressure from their fellow millennials, they found their way through the haze and formed a community of like-minded souls. Together, they had the power to accomplish incredible things.
American Pravda Page 19