American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  “No problem,” I answered. “My alma mater would never have me back.” The ice broken, other young guys approached. I was busily signing T-shirts, programs, and, of course, “Make America Great Again” hats. I’d be lying if I said I did not enjoy the attention. I am much more introverted than I ought to be for doing what I do, but the Hilton that night was my world.

  Not everyone shared in the slowly growing anticipation that the night might break Trump’s way. Here and there I spotted establishment types—consultants, pollsters, pundits. Some had come to experience the punch line of the Trump joke, the anticipated moment when all their warnings were realized and their establishment wisdom vindicated. For them, a Clinton victory meant four years of talk show bookings where they could sound off, look smart, and patronize their less savvy compatriots. They had made their peace with the deep state. If the swamp prevailed, so be it.

  The idea of a Trump win unsettled them. Throughout the evening I overheard their random insider comments—“I was with Frank Luntz earlier”; “Chris Christie was telling me”; “Clinton wins Virginia”—and sensed their unease. For the last few weeks, few months really, even on Election Day itself, the media had been predicting not just a Hillary Clinton victory but a Hillary landslide.1 Now, these skeptics were not so sure. The world was shifting under their feet, and more so by the minute. For skeptics and true believers alike, there was this dawning sense that Trump might actually win. For the believers, this would be their first real taste of heaven.

  “Where are we?” some enthusiastic young guy asked behind me.

  “We’re 254, and we need to get to 270,” came the answer.

  In the VIP section, a giant image of Brit Hume loomed above us. His voice echoed loudly as the state returns came in. In between announcements he killed time. No Trump fan, Hume worried out loud about the effect on the markets if Trump should win.

  “Oh, please!” said a Wall Streeter standing next to me. “What’s going to happen tomorrow? Nothing! The ups and downs are all fake. It’s Brexit, basically. Markets responded when FBI info came out, but they bounced back in a day. Stocks are going to bounce back obviously.”

  And then the word came down. The AP was reporting that Trump had won Pennsylvania. Hillary’s path to victory had narrowed to the vanishing point. Trump was going to be our next president. The confetti flew. The tears flowed. The young men screamed into their smart phones and waved their red caps.

  Although I try to keep my distance from partisan politics, what I realized during the campaign was that Trump’s people were our people.

  “I tweeted every single video of yours during the election,” one guy said.

  “Dude,” another laughed ecstatically, “you’re the reason we won.”

  I meant every “thank-you.” Every handshake I was offered, I shook back harder—with appreciation. When someone hugged me, usually awkwardly, I hugged them back. My hugs were as sincere as theirs, maybe more. They tweeted my stories out. They made it happen. It can be hard to express gratitude to people you’ve never met, but not that night. That night it all came easy.

  Laura grabbed a screenshot of me and tweeted it out with the message: “Watching a historic power shift, not just in government but in media. You can bypass them now.”

  The media were a mess. Laura and I looked up on the elevated podium where hundreds of journalists gathered, their lights beaming down like those of the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And aliens these media people now were, strangers in a strange land, their estrangement from the crowd below palpable. They hunched over their phones in shock or pulled at their hair or sobbed unashamedly. This election was about them—they knew it—and they lost. A few actually accepted responsibility and expressed something like contrition. In the Showtime series The Circus, John Heilemann offers a belated mea culpa. “I was wrong,” says the ace political reporter. “They are going to be talking about this for years, the greatest political upset of our lifetime.”2

  Down below, above the din, I found myself in a few sobering conversations. One was with Sidney Powell, a DOJ whistle-blower, truth-telling author, and former federal prosecutor. She seemed to sense what I was thinking and walked over to me to talk about it.

  “First thing everyone always asks me,” she said, “is, ‘Aren’t you afraid of the DOJ? Don’t you have someone starting your car for you?’ I have a feeling you get the same questions.”

  I just stared at her and murmured, “All the time.”

  Powell had written about prosecutorial misconduct, specifically how prosecutors often conceal the evidence that might free a defendant, and they do so with impunity. I knew something about this phenomenon. In New Orleans in 2010, the arresting officers confiscated my computer and cell phone without permission. The exculpatory information contained therein was not shared with the court, but someone did leak my private communications to the media in order to poison public opinion. Several prosecutors on our case were later forced to resign when it became clear they routinely used aliases to post comments critical of their investigative targets on the website of the Times-Picayune.

  “I just tell them I’m not going to live in fear,” said Powell of those who questioned her sanity. “I’d rather be mad. But fear is why some people quit.”

  Man, did that hit home. I thought about quitting so many times—the arrest in New Orleans, the three years spent on federal probation, the accusations of sexual assault by a woman I never touched—which I describe in detail in Breakthrough—the occasional half-baked sting that went nowhere. Worse, every failure, every setback, was cheered by gloating, vindictive journalists. But then, just when I was convinced I was spinning my wheels, that no one really noticed or cared, some worldly advisor would whisper in my ear, “They attack you because they fear you, because they respect you. Press on!”

  I spoke with a few military veterans that evening. In each case, theirs was a measured celebration. Yes, we had secured a beachhead on enemy territory, but there was a long slog ahead.

  “This is a phenomenal night, a big victory,” one Special Forces guy told me, “but now the hard part really begins. The establishment will dig in their heels and try to fuck us every which way they can.”

  The bond we shared in victory gave me the nerve to ask a question that I had been chewing over since Marcus Luttrell first raised it at the Republican National Convention.

  “I’ve never understood,” I asked, genuinely perplexed, “why soldiers in our country are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. They go to hellholes like Iraq and Afghanistan knowing they just might die for their country. But here, almost no one is willing to sacrifice anything for his country.”

  The soldier got it. “For all the soldiers we have with the moral courage to get it on overseas,” he said, his voice rising, “not one fucking careerist FBI agent had the stones to stand up and say, ‘Here’s what’s going on with DOJ.’ ”

  He was referring to those many FBI agents who leaked their displeasure about Director James Comey’s bewildering refusal to bring charges against Hillary Clinton in the email scandal. Yet for all the backstage grumbling, not a single agent chose to risk his career by bucking the DOJ and going public with his discontent.

  “Why is that?” I asked. “I don’t understand.” This was the heart of the matter for me. The question that would answer so many other questions about how we got where we were as a country.

  “Cowardice,” said the soldier. “It takes two of kinds of courage to fight a war. You need individual soldiers willing to attack a position and leaders willing to commit to an attack, even when the outcome is uncertain.”

  “So, is it harder,” I asked, “to confront some bureaucrat who might fire you than to confront an enemy who might kill you?”

  His answer cut through all the jubilation around us and fixed itself in my heart.

  “A firefight lasts
for minutes,” he said. “The decisions you make, you make in seconds. And you know someone’s always got your back. But in government it takes years to build a reputation and a ton of moral courage to put that reputation on the line. Plus, you’ve got lots of time to stew about the decision, too much time.”

  “And no one’s got your back,” I said.

  “Probably not.”

  “You’ve got to be pretty naïve to take this fight on, I suppose.”

  “It helps,” he said with a wry smile, then nodded and walked away, my suspicions confirmed. I got to see this duality up close. Not too long afterward, I was talking to a would-be Project Veritas recruit who hoped one day to be a Marine. He was less afraid, however, of getting injured in Afghanistan than he was of being burned by the Huffington Post. The fear of exposure troubled this young guy. As you might expect, we didn’t sign him.

  In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that “the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time.”3 In a firefight that certainly holds true, but in public life it is just too easy to compromise your principles and slink away from a fight. If you’re a Republican, the media will even praise you for “growing” in office.

  When Trump finally came out in the early morning hours at the Hilton, it just didn’t seem real. I felt like I was watching some kind of pageant that Trump himself had staged, a “Mr. President USA” contest.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said with a smile, “had very important business.” Watching him speak over the sea of red hats in front of me and knowing that millions of others were watching on TV left me feeling like a witness to history.

  After his speech, I headed for the exit. A line of NYPD officers met me as I stumbled out of the building. This wasn’t New Orleans. These guys wanted to shake my hand, and they weren’t shy about it. “You’re the guy who did those videos,” said one. Yes, I was. I suspect they saw in Trump what I did. On the campaign trail at least, he didn’t always make sense, didn’t always say the right thing, but he never backed down. In the immortal words of Steve Bannon, “Honey Badger don’t give a shit.” What these cops respected about him was that he stood against the grain and defied the same elites they and I had been defying for years.

  Targeting the Media

  As the election proved to all who cared to see, the press was in a state of crisis. Its reputation, its business model, its power over the people were all at risk. It was the victim of a now undeniable reality: much of the public had given up on the credentialed journalists of the establishment media and were turning to citizen journalists and alternative media sites, not just for opinions but for news.

  If the press was stuck in time—the anachronistic word “press” suggests as much—the social media were altering the course of global events, rewriting history, rewiring human society. Diversified and decentralized, these media have wrested control of public imagery away from the powers that be. No force can stop the truth from emerging, and no cabal can shape the national consciousness the way it once did.

  A late April 2017 poll showed only 29 percent of those surveyed trusted the political media, a figure less than those who trusted President Trump.1 The social media were largely responsible for those numbers. By 2016, spending on social media advertising surpassed that of television or print, and all major brands were running videos on various platforms. From 2014 to 2017, money invested in social media advertising increased nearly 150 percent to an estimated $41 billion per year, with Facebook and Twitter getting the greater part of that revenue.2

  The once formidable barriers to entry were no more. Although some in Congress may try to dictate just who is a journalist, no degree is needed to launch a podcast or start a blog. No license needs to be filed. No one’s permission needs to be sought. Good content usually finds an audience, and content is king.

  The swamp class has watched all this with dismay. Thomas Friedman spoke for his class the week before Trump’s inauguration in 2017 when he lamented, “A critical mass of our interactions had moved to a realm where we’re all connected but no one’s in charge.” The italics are his. Friedman saw this state of affairs as “downright scary.”3 At Project Veritas we find the concept of “We the People” downright liberating.

  Despite the trend toward social media, we are teetering back and forth on what Malcolm Gladwell calls a “tipping point.” The paradigm has not completely shifted yet as evidenced by the media’s continued shaming power over the Republican Party. As Friedman recognized—he too used the phrase “tipping point”—the shift is well under way.

  No one has figured this out quite like Donald Trump. The democratization of the media allowed him to go right to the people. He became his own assignment editor. He was also the media’s assignment editor. The fact that he and his supporters could communicate “without editors, fact-checkers, libel lawyers or other filters” disturbed Friedman and others of his class to no end.

  In some ways, Trump turned the access paradigm on its head and twisted it into something unprecedented. With his direct Twitter connection, he gave the press pool an unfettered feel for what he was thinking. This directness, combined with a Bannon-inspired strategy of always being on the offensive, made it difficult for the media to focus on anything but Donald Trump.

  This was true from the moment Trump declared for the presidency. During the primary campaign, he accumulated more earned media than all the other Republican candidates combined. Trump was good for ratings, but, even better from the media’s perspective, he seemed to be wrecking the Republican Party. This was a big win-win—until it wasn’t.

  “Trump has caught the press in something of a double bind. To ignore what the President does or what he says he intends to do would be journalistic malpractice,” wrote Politico’s Jack Shafer during inauguration week. “For now, Trump has his glittering saddle on the press, is fannywacking the beast’s butt with his crop, and is driving the day.”4

  As became evident in November 2016, the truth was drifting away from what the political class preferred to report and far away from what it predicted. Allan J. Lichtman, the one major political historian who accurately called the presidential race, put it thusly: “Punditry has no scientific basis but simply reacts to the latest polls, which miss the fundamentals of an election and what really drives our politics.”5

  As to what does drive our politics, there is a brutal reality that those immured in our capital cities refused to face right up until election night. The day after the election, the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin finally conceded, “Voters have had it with the artifice, emptiness and elements of corruption that pervade the country’s politics.”6 Was that not obvious?

  The major media were profoundly wrong throughout 2016. They missed the drive and pulse of this country in the run-up to an election of extraordinary consequence. The condescension toward Trump and his supporters started at the top and flowed downstream to the entertainment media, most notably to the once-funny Saturday Night Live. On October 23, two weeks before the election, America’s beloved actor Tom Hanks showed how far he had strayed from his “everyman” roots when he played a Trump supporter as a marble-mouthed conspiracy theorist so dimwitted he believed the election to be rigged.7 The audience laughed and cheered. What SNL was attacking here was not only Trump and his followers but also their communication streams. If Hanks’s character got his information from the internet or wherever, the real Hanks got his information from the major media. That is why he was in a laughing mood. At least he was before the election.

  In an unusually honest commentary two days after the election, CBS’s Will Rahn admitted that he and his colleagues “spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.” This, said Rahn, was “symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness,” a smugness he traced to
a “profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing.”8

  Unfortunately, few in the mainstream media proved to be as honest as Rahn. The election of Donald Trump was a repudiation of their credibility and thus their relevance. They took it hard. They had reason to. Said Kelly McBride, a media ethicist and vice president of the Poynter Institute, “Everything the media does is based on the notion it has relevance. The whole business model falls apart if you’re irrelevant.”9

  In the aftermath of the election, a CNN senior producer in Atlanta confirmed to one of our undercover reporters his network’s growing fear of irrelevance. “Like, if you look at our ratings and our numbers, we don’t have enough of an audience,” he told our journalist. “Like, even if you combine Fox, MSNBC, and CNN all together, you’re talking about 2 million people in a country of 300 million people. Like, our ratings, alone are not enough to swing an election.”10

  The producer sensed that the tipping point had already been reached. He acknowledged that the “social media,” more specifically “the conservative media,” prevailed on Election Day. “It’s like Town Hall, Breitbart, those people really helped Donald Trump get elected. I mean, we have 250,000 people watching us on our best night.” Those numbers, he conceded, were “not enough to change the behavior of a nation.”

  “The business model for mainstream journalism is in crisis,” wrote Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times in a spiteful postelection column headlined, “Lies in the Guise of News in the Trump Era.” Other than his observation about the business model, Kristof got just about everything else wrong. His takeaway message was that “fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy.”11 This kind of sentiment is precisely what Rahn had in mind when he called out the “unbearable smugness” of the mainstream media.

  In reality, the business model is “in crisis” because for years the media have been passing off their analysis and opinions as journalism. When this “journalism” is shown to be as spectacularly misguided as it was on Election Day, citizens have reason to wonder whether they should believe anything the media might say about the Trump administration going forward.