Riding With Project Veritas

An Article Two Years in the Making

Sing, goddess, the rage of James O'Keefe,
Black and murderous, that cost Project Veritas and also many others
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.

The rise. The fall. The pseudoresurrection. You can read my feature article on Project Veritas live on Rolling Stone’s website or, if you’re old-school, you can grab the print magazine wherever fine publications are sold. It takes you on a whirlwind tour of thirteen years of chaos, drama, and musical theater. You should read it. It’s fun.

(No Rolling Stone subscription? Scroll down to the comments. Someone might have posted a work-around down there)

As I explained a few days ago, a lot of material got left on the cutting-room floor on this one. 8,000 words sounds like a lot, but when it comes to Project Veritas, it’s about a tenth of what you really need. I’ll be doing a bunch of auxiliary articles with the material that got cut, and where better to start than how I came to write this article in the first place?

Riding With Project Veritas

This story begins as so many do: with a complete psychological breakdown. They can’t expose your dark secrets if you beat them to it.*

I didn’t necessarily want a reason to stay alive as 2021 turned to 2022, but I needed one, and I tried to find as many as I could. Some of them were even legal. I’m a sicko and always have been: I write about American conservatism because it fascinates me and I want to understand it. Surely some weird right-wing event would cheer me up. Maybe I could even sell an article about it, get a paycheck, score some dopamine, gain some purpose.

And that’s when I found it: the Project Veritas experience

The event of the century! Miami! If this wasn’t worth a few more weeks, nothing was. I bought a ticket, booked a flight, and pitched the story. I’d written an op/ed for Rolling Stone about 9/11 and reached out to the editor I’d worked with. I didn’t dare get my hopes up — it was stupidly last-minute — but he said yes, and there I was, barely two weeks out of the psych ward, flying to Miami, working my way through 13 years of Project Veritas videos on 2x speed and taking furious notes.

I expected a book reading, maybe some guest speakers: moderate weirdness. What I actually got was a 50-minute all-singing all-dancing fully-choreographed fog-machine-and-visual-effects musical theater production of James O’Keefe’s life. You can and absolutely should read about that here. It remains perhaps the most fun article I’ve ever written, and one of the weirdest nights of my entire life.

I returned home and braced for impact. The article wasn’t particularly kind to Project Veritas, but it praised O’Keefe’s dancing, displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of his life, and pointedly refused to perform the ritual denial of the self-proclaimed American Muckraker’s status as a journalist. His people reached out to tell me how much O’Keefe liked it. Part of it was the magazine choice, I think. Rolling Stone, perhaps the biggest arts and entertainment magazines currently running, had reviewed his theater production! Described it as “An Unforgettable Performance,” even! The line became a pull quote that appeared at the top of advertisements for a Vegas performance that ultimately fell through last-minute.

One month after the article dropped, I skipped the Ronald Reagan dinner at CPAC to have dinner with O’Keefe, which a star-struck fan at a nearby table insisted on paying for. We had a two-hour argument about whether video footage is definitionally objective (it’s not) and whether objective journalism is possible at all (it isn’t). Eventually we said our goodbyes and he left for Project Veritas’ poolside afterparty. I left and crashed the organization’s poolside afterparty. Another fantastically weird evening.

For the next two years, I received sporadic invites and comp tickets to Project Veritas events, which I accepted whenever I could. I toured the Project Veritas headquarters in late March, where I bore witness to the shadow-box displaying O’Keefe’s grandmother’s chinchilla stole and other pimp accoutrement from his first sting, which destroyed the largest low- and middle-income advocacy group in America (see article), and O’Keefe’s office itself: an enormous room that smelled vaguely floral thanks to the scented candle that burned on a table near the door. The office contained two couches, several TV monitors, and a massive wooden desk that might have weighed more than the large gun safe that sat to its right. The desk featured two small recessed display shelves, each containing leather-bound books. Some were classics, like Great Expectations and the Iliad; some, like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, were definitely not mass-published in leather. To the desk’s left, shelving of amber wood and metal pipes bore plaques demarcating the different subjects of O’Keefe’s private library: Ethics in Journalism, Soviet history, Philosophy, etc. The top right shelf contained all the books cited in American Muckraker, O’Keefe’s third and most recent book. The array was impressive, the dog-eared pages and extensive margin notes even more so. They feature in American Muckraker largely as sources of quotes to rhetorically reinforce O'Keefe's arguments rather than actual research supporting them.

O’Keefe and I both had ulterior motives for our association that neither of us bothered to disguise. His big ask at the beginning was for a debate on journalistic ethics at the NYU J-school I was attending at the time — an absolute no-go, I quickly discovered, due to his 2011 sting attempt on the faculty. Later, we discussed the possibility of a profile. O’Keefe’s desire to associate waxed and waned in direct relationship with how useful he felt I might be to him; we were friendly, but not friends. I was there because I wanted a scoop. Eventually, I got one.

More than anything, O’Keefe wants to be recognized as a journalist. Like many people who operate in conservative circles, he desperately seeks the approval of the establishment while simultaneously despising it. A debate at NYU, even a hostile one, would have been a tacit admission that he’s a journalistic force to be reckoned with. The college didn’t want that, and not just because O’Keefe had declared war on them in those early days. Nearly every journalist would rather die than give O’Keefe the recognition he craves. Search and you will find countless articles explaining why what O’Keefe does is not journalism, can never be journalism, is totally different from what us Real Journalists do.

I have always found this argument exhausting, which is one of the reasons Project Veritas tolerated and perhaps even enjoyed my presence at their events, despite me making no secret of my issues with their tactics and targets. I love my job, and I believe that good journalism can do great things, but I’m not particularly precious about it either. It’s not a holy order. We are not paragons of virtue. We are carrion eaters, scavenging the bones of human tragedy and triumph for a good story. Sometimes those stories help people. Usually they hurt someone. You hope they help more than they hurt. You never really know.

If I had to make a call, though? I’m willing to call Project Veritas journalism, albeit journalism I take enormous issue with. Project Veritas has always been a funhouse mirror held up to the mainstream press: hideously distorted but not entirely inaccurate. This is why journalists get so heated about Project Veritas’ journalistic status, I think. It’s very, very important that we convince ourselves that Project Veritas was fundamentally different than we are, because if they aren’t, what does that say about our own work?

Project Veritas constantly glossed over details of the little-t truth to get at what they perceive to be the Big-T-Truth. As I put it in the article:

Veritas did not mount investigations to discover whether ACORN is corrupt or whether Twitter censors conservatives; they mounted investigations to find proof for these things they were already convinced were true. This proof usually took the form of impropriety by someone within the target organization, which they presented as evidence that the entire organization, along with the ideology behind it, was irredeemable. A handful of poorly trained staffers at ACORN who exhibited staggeringly poor judgment became proof ACORN supported undocumented underage sex trafficking. A Twitter executive blowing off steam over drinks became proof Twitter itself had a vendetta against Musk. Whether or not these conclusions are true, Project Veritas videos proved neither.

I think Veritas violated little-t-truth in a more extreme way than most mainstream publications. I also think that if we were to start excommunicating journalists for little-t-truth violations, a lot of mainstream journalists would find themselves in the desert right alongside them. Remember that one time when the media reported that Trump promised a “bloodbath” if he did not win? The little-t-truth is that Trump said it in the context of an imagined auto industry collapse during a second Biden term. Their Big-T-Truth, which I also believe, is that Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. So the New York Times and other outlets chose to sacrifice that little t in the name of Big T. It happens all the time. The difference is in degree, not the activity itself.

A lot of Veritas-affiliated people I spoke to for this article chose to remain off the record, which is funny to me, since I doubt they’d have granted me the same were our positions reversed. No one asks PV sting targets whether they want to stay off the record: they are exposed against their will. But no one asked Samuel Alito if he was OK with being quoted telling Lauren Windsor that “one side or the other is going to win,” either, and I am 100% onboard with that. Sometimes, undercover journalism is the only way to get to a story of vital public interest, and there’s a long tradition of this type of journalism in America. I think a lot of Project Veritas’ stories fall way short of the “vital public interest” mark, to say the least, but once again the difference is degree.

Project Veritas has weaponized journalism. To quote the article once more:

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals refers to targets and enemies, counterattacks and threats. This is not the language of traditional journalism — which investigates facts and strives for understanding — but of war, which annihilates its target by any means necessary. Journalism as combat short-circuits empathy and renders nuance impossible. It makes for a simplistic story flattened to the point of dishonesty. 

But journalism as combat is still journalism. If that makes you uncomfortable: good. It makes me very uncomfortable. My first Project Veritas story was also my first major reported article, and the time I spent with the organization over my two subsequent years of career development kept me on the straight and narrow. I’ve never wanted to see myself in that mirror. When I catch a glimpse, I know it’s time to change.

Coming up next time: a behind-the-scenes account of the Love Boat Caper. Stay tuned!

Please keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times

*Thanks to more therapy than anyone should receive in a single lifetime, plus meds, I’m doing much better. For the first time in my life things feel more or less under control. I’m just regular crazy now.