Project Veritas was all about James O’Keefe. It was turning into a cult of personality, and such movements often fail.
The sheer personality of one person is not enough, unless that person’s life is completely invested into other people. If an activist organization is focused only one person, or is promoted predominantly through one person, then it’s destined to fail.
Did James O’Keefe train successors? Was he invested in seeing other people take the lead for the organization?
I was also concerned as I saw James O’Keefe go to great lengths to troll some of the worst journalists. Yes, they lied about Project Veritas. Yes, they wrote defamatory remarks against James O’Keefe and others. To their great credit, they rolled back the false reports and forced retractions. Even better, they went after the New York Times in court and really had them over a barrel when it come to other abject libel.
But in much of his direct encounters with those bad journalists, you could see O’Keefe having too much fun promoting himself. I remember when a group of his journalists followed one of the defamatory reporters. They surrounded him, then they followed him closely as he walked out of one of the conservative conferences. I remember watching that exchange and thinking: “James is giving that runt propagandist more power than he deserves. Why give them any attention in the first place?”
I remember another scene, in which James O’Keefe brought a Retracto llama to a disgraced Washington Post reported. O’Keefe approached him, left the alpaca at his desk, and then badgered him with questions for about two minutes straight. The reporter ignored O’Keefe and focused on his writing. At one point, he looked at the alpaca and said: “It’s nice!”
He rejected and ignored the trolling, and O’Keefe looked kind of stupid.
Then there’s the larger question of effectiveness. So Project Veritas was able to get rid of bad journalists. A number of propagandist frauds did get fired. How effective was this effort? Did it solve problems for O’Keefe to force them to quit? When has to wonder, since it’s very easy for flagging news sites to find another set of gaping aggregators who will push a left-wing narrative. It felt good to see bad reporters humiliated, to see news organizations forced to retract lies and errors.
But what good did it really accomplish?
Last of all, a number of O’Keefe’s exposes of bad teachers, including union bosses, were stirring and engaging. But what did they accomplish? One of the most notorious teachers exposed by James O’Keefe was Gabriel Gape. He was the Antifa teacher working for Natomas Unified School District. He was an egregiously abusive, partisan hack masquerading as a teacher. He admitted on camera bullying students, and he was proud of all the left-wing propaganda on his classroom walls.
When Project Veritas exposed him, he went into hiding, and parents throughout the district overwhelmed the school board. Other reporters went to the district office to demand more answers, and the school district staff would run scurrying.
But what happened in the end?
That teacher did not get fired. He had tenure, and for the most part these left-leaning school districts tolerate if not outright celebrate such terrible teachers. Yes, the school district board of trustees and the superintendent had to weather some whithering calls and public testimony, but at the end of the day, what were the parents going to do about it?
Even if the district wanted to, they could not fire the teacher. The career protection laws in California are quite strong, and they protect even the worst of teachers. What ultimately happened? Gipe was released from his contract with a massive severance package, and the school district agreed to provide him a job reference without mentioning why he asked to quit.
In other words, for all the noise and hoopla shaming Gabriel Gipe and forcing the spotlight on the school district, not much really happened.
All the hype, type, and swipe did not accomplish much to rid us of Gabriel Gipe. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the fallout immensely.