Project Veritas Poops the Bed, Munk Debate, and Twitter

There's this right wing group called Project Veritas led by this guy James O'Keefe. They're biased, but generally pretty good. Recently, though, I think they really pooped the bed taking this right wing "groomers" talking point too far.

Before I get into it, maybe a little background on Project Veritas first.

The founder/leader is a guy named James O'Keefe.

He came to prominence in 2009 doing an undercover sting operation against a left-wing group called ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). He pretended to be a pimp, with his colleague as a prostitute.

That's a publicity shot.
He didn't dress like that on the actual video.

Using a camera hidden in his necktie, they recorded the staffers in ACORN offices around the country explain to them how to lie on tax and welfare forms, and how to declare the underage Salvadoran girls he claimed to be trafficking into the U.S. to become prostitutes as his dependents. The reporting led to the group's collapse. Project Veritas has been going strong ever since.

They mostly have their agents go on a date with a subject and do undercover video that they then broadcast on their channel. Sometimes whistleblowers go to them and he interviews them.

They are definitely right wing. They selectively choose to go after and report on targets on the left. They have gone after some on the right, but the vast majority are on the left. I don't imagine leftists bring them leads, on the other hand.

However, within that constraint, their integrity is generally pretty good. They have not been caught in a blatant lie yet, and they do fact checking and multiple sourcing to a greater extent then most mainstream media tend to. While they obviously edit video, they are quite good at leaving in the context, and make the full video available in controversial situations.

They're constantly being sued (generally for libel), but they vigorously defend themselves and win the vast majority and have not lost in any significant or telling way yet. The mainstream media publishes a lot of lies about them, and they vigorously go after them and get retractions (threatening lawsuits otherwise). They have a "Wall of shame" with over 300 journalists who had to print retractions after lying about Veritas.

They definitely engage in "click-bait" journalism (as does everybody else), and most of their stories and  "Giant Exposés" are not as sensational as they make out, but there's almost always newsworthy stuff there.

One thing they've been going after lately is the whole left-wing "grooming" stuff, where the left is trying to normalize alternative gender and sexual preferences with young children (such as "drag queen story hour" where biologically male drag queens dressed in very skimpy outfits twerk in front of nine-year-old children).

The right has a conspiracy theory that the left intends to "groom" children because there are a lot of pedophiles amongst them who wish to take advantage of the children. Myeh. I think the left just wants to break the cycle and have the children grow up to be tolerant of alternative gender and sexual preferences. I do think that sometimes the left gets a little over enthusiastic, especially when they do it in classrooms without informing parents and against the parents wishes (that is what the Florida misnamed "Don't Say Gay" bill tried to stave off).

All of this is NOT to say there aren't real groomers and real pedophiles running around. I don't think it's a political thing. We covered my views on that in an earlier blog-post. Here is the summary:

Getting back to these more recent videos, I really think Project Veritas got it wrong and unfairly targeted the subject of this video:

The Dean of Students at a prestigious Chicago private school describes to an undercover reporter an event during Pride Week.

During Pride, we do a Pride Week every year, and I had, like, our LGBTQ+ health center come in. They were passing around butt plugs and dildos to my students. Talking about queer sex. Using lube versus using spit.

Who was this?

This is an LGBTQ+ health center came in to talk to my high school students. They're just like passing around dildos and butt plugs. The kids are just playing with them. They're looking at them. In a classroom. While I'm sitting there.

No big complaints? I mean, if the parents found out would they...

No. It's queer sex.

How old are the kids in the classroom?

14-18. They're like, 'How does this butt plug work? How do we do - like, how does this work?'

So, not a big story, if you ask me. They're HIGH SCHOOL kids. All the parents and the school higher-ups are fine with it. They're all progressive leftists. In fact, I'm all for it - I love me some dildos and butt plugs and lube. And they're not children as the misleading headline states. They're high school kids. They're probably already fucking each other in the ass!!!

But, O'Keefe deceptively edited earlier into the clip this photo:

Yes, it was from the same event, but this was the junior school. Butt plugs were not involved. But it is clearly designed to lead the ignorant right-wing news consumer to come away with the idea that young children, such as those pictured, were exposed to that.

The younger kids in the junior school did have "drag queen story hour" 

Again, I think it's fine and age appropriate to let kids know there's such a thing as alternate sexualities. To call this "grooming" is preposterous, and lessens the focus we should put on real child grooming. It's like when they call every inappropriate touch or bad date "rape", then what word do you use for a real violent rape?

So, in this case, FUCK YOU James O'Keefe for trying to ruin the life of this educator. Fortunately, the parents and school seem to be standing strongly behind the educator. But not right to harass the guy, or to open up this guy to harassment from crazies influenced by this "reporting".

Veritas also put up a second video, on generally the same subject matter, but this one I reluctantly agree with Veritas on.

A woman undercover reporter goes on a date with a school teacher who is beset by groups of misbehaving young ladies deliberately flashing their panties and pussies at him.

The target is Iman Rasti, Director of Writing Center; Middle School English Teacher; Seventh Grade Dean at Greens Farms Academy, another prestigious private school.

Like, one thing they [students] do these days, they sit down in front of me, they purposefully sit down somewhere in the class that is literally directly in front of me. They spread their legs wide open and that is just brutal. Brutal.

Every day there is different panties on: green, black, white and they [students] make sure -- it’s like they talk to each other, the three of them do that.

They open their legs, and I am teaching, and I see what I see. They make sure that the panties are positioned in a way that I actually see the thing [their pussies].

Ok,  they sit like this [demonstrates legs spread wide] in a short, short skirt, and you see the green panties, inserted in [their pussy slits, baring their pussy lips at me]. You see that.

Sitting in front of me in the chair, spreading legs so I can see. When they write, their nice, big beautiful, firm [pussy] lips. They make sure I see it.

It's unclear what age he's talking about. I think maybe 15, but potentially as young as 13-year-olds? Later on, he says "They are very naughty".

Now, having been a somewhat sexually promiscuous misbehaving adolescent myself back in the day, exploring my power over men, I can relate to those girls. I was initially reluctant to crucify this guy over his thoughts that he didn't act on. But as I kept listening to him, it was clear he was fantasizing strongly, and was telling this woman he barely knew all his innermost sexual thoughts. Not good!

And I don't think he even tries to curb this behaviour. Surely, even in today's day and age, there is some way to discipline these girls? (No, not that way, you PERVS!) But then, I know some teachers, and I know what a minefield of an environment they exist in and how difficult it is to impose any sort of discipline. If it was me, I'd get a female teacher or administrator involved, explain the situation, and come up with a strategy to deal with it. Mind you, that's still a minefield. With girls like that, won't they just claim they did nothing wrong and that teach was perving on them? And how would that go for him?

On second thoughts, perhaps I would just humiliate them in class: "Amanda, Grace, close your legs when you sit." And then just avert your eyes and say that every time you spot it, right in front of the whole class. I knew a male teacher in a girls' Catholic school who took that approach. The trick, he said, was not to look at it, but glance away and say, "Mary, button your blouse properly", or "Grace, roll your skirt back down."

Alternatively, how about bringing back the strap? Those girls like showing off their pussies? Have them to the front of the class, bend over the desk, skirt up, panties right down, and strap them on their bare bottoms. That'll learn 'em! Oh shit. Now there I go voicing out my own fantasies!

So, yes, I feel his plight. But the issue is he seemed to be really enjoying it, and when asked if he was tempted to have sex with them he said he was, but dared not do it because of the risk. He also said it is his "principle" not to fuck his students. But then admitted there are exceptions. When he was teaching in a college, he bragged that he had sex with many, many, many of his students (unlikely!). And just the creepy way he described these adolescent girls, and how fixated he was on their budding sexuality, it was just plain creepy, and I would be worried to trust young ladies with him. When the video was shown to his school higher ups, he was, correctly I thought, placed on suspension. Yes, men will have these fantasies about nubile young adolescents. Keep it in your heads (and in your pants), boys!

 

My overall verdict on Project Veritas is that they mostly do good work, and generally have a high degree of integrity, but do sensationalize things and are captured by their own ideology.  On the other hand, it used to be the mainstream media, like "60 Minutes", would do this kind of tough investigative journalism, but, alas, no more. As well, the mainstream media used to have strong standards of fact checking and multiple sourcing, but alas, that seems to be gone as well, but Project Veritas, at least, tries.

There was recently a Munk Debate in Toronto, Be it resolved, don't trust the mainstream media.

It was really good and the results were quite astounding. It was the biggest "swing" in the Munk Debates history. These were the debaters:

The Pro side was carried by now independent journalists (with a background in mainstream media), Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray. The Con side was represented by author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg who works as an editor for the New York Times.

The audience was quite large, filling Roy Thompson Hall. Coming in, the crowd was somewhat evenly divided on the question. Coming out, they were heavily swayed by the "Pro" side (the "don't trust" side), swinging over to 2/3rds in favour, which is HUGE for a debate like this. The folks attending these events are mostly highly educated people, generally with a left-wing bias.

The Con side tried making the point that mainstream media has all these checks and balances. The Pro side said they used to have, but they don't apply those standards anymore. They said that the mainstream media, in search of greater commercial success, has followed the Fox News model of catering to only one side and feeding them only stories that would affirm their audience's prejudices. Now, leftists have claimed this (correctly) about Fox for years, but they don't seem to notice that the vast majority of the mainstream media has followed along in-kind, but slanted to only affirm the left's prejudices. This debate sort of convinced a bunch of left-leaning people of the truth of that.

Personally, I think the old mainstream media model is dead and cannot recover. I think the new model will be independent journalists, like Project Veritas, Matt Taibbi, Bary Wies, Glenn Greenwald, and so on. Some will cater to a constituency, some will be balanced, some will have great ethics and standards, and some will have poor ethics and standards, and the public will decide for themselves. I think Twitter will be an important part of this, where stories are broken, and the public can follow along with their preferred journalists. The new Community Notes feature of Twitter will add context to tweets in an even-handed way.

By the way, if you're not following the Twitter Files, you're missing a great show! Elon Musk opened up all of Twitter's historical internal documents to Matt Taibbi and Bary Weis to report on how they please. The only condition is that they break their stories on Twitter first. The first two installments are out. Very, very, enlightening, and confirming everything the right suspected about Twitter massively putting their thumb on the scale of political discourse.

The Twitter Files Part One - in which it is revealed that government and political parties made frequent requests to Twitter to have people banned, and Twitter acted on it, with a big bias in favour of Democrats. And how the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed on phony made-up grounds.

Twitter Files Supplemental - in which it is revealed that former FBI Chief Counsel James Baker, who was central to the misinformation surrounding Russiagate, was Chief Counsel at Twitter and hid documents from Matt and Bary that implicated the FBI. Elon subsequently fired him.

The Twitter Files Part Two - in which it is revealed that contrary to previous statements, including Congressional testimony, Twitter was indeed shadow-banning people (decreasing their reach significantly) on political grounds.

More parts to come!