Conservative activist James O’Keefe was unceremoniously removed in 2023 as the head of Project Veritas, the far-right activist group that he founded, and now he wants everyone to know that people in the organization were mean to him.
The Bulwark’s Will Sommer reported on Tuesday that O’Keefe is selling a video called “The Truth Inside Veritas” purporting to tell the “chaotic power struggle that consumed Project Veritas from within.”
After watching the video, Sommer notes that O’Keefe “devotes a surprisingly large amount of the video to demonstrating how rude his employees were to him.”
This includes detailing the content of mean texts that were sent to him, along with a Photoshopped picture replacing O’Keefe’s face with a sex toy. In another instance, O’Keefe whines that an employee sent out “a text message of me eating a sandwich covered in semen.”
O’Keefe’s apparent goal is to restore himself as the head of Project Veritas so he can once again produce absurd far-right propaganda.
O’Keefe is an unsympathetic figure who has spent more than fifteen years in right-wing political activism targeting liberals and the Democratic Party, particularly by smearing and distorting left-aligned groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which assisted poor Black people.
In 2023, the Project Veritas board pushed him out of his role as CEO, which came as allegations of financial misconduct and other odd behavior surfaced. For instance, O’Keefe reportedly used more than $20,000 of donor money to put on an outdoor production of the musical “Oklahoma!” in which he starred.
Despite his strange behavior—or perhaps because of it—O’Keefe is not a fringe figure on the right, and he has connections to some of the most powerful people in Republican politics.
In 2016, it was revealed that the nonprofit Trump Foundation paid O’Keefe $10,000. During that same campaign cycle, Project Veritas released videos attacking presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
And in 2021, as he prepared to launch his ultimately unsuccessful presidential run, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis featured O’Keefe at the signing of a bill purporting to prevent censorship of right-wing views on social media.
A hallmark of O’Keefe’s work is deceptively edited videos purporting to show people on the left in the worst light possible. O’Keefe, who was an apprentice of the now-deceased right-wing smear artist Andrew Breitbart, has surfaced again and again with videos claiming to show malfeasance on the left, which frequently dissolves after the faintest hint of scrutiny.
O’Keefe’s drive to attack the left even led to a run-in with the law. In 2010, he was arrested while trying to gain access to the phone lines of former Sen. Mary Ladrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. O’Keefe later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and was sentenced to probation and community service.
And at other times, O’Keefe’s actions just led to national embarrassment and humiliation. The same year as his arrest, O’Keefe reportedly tried to lure CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat strewn with sex toys and pornography in an attempt to seduce her.
O’Keefe is a clown who loves to play dress-up while dishonestly attacking the left. His antics led to his downfall and ouster, but he clearly wants to continue to be a player in conservative circles.
But despite his cringe-inducing behavior, O’Keefe has always had a solid following, and the right chose to embrace his deceptions and mediocre work. So his bid to be relevant once again does stand a chance of succeeding.
He’s precisely the sort of whack job the conservative movement relies on again and again.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
