Disgraced conservative media villain uses hidden camera video to get Commanders employee fired
When conservative activist James O’Keefe first entered the business of deceptively edited undercover video recordings 15 years ago, he probably never imagined that he would spend his early forties planning an operation that would lead to the dismissal of a mid-level employee of the Washington Commander for some things he said on two secretly recorded dates from his own pocket. O’Keefe, one of the more baroquely damaged defects in the reactionary media, destroys fewer famous lives today than in the years when the videos he produced for the resignation of NPR Executives and the collapse of the activist organization ACORN, but his rancid body of work is convincing evidence that for him, destruction is something of its own reward.
O’Keefe’s taste in enemies has never been particularly creative, reflecting both what vintage conservative he is — vain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong echoes of New York City suburban psychosis at the end — and what business he’s in. Project Veritas, which O’Keefe built by creating videos exposing various conservative culture-war enemies in ways that fit their lame media caricatures, was a nonprofit enterprise backed by rich conservatives and thus generally aimed at scratching the recurring itch of those old, boring, nasty people. Sometimes, as with ACORN, O’Keefe got the results he wanted. Most of the time, he succeeded in helping people whose politics revolve around scandalizing and aggravating stay in their desired state of arousal, and raising money from them to help be many Complaints.
O’Keefe’s grandiosity and vanity ultimately destroyed Project Veritas. He set it in motion when he misused company funds to do whatever he wanted. He bought DJ equipment because “O’Keefe dreamed of playing at the Coachella festival, according to two former employees.” The WashingtonPostWill Sommer wrote“and was upset when his staff couldn’t book him.” He wrote off more than $200,000 in car service rides and frequent cross-country trips to visit the Netflix series’ actor. Selling the OC He was together and drove the employees of Project Veritas by bus to a production of Oklahoma! in Virginia, in which he played Curly. O’Keefe sealed the death of the company when he insulted himself after being confronted by employees who felt he was “a power-obsessed tyrant.” The folks at Project Veritas, who had gotten into the business of political cruelty for the right reasons and just wanted to do the important work of secretly taking footage of people they considered enemies and then editing it in ways that would embarrass them, were concerned about the extent to which their workplace had become a personality cult around a paranoid and self-aggrandizing bully. It’s hard to excuse O’Keefe’s behavior here; one employee described snatching a sandwich out of a coworker’s hand when she was eight months pregnant “because he was hungry.” But this might be a case where a familiar flimsy excuse for shitty behavior by executives actually seems to fit. If James O’Keefe were even a little less of an asshole, he wouldn’t be James O’Keefe, nor could he ever have been.
Project Veritas, which O’Keefe left in 2023, is not officially dead. But the organization that produced the video, which was shot on two dates in June by a woman former Commanders employee Rael Enteen met on the dating app Hinge, is called O’Keefe Media Group. It’s his old project under a new name and with more of him on the monitors. “O’Keefe is seen frequently in the nearly 11-minute-long video,” says Alex Simon of SFGate wrote. “Clips of Enteen’s conversation with the O’Keefe Media Group agent are interspersed with comments from O’Keefe himself.” The comments for which Enteen was initially suspended and then fired were rude: He called NFL fans “high school graduate alcoholics,” the players “dumb as hell,” and Commissioner Roger Goodell a “puppet” of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who, according to Enteen, “hates gays and blacks.”
The news value of a mediocre NFL team’s Senior VP Of Content going on what he thinks is a date hardly translates to any kind of politics. By now, most of the dullest conservative loopholes have stopped calling the league elitist and woke up. It’s perhaps easier to understand O’Keefe putting the beat over the lyrics, trusting the meanness to get him across in the absence of something more meaningful. In a new feature for Rolling StoneLaura Jedeed said that’s the direction O’Keefe had in mind for his new venture. He “envisioned a decentralized empire of citizen journalists across the country – ‘the Uber of journalism,’ as he put it to podcast host Jack Posobiec – where aspiring citizen journalists could enroll in the O’Keefe Academy and buy a master class in undercover reporting for $497. They could buy or lease hidden cameras and sell scoops to OMG: $3,000 per story, with a bonus if the story went viral.”
O’Keefe managed to raise a lot of money from people who like his work, although his company website is already shaky; Jedeed noted that many of OMG’s investigations were hidden camera versions of stories that other media outlets had already investigated years earlier. But if the mandate is defined broadly enough to target basically anyone for deception, there is still a lot of the old work to do and a bumper crop of complaints to collect. In a video he posted on Twitter after the Commanders employee’s firing, O’Keefe sits in front of a local news report, triumphantly eating a packaged bowl of Lucky CharmsIt probably goes without saying that he looks pretty pleased with himself.