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Welcome to the Eric Matexas show with your host Eric Matexas.

Hey folks, very excited in the studio to have James O'Keefe, the founder of Project

Veritas. He's got a new book out called American Muk-Raker, rethinking journalism for the 21st century. James O'Keefe, welcome.

Great to be with you in New York City Eric. It's great to be with you anywhere, but the problem, of course, we bump into each other at conventions and things.

And it's nice to be here. We can actually have a conversation.

I don't know where to begin with you. You're complicated. I was trying to explain to one of my staff members today about how you got your start taking down Acorn Dressed as a Pimp.

That's a level of performance art. I just can't believe that anybody bought you as a Pimp and the whole thing. It's just funny.

So let's start here. You have a sense of humor. You're deadly serious about telling the truth about journalism, but at the heart of it all, there's kind of an impish quality.

Interesting. Impish.

Impish. Nobody would say that about you, but I just did.

I think our mission is Veritas Latin for Truth, Veritas Vos Libra beat, which is Latin for the truth. She'll set you free. It was the model of my college newspaper.

The mission is, what do you go to college? Rutgers in New Jersey.

And of course, where did Rutgers get that from? Oh, Jesus, the New Testament.

That paper was the one I founded. It wasn't the daily Targon, which was the daily newspaper. I founded my own little monthly newspaper called the Centurion.

So you were kicking it at the undergraduate level. Yes, that's what that's where I got my star. People say, what got you started? I was in college.

I read The New York Times every day and I felt really contemptuous of media. I felt it wasn't representing reality accurately.

So I started this newspaper Veritas Vos Libra beat. The truth shall set you free. And our mission is really more of an artistic one. People think we're political. We're not really that political.

Our stories might involve politics or political people, but it's one of revelation revealing exposing reality, exposing the truth, which is not a political mission.

I think politics is about harming the other guy. That's not what we try to do. We try to expose the truth. And we believe there's only one reality. There's not multiple reality.

Well, actually what you're talking about, it's like science, right? Like science is science. We want to know what is. We want to discover. It doesn't have, it's not supposed to have a dog in the fight.

It's supposed to care about truth and reality. Journalism is a kind of that as well or it ought to be. But whenever you're dealing with human beings, whether in the scientific universe, in any aggregate of human beings, power enters the picture, sin enters the picture.

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