Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas.

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 Muckraker, Rthinking 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, it's nice to be here. We can actually have a conversation. You, I don't know where to begin with you. You're, you're complicated. I was trying to explain, uh, um, to one of my staff members, uh, today about how you got your start taking down acorn dressed as a pimp like that's that's a

level of performance art i just can't believe that anybody bought you as you know a pimp and 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 a kind of an impish quality.

Interesting.

Impish.

Impish.

Nobody would say that about you, but I just did. I just did, yeah. I think our mission is veritas, Latin for truth, you know, veritas vals lebris, which is Latin for the truth, shall set you free, was the model of my college newspaper. It's sort of the mission is...

Where'd you go to college? Rutgers in New Jersey. And of course, where did Rutgers get that from? Oh, oh, Jesus, the New Testament. Well, that paper was the one I founded. It wasn't the daily Targum, 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 where I got my star. People say, what got you started? I was in college,

and 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, Veritasos,

Libera 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,

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