Back when the conservative activist James O'Keefe first made his mark in the deceptively edited hidden-camera sting video business 15 years ago, he probably did not envision spending his early forties masterminding an operation that would lead to the firing of a mid-level Washington Commanders employee for some out-of-pocket things he said on a pair of secretly recorded dates. O'Keefe, one of the more baroquely damaged defectives in reactionary media, is destroying less notable lives now than he did during the years when the videos he produced led to the resignations of NPR executives and the collapse of the activist organization ACORN, but his rancid body of work is compelling proof that the destruction is something like its own reward for him.
O'Keefe's taste in enemies has never been especially creative, which reflects both what vintage of conservative he is—vain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong notes of metro-NYC suburbia psychosis on the finish—and the business that he's in. Project Veritas, which O'Keefe built by crafting videos that exposed various conservative culture-war enemies in ways built to fit their laziest media caricatures, was a nonprofit business supported by rich conservatives, and so generally aimed to scratch the recurring itches of those old, dull, nasty people. Sometimes, as with ACORN, O'Keefe got the results he sought. Mostly, he succeeded in helping people whose politics revolve around being scandalized and upset remain in their desired state of agitation, and in raising money from them to help with his many lawsuits.
O'Keefe's grandiosity and vanity eventually destroyed Project Veritas. He set that in motion when he appropriated company funds to do whatever was on his mind. He bought DJ equipment because "O’Keefe dreamed of playing a set at Coachella, according to two former employees," the Washington Post's Will Sommer wrote, "and was irritated when his staff couldn’t get him booked." He wrote off more than $200,000 worth of car service rides and frequent cross-country travel to visit the cast member of Netflix's Selling The OC he was dating, and bussed Project Veritas employees down to a production of Oklahoma! in Virginia in which he played Curly. O'Keefe finalized the company's death when he huffily martyred himself after being confronted by staffers who felt he had become "a power drunk tyrant." The people at Project Veritas who got into the Political Cruelty Business for the right reasons, and wanted only to do the important work of secretly recording 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 cult of personality centered around a paranoid and self-glorifying bully. It's tough to excuse any of O'Keefe's behavior, here; one employee described him snatching a sandwich out of the hands of an employee in her eighth month of pregnancy "because he was hungry." But this may be an instance in which a familiar threadbare excuse for executive fuckery actually seems to fit. If James O'Keefe was even slightly less of an asshole, he wouldn't be and could never have become James O'Keefe.
Project Veritas, which O'Keefe left in 2023, isn't officially dead. But the organization that produced the video recorded over a pair of dates in June, by a woman whom former Commanders employee Rael Enteen met on the dating app Hinge, is called O'Keefe Media Group. It's his old endeavor with a new name, and with more of him in the monitors. "O’Keefe is seen frequently in the video that goes nearly 11 minutes long," Alex Simon at SFGate wrote. "Clips of Enteen speaking to the O’Keefe Media Group agent are interspersed with narration by O’Keefe himself." The comments for which Enteen was first suspended and then fired were rude: He called NFL fans "high-school-educated alcoholics," players "dumb as hell," and commissioner Roger Goodell "a puppet" of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who Enteen said he believed "hates gay people, black people."
The news value of a middling NFL team's Senior VP Of Content popping off on what he thinks is a date is hard to plot on any kind of politics. By now, most of the dreariest conservative dead-enders have let go of calling the league elitist and woke. It might be easier to understand as O'Keefe emphasizing the beat over the lyrics, and trusting the nastiness to get him over in the absence of anything more significant. In a recent feature for Rolling Stone, Laura Jedeed suggested that this was the direction O'Keefe had in mind for his new enterprise, which he "envisioned [as] a decentralized empire of citizen journalists across the country—'the Uber of Journalism,' as he put it to podcast host Jack Posobiec—where would-be citizen journalists could sign up for O’Keefe Academy and buy a master class on undercover reporting for $497. They could buy or lease hidden cameras and sell scoops to OMG: $3,000 per story, with a bonus if that story went viral."
O'Keefe succeeded in raising a bunch of money from people who like the work he does, although his company's website is already janky; Jedeed noted that many of OMG's investigations were hidden-camera versions of stories that other outlets had investigated years earlier. But if the mandate is defined broadly enough to target basically anyone for deception, there is still plenty of the old work to be done, and bumper crops of grievance to farm. In a video he posted to Twitter after the firing of the Commanders employee, O'Keefe sits in front of a local news report, triumphantly eating a prepackaged bowl of Lucky Charms. It probably goes without saying that he looks pretty pleased with himself.
