Conservative activist journalist James O’Keefe addressed a group of approximately 230 at an event hosted by Focus on America in Huntsville’s Jackson Center on Sunday. O’Keefe, until recently, was the founder and Chairman of Project Veritas – an internet investigative news outlet. He has now started his own organization.
O’Keefe expressed his frustration with state governments seeking to suppress news journalism.
“Why is the Governor (of Hawaii) telling me that you cannot videotape?” O’Keefe asked about a recent encounter he had while trying to film in Maui, Hawaii, which was recently devastated by the deadliest forest fire in American history. “I have sued the Governor of Hawaii in federal court this week.”
“Two years ago, I filed a suit against the governor of Oregon,” O’Keefe said.
In 2020, leftist activists loosely attached to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioted in the wake of the George Floyd slaying by police and seized control of a large section of Portland, Oregon. The Governor, Kate Brown, ordered the police to flee. While the Democratic governor would do nothing to send troops to take back control of the streets, they used police powers to suppress O’Keefe and Project Veritas’s efforts to report on the situation there.
“I have been sued thirty times, and I had never gone on offense,” O’Keefe said. “I looked to my general counsel and said let’s sue the bastard.”
Suing was more difficult because the federal courthouse was in a section of the city controlled by the criminal insurrectionists. O’Keefe showed pictures of him and his attorney wearing bulletproof vests as they walked to the courthouse. “We got there at 9:30 while the Antifa thugs were still asleep.”
“The judge initially ruled against us,” O’Keefe said. “James O’Keefe may do journalism without audio. How does that work?”
O’Keefe continued, “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law (under which the Governor of Oregon could regulate who could and who could not film) and ruled it unconstitutional. Now we can report in Oregon.”
In another story, a man named Liban Mohamed filmed himself in a car with hundreds of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. “Money is the king of everything,” he said. It is illegal in that state to be in possession of more than three ballots, and he had harvested hundreds of ballots.
“He filmed himself on Snapchat with hundreds of ballots in his car,” O’Keefe said. “He sent the video to 14 of his friends, and one of them turned him in to me.”
O’Keefe ran the story about the illegal ballot harvesting – essentially just a video that Mr. Muhammed made of himself with the ballots.
“The video received 30 million views on Twitter,” O’Keefe said. “On the same day, the New York Times released its Trump tax return story. Nobody cared about the Trump tax return.”
The New York Times then did an article on O’Keefe’s story and said there was “no verifiable evidence.”
“This is gaslighting,” O’Keefe said. O’Keefe said that they project what they do in their own reporting. He had the video that the man made himself. In the New York Times story on the Trump tax returns, “it was anonymous sources. They did the tax documents story with no evidence. They had no tax documents.”
“Facebook used this article to ban me from Facebook because Facebook uses USA Today as their fact checkers and USA Today uses the New York Times,” O’Keefe said.
O’Keefe sued the New York Times.
“The New York Times attorneys wrote in their filing: ‘Neither the word “deceptive” nor the word “verifiable” has a precise meaning that is readily understood,’” O’Keefe recounted.
“They fear being exposed,” O’Keefe said of people in power. He played a video of an encounter with the Mayor of Rosell Park at a school board meeting.
“I was trying to give cameras to the parents,” O’Keefe said.
“You don’t belong here – you’re a conservative,” the Mayor said. “You don’t have children in the school system.” On counter-questioning, the Mayor admitted that he did not have any children.
O’Keefe also highlighted a report he did on the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
An undercover journalist went on a “date” with Dr. Jordon Trishton Walker, who was then the Director of Research and Development at Pfizer. During the date, he suggested they could infect monkeys with a virus, encourage mutations in the virus in a process he called ‘directed evolution,’ develop a vaccine for the mutated virus, and then release it into the population. He said Pfizer would make lots of money by having the vaccine for the virus they created in a lab. In the tape, Walker does not actually say that he and Pfizer did that, but he doesn’t say that they didn’t or would never do such a thing either, and he was pretty gleeful about the prospects of how much money they would make on it.
“People are so honest when they think you are not recording,” O’Keefe said. It is amazing what people will tell you when you show interest in them.”
O’Keefe then ambushed Walker with the videotape of Walker discussing the lab-directed evolution of viruses to make profits at a pizzeria in New York City. Walker became very upset.
“He locks the restaurant doors, so I can’t leave,” O’Keefe said. “He is smashing the IPAD on the ground like this is the only place where this video is recorded. And these are the people making medical decisions for the people in this country.”
O’Keefe’s crew was filming all of this outside from the state through the window.
“We have grown up in a country where most of the advertising is paid for,” by Pfizer and the pharmaceutical companies O’Keefe said.
“A week after this story, I was removed from the organization that I founded. The board gave two reasons,” O’Keefe said. “That I had cars chauffeuring me around, and they said that I once stole a pregnant lady’s sandwich.”
“Pfizer scrubbed the website of the guy,” O’Keefe said of Walker. “People that knew him were removing references to him.”
O’Keefe credited citizen journalists for coming forward with screenshots, photos, and evidence that Walker had ever been a senior employee at Pfizer.
Debbie Bernal, who worked for a company that was consulting for Pfizer, then released a series of corporate documents.
“In my time at Pfizer, I saw documents with a lot of things that concerned me,” Bernal told the group.
“It literally came from Wuhan,” Bernal said of COVID-19, countering the narrative that health authorities were saying at the time.
“Pfizer knew about the irreversible side effects,” of the COVID-19 vaccine, Bernal claimed.
After the documents were released, “I was interrogated,” Bernal said, “I was searched. People were sent to my parents’ house. My company fired me. James O’Keefe was ousted from his company.”
“Pfizer was concerned about myocarditis happening,” following the vaccine, Bernal claimed. “Onset was usually within several days.”
“The reason for male predominance (of myocarditis following vaccination or COVID) remains unknown,” Bernal said. “Incidents of myocarditis are higher after the second dose. We have been hearing about young, healthy athletes who have worked out their whole life suddenly dropping dead from cardiac arrest.”
“They know that myocarditis is a risk,” Bernal said. “They want you to think that the virus is a greater risk.”
“These doctors are in the pockets of Pfizer,” Bernal warned.
“That is an incredibly brave thing to do because you don’t know where you will land,” O’Keefe said of Bernal’s release of the Pfizer documents. “Whistleblowers inspire other people.”
“I lost my job. I probably lost my career,” Bernal said. “In the end, if you live right, God will provide.”
“I have been doing this all my life,” O’Keefe said. “My goal is to empower you.”
“What we need is an army of hidden cameras in schools,” O’Keefe said to expose the indoctrination that is allegedly going on. “People can do this.”
“My mentor Andrew Breitbart said, ‘Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about what they call you. All those things are said against you because they want to stop you in your tracks. But if you keep going, you’re sending a message to people who are rooting for you, who are agreeing with you. The message is that they can do it, too.’”
Approximately 250 people attended Sunday’s event – a source said that 217 bought $75 tickets to the Focus on America event.
“We cannot trust the New York Times. We cannot trust the Senate. We cannot even trust the President because the President is not as strong as the administrative state,” said Focus on America Director Rebecca Rogers.
Rogers announced that the group was starting small groups across Alabama.
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