Transcript of James O'Keefe speech to the G.K. Chesterton society at Mount St. Mary's in Maryland

Karl Marx said that philosophers have explained the world; it is our job to change it. I say Chesterton has explained what's wrong with the wrong; it is our job to restore it.

A specter is haunting the powerful and the corrupt, and that is the specter of the independent, free, renegade video journalist. That journalist seeks to correct the wrongs of the society we live in. There is a lot wrong with the society we live in. Chesterton says, [paraphrasing] "The position we now have reached is this. Starting from the state, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the courts." It seems like the world has become one giant divorce court.

And as Dale says in his book: "Schools have become surrogate parents. Regulations have replaced conscience." If you look at Washington D.C., the people in Congress don't solve the great problems of the society. They pick winners and losers, and they bail out the losers.

There is an unholy alliance between what Chesterton was talking about before: big business and big government in this country. People don't see it.

How did I get started doing what I do? It all starts with—what else—Lucky Charms breakfast cereal. (I hope everyone's familiar with Lucky Charms.) Now I am irish. My last name's O'Keefe. I am six foot two inches tall, and I have blonde hair. My great-great-great... I lost count. But one of my grandparents died in the Irish potato famine.

Lucky Charms has a picture of a leprechaun on the front cover. And he's little, short, and he's got a great hat and orange hair.

So could I—by making a reasonable, rational argument—walk into my college dining hall with a box of Lucky Charms on St. Patrick's Day 2005 and make the argument that Lucky Charms breakfast cereal is racist, and could I get it removed from Rutgers dining hall? Well, that's the first video that I did, and I got Lucky Charms removed.

I said to them: I'm not lucky, and this is racist, and you know, teeth-rotting marshmellows and the importance of the clover to the Catholic Church, and the bureaucrat marked everything down and said "uh huh, diversity." We got it banned, and I got it banned on another campus as well. The guy in Texas said, "Taco Bell?" and I said, "Yes, that's racist too! The chihuahua."

When I visit these government bureaus in my investigative videos I find that nothing shocks people anymore. Nothing shocks a bureaucrat. There's a sense of soullessness in the way they conduct their affairs. In other video I got married. Now I am heterosexual, and I got married to a male friend of mine. I got a marriage license saying I want to get married and get divorced in a week; I just want the benefits. And they married me. They didn't blink an eye.

In another video I called the department of labor. I said I was an illegal British immigrant (using a British accent) and said I had lost my sombrero and want another sombrero? Would the department of labor help me? Yes. They referred me to the appropriate hotline to get a sombrero.

And of course, darkly and hauntingly, I called the abortion provider Planned Parenthood and—I don't have a drop of racism in my heart—and I said on tape I want to donate money to Planned Parenthood on the grounds there are too many black children in the world, and I want to get rid of them. Planned Parenthood responded, "That's exciting, that's understandable; I want to make sure I don't leave anything out."

And that's when I started to realize that the way to reveal the truth is not to just talk about the truth, not to just bring out the truth. It's to bring out the ridiculousness and the absurdity of your opposition. As I said the bureaucrats were not shocked in any of the situations I talked about—they're never shocked. They don't care. It's almost absurd to suggest they should care. I often look at the Youtube comments and see, "So what? What are you proving?" That is how a lot of people react out there.

It's almost absurd to suggest anyone should look beyond the letter of the law to solve their problems. It's almost absurd to suggest virtue.

So what is the solution to this "atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noble impulses" [Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement speech], which makes them depend strictly on what is legal? Ask young people today what they're going to do to change the world, and they always answer: "I am going to law school." I went to law school for a year; I couldn't take it.

It is not the law that changes the world. It is, I think, journalism. It is a great scoop, a hidden camera, a sensational video, someone caught on tape saying something true, something they don't tell you when they're on a podium. Lawyers and legislators did not defund ACORN. A video camera and a bunch of hookers did that.

Look at what Chesterton did with his own life. He was a journalist. Journalism can do a lot of great things for this world. It is not just that journalism seeks to expose government, corporations, social services, institutions, unethical behavior—journalism is itself a service that gives us the truth and thus frees us. There is no power as great as the press, but not just any press: something called a free press. I believe Chesterton took over a paper called the New Witness from Hilaire Belloc for the purposes of providing something that is uniquely free; it provides truth.

Belloc refers to what we call today the mainstream media as the official press. This press is not about truth, it is about "the suppression of truth, the propagation of falsehood ... and the boycott of inconvenient doctrine." [Hilaire Belloc, The Free Press] The current press is not free, as Belloc as said, it is a system that favors the status quo and professional politicians. They both feed off one another. They both elevate one another, put one another in the spotlight to keep themselves in business. Knowledge is a monopoly. Information comes to the public in thin and selected streams. The media truly does favor the regime and protects it at all costs, and devotes all its resources to investigating not government but other investigative journalists like me.

If you don't believe me look at the scandals over the last decade. I'll just name a couple. Look at the Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s. Regardless of what you think about Bill Clinton, that was a huge news event. Monica Lewinsky; cheating in the oval office! Who broke that scandal? Was it the Washington press corps? Or was it a young journalist named Matt Drudge who, in his Hollywood, Los Angeles, apartment broke a story about the president of the United States. What does that say about the Washington press corps when a man 3,000 miles away breaks a story on the internet?

And what does it say about the Washington press corps when a 20-year-old girl named Hannah Giles spends her own money flying across the country with me to investigate an organization with direct ties to the president of the United States—spends her own money to fly across the country posing as a hooker though she's a Christian, the daughter of a minister—to do that, what does it say about the press? The media initially ignored the ACORN story until the Congress and Senate voted to defund it based on what this young woman found with her own money.

Soon thereafter the government accountability team at the Washington Post spend more time and money investigating me and when I get my money from than an organization with ties to the president. What does it say when a newspaper like the New York Times sends a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist down to Louisiana to interview everyone who lived nextdoor to me while I was conducting my investigation of Sen. Landrieu? What does it say when that newspaper didn't even ask Sen. Landrieu what was going on in her office that day?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Sen. Landrieu [affair], I was arrested for doing an investigation in Louisiana. I was given a misdemeanor for walking under false pretenses onto federal government property posing as something I am not. I suppose if you walked onto federal property as Santa Claus that would be a crime, or as Barney the dinosaur that would be a crime. I posed as a telephone repairman. The government later destroyed my tapes so no context could be given, and there was a campaign in the media to label me a wiretapper, which was completely untrue. I was just trying to strike up a conversation and get some honest truth.

If you are a part of the free press and actually expose a political scandal, you will suffer for it in this country. It is intolerable to those in the media that young people, independent people who have access to Youtube, could possibly have all that power. We're just obscure nobodies... yet we can actually influence Congress.

Another anecdote: Mother Jones magazine, another so-called magazine of fearless journalism, that is supposed to be about taking on power structures—and I'm all for that, I do that myself—after Landrieu we had reason to believe they were conspiring with the U.S government to leak my personal emails. Imagine that! A newspaper dedicated to and founded on the principle of challenging government is cooperating with government to take on a young investigative journalist. That's how far we've come in this country.

You may even be subject to the risk of ruin and loss of liberty. As Chesterton points out, there are two forms of this: slander and silence. It is the greatest censorship to silence someone, and you silence them by ignoring them. If that doesn't work they'll call you a criminal, and if that doesn't work they'll call you a racist. (They would call me a radical but I refer to myself as a radical, so they don't get away with that.) So they call me a conservative.

They'll call me an activist. Chesterton, who has been called a journalist, is actually an activist at heart. Every journalist is an activist; every good human being is an activist. Some would say that monks and nuns aren't activists. In fact they're the greatest activists. They spend their days being activists for our benefit. There's activism through mind, body and heart, and prayer is in fact the greatest activist.

Then they'll challenge your identity as a journalist. You know what—I don't really care what they label me. I don't really like the label journalist anyway because unlike journalists, people on my team actually do investigative reporting.

If your videos are in context, it doesn't matter. They'll use hyperbolic accusations you "heavily edit" your videos. But everyone heavily edits everything. This speech is heavily edited. Their articles are heavily edited. The New York Times heavily edits. In one case I had a reporter call up a friend of mine, spend an hour on the phone. He took one word, "whoa," and put it in the article.

When reporters start posting unedited transcripts with their subjects, then we'll be on level playing field, but until then I will post unedited videos of everything I do along with my packages, because that is what journalism is.

They'll do anything. They'll call your undercover tactics immoral, falling outside the journalism bible, the [SPJ] Code of Ethics. What is this journalism code of ethics? Who wrote this journalism code of ethics? The Columbia Journalism Review? (I've heard some of those people speak. They're kind of crazy.)

What is journalism? Is journalism asking questions at press conferences and getting official responses? Is it journalism to expect someone to be honest to when you put a microphone in front of their face in front of a million people? That's not journalism—that's stenography.

If I had walked into ACORN dressed like this and said, "Hi, I'm James O'Keefe. I'm doing a story on corruption. Would you start brothels with underage prostitutes?" I don't know what would have happened. If I had walked into Sen. Landrieu's office, identified myself as a reporter and said, "Now, did you shut your phones down so your constituents couldn't reach you?" I don't think they would have been honest with me.

So what I do is I go behind closed doors posing as telephone people, as pimps and prostitutes and racists and all of these nefarious characters, in order to expose the humanity of public officials. How extreme can I go before the submit that they have a soul? "You know what dude, this is ridiculous. Lucky Charms... racist? What?" But no one ever does that. I can't get to the point where the finally admit to me that I've gone to far.

Then they say that this is immoral. How is this immoral? Belloc has said that salaried public servants should be kept under watch and kept under control. I think that this is the [zenith] of morality; I think this is the most moral thing you could possibly do. There's a movie with Al Pacino called The Insider in which he says to CBS news executives, "We won't air the show because our subject is telling the truth, and the more truth he tells the worse it gets."

The people in corporate media play a game with people in power. They will never [paraphrasing Belloc] "soberly and simply describe a professional politician like he really is." We might actually see these politicians as they are. They won't do that; they don't want to report what happens behind closed doors. They want to continue the illusion that these people are kings and queens, that they're special, they're magical, and you get a thrill up your leg when you listen to them.

Few owners of the press will turn off the limelight and make a brief, accurate statement about the mediocrities about those in power... whether it's to protect their sources or to get future access or to keep on with the charade to get helicopter rides with the vice president... I don't know what it is.

Now Dale has pointed out that the official media is "vulgar and silly," and that the reason it is vulgar and silly is because the millionaires who own the mainstream media are vulgar and silly. I agree. Vanity Fair, NBC, I don't care who you are—these are not newsmen. They are a perverted form of businessmen. And I'm a capitalist, but capitalism has its faults, as [Chesterton] has said: "capitalism cannot write ... it cannot pray, marry or make a joke." And Belloc says, "half-tragic and half-comic ... the economic difficulty" of the free journalist. The difficulty of obtaining information, the difficulty of distributing it.

Chesterton says "nothing, as a matter of fact, goes every night through more agonies of adventure, more hairbreadth escapes, desperate expedients, crucial councils, random compromises, or barely averted" disasters, and that's just writing an article. Imagine going undercover in a government office in Oregon.

But the truth will prevail, and that may come as a surprise to you given all the handicaps. How is that possible? Because the truth has a power unto its own. The truth confirms itself. Belloc wrote—and I want you to listen to this because it's written a 100 years ago but is so similar to today—

"Half a million people read of a professional politician, for instance, that his oratory has an 'electric effect,' or that he is 'full of personal magnetism,' ... he 'can sway an audience to tears or laughter.' "

But truth about him is that he's dull, and he flogs up these stale phrases, phases like "Who's ass to kick?" (That was a reference to the oil spill.) The point is, people do hear the politicians speak—they receive "primary and true impressions" about them—and they're likely to pay attention to that independent who corroborates their impression. They are not going to listen to the mainstream press who [??] some fantasy impression. The ordinary man is not interested in this stenography.

We are constantly, by the way, a target of lawyers and of the legal profession and of the prosecutors and everyone who is in a conspiracy to stop the truth. Recently a citizen in this state of Maryland was [fielding] a camera at a traffic stop and filmed an officer who took out his gun when he was on his motorcycle—some officer misconduct—and now this young man faced 16 years in prison for filming the officer at a public traffic stop because of some law that says you can't film people without their permission. It was written 70 years ago before the camera was invented. It's so ridiculous yet people say: "But it's the law."

Belloc says if you look at history and all the great reforms, they have started "not through a widespread control acting downwards, but through spontaneous energy, local and intensive, acting upwards." We must expose the mainstream media, like we expose fraud, corruption, waste, abuse and the politicians themselves. We can do this because the mainstream media and the official press is vulnerable as all things built on lies are vulnerable. And we must use creative and courageous means to tackle the media and the lawyers, and we must tackle them all at once. And that, to respond to George Stephanopoulos's question to me, is what we mean when we say we want to create chaos for glory.

We face a lot of severe handicaps. I've gotten sued many times. I've been imprisoned... falsely. I've had newspapers run front page stoires with my mug shot on them when they've ignored the stories I'm famous for... how ironic is that? Conspicuously absent from any of these lawsuits is the veracity of these tapes themselves. No one has doubted these employees have said what they've said.

We don't have a lot of money. In fact we're personally financially not doing very well. But most of these investigations aren't very expensive. In fact the best ones are most times free. How weird is that? Lawyers have tried to stop the creative process, but it is our creative process that has allowed us to remain unstoppable. I think the truth will prevail despite these financial handicaps and legal handicaps.

I make an analogy between [two things for which] you might think there's not an analogy to be made. But our journalism endeavor sort of relates to Chesterton's analysis of St. Francis and his book. St. Francis was penniless, parentless; he had the problem of a ruined and neglected church which has been the standing point of St. Francis' crime and punishment. It dawned on St. Francis that one of the great paradoxes (which is also one of the great [principles])---and I think this paradox applies to the paragon of investigative journalism---was: The way to build a church is not to become involved in the law, become a lawyer, or deal with bargaining in the community or try to get approval. The way to build a church is not necessarily to pay for it, not with other people's money and certainly not with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.

So St. Francis went about collecting stones. He became a new sort-of beggar, one who asks not for money but instead asks for stones, to build a church. He worked with his own hands rebuilding his church without money from anyone and presumably without knowledge of how to build anything. Along th way he learned lessons; he got his hands dirty, it was probably very cold because he didn't have any clothes. But he had a church, and he transcended all the crap with the law and with the money and with dealing with community, getting permits and so forth.

Nowadays if you have an internet connection, a video camera and a little bit of courage you are more powerful than the New York Times. And if you have the right story then, well, you might embarrass the New York Times... as we did with ACORN. And if you need a ride to get from place to place, maybe you can borrow your friend's car. I borrowed my sister's car to film the ACORN videos because I did not have a car. I slept on couches or sometimes you sleep on boats, or you sleep on beaches in Oregon. You'd be surprised the places you sleep when you're undercover. And if you're on probation, which I was on, and you aren't allowed to leave your state of New Jersey, you can always get a job at your local census bureau. And you don't have to lie about who you are.

And in the worst possible situation: when you're broke, and in debt having been sued into oblivion, you can be out on the street, unwashed, begging for a ride to the nearest government bureau, exchanging your driver's license at a local pawn shop for a little video camera... we will not be stopped. I don't care what it is. We will beg for stones if we have to. I am not going to stop doing what I do. I don't care how many times they sue or imprison me. I am not going to stop seeking the truth.

What are we all waiting for? What stops Christians from taking action? Why do I hear so many excuses from people who won't fight the great fight? There is great joy in fighting. It means good is being defended and bad is being attacked. People always look for the finer points of morality to evade action.

You may think community organizer Saul Alinsky has nothing to do with Chesterton. Well... you're right. But! Alinsky made the argument—I actually encourage you if you could to read his book because it's fasincating—Alinsky made the argument there are two examples of people who evade action. First there is the priest who wants to be a bishop, and bootlegs and politics his way up justifying it with the rationale: "I'll use my office for Christian reformation." Or the businessman who reasons, "First I'll make a million dollars and then I'll go for the real things in life." I cannot tell you how many times I have been around the country meeting people with this attitude: "Well, once I become a millionaire, then I'll finally be able to get my hands dirty and change the world."

But as Chesterton points out, it is the millionaires who are vulgar and silly. They're the ones who own the mainstream media. Alinsky says the same thing. "One changes in many ways on the road to being bishop or the first million." The bishop says, "I'll wait until I'm cardinal and then I can be more effective." Or I can do more after I get my second million dollars, and so forth.

So take a look at St. Francis the way Chesterton did. If you want to build a church you must build it. If you want to investigate government or find the truth you must start investigating and finding truth. And if you want to be a journalist you might have to be free and poor. You must continue to have courage and creativity. Power comes, I think, in two forms: people and money. We don't have money; we have people. We don't have a lot of people, but we have certain people who are very courageous and very creative.

And of course, the most important thing and finally the most simple thing: the mainstream media is just boring. It's not just vulgar and silly, it's just boring, so of course you have to create interesting content.

“I think that’s racist. We’re not lucky.”

LOL

How does this relate to the avoidance by the courts of the ineligibility of the man occupying the Oval Office?

4 posted on 05/14/2011 4:17:54 PM PDT by don-o (He will not share His glory; and He will NOT be mocked! Blessed be the name of the Lord forever.)

That was an excellent speech. Mr. O’keefe is an impressive young man. I plan to send my parents this.

7 posted on 05/14/2011 4:36:08 PM PDT by Hoosier Catholic Momma (Change everything you are, everything you were, your number has been called.)

8 posted on 05/14/2011 4:38:55 PM PDT by don-o (He will not share His glory; and He will NOT be mocked! Blessed be the name of the Lord forever.)

11 posted on 05/14/2011 4:54:52 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o ("How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be" said the Cat,"or you wouldn't have come here.")

HOORAY James O’Keefe and others like you! HOORAY Hannah Giles! Thank you, both. BUMP-TO-THE-TRUTH!

I loved it when O’keefe dressed as a pimp and walked into the acorn offices with the hooker in tail. It reminded me of Kramer from Seinfeld and he got away with it. It was hilarious.

14 posted on 05/14/2011 5:17:56 PM PDT by kalee (The offences we give, we write in the dust; Those we take, we engrave in marble. J Huett 1658)

G. K. CHESTERTON PING

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15 posted on 05/14/2011 5:28:06 PM PDT by Jo Nuvark (Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed. Gen 12:3)

16 posted on 05/14/2011 6:50:48 PM PDT by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)

“What are we all waiting for? What stops Christians from taking action? Why do I hear so many excuses from people who won’t fight the great fight? There is great joy in fighting. It means good is being defended and bad is being attacked. People always look for the finer points of morality to evade action. “

James must read the FR religion forum. While we argue over things here, the secular world is gaining ground.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Christians need to stand together.

20 posted on 05/14/2011 8:23:53 PM PDT by Jo Nuvark (Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed. Gen 12:3)

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