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 hismanylawsuits.
