Disgraced conservative media creep gets Commanders employee fired with hidden-camera video đ https://t.co/OlMv5cGVNh
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) September 7, 2024
Since there’s a gift link, here’s the always brilliant Dave Roth’s evisceration of JOKeefe’s latest grift:
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 isâvain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong notes of metro-NYC suburbia psychosis on the finishâand 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…
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. “OâKeefe is seen frequently in the video that goes nearly 11 minutes long,” Alex Simon at SFGate wrote. “Clips of Enteen speaking to the OâKeefe Media Group agent are interspersed with narration by OâKeefe 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 countryâ’the Uber of Journalism,’ as he put it to podcast host Jack Posobiecâwhere would-be citizen journalists could sign up for OâKeefe 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.”…
Truly, it is nearly impossible to go broke overestimating the gullibility of today’s “conservatives”.
Medium Cool â Love Them or Hate Them, Movies & Shows Based on Comic Book Characters
JML
I assume this was an attack on the Washington Football Team for changing its name away from the racist former name, making anyone who worked there a “woke” target. But the whole thing is pretty gross: pretend to date some douchey VP so you can get him fired for being an asshole in a public relations job?
Yuck.
Not a shock from anyone associated with O’Keefe, who barely passes for human.
Scout211
I read about the Commanders employee but not about OâKeefe Media Group (OMG for short, really) being involved.
I saw that his OMG (really?) is now getting involved in supplying cameras to poll workers.
Should we tell him that in many states there are laws against this? Nah, letâs let him FAFO.
steve g
Sad guy brings down some other sad guy. Kinda sad, really. In the olden days this kind of thing had some real sting to it. All they got now is that the company initials are OMG.
scav
I appreciate how that phrase Disgraced Conservative Media Creep can apply to the singular and plural forms of mission creep of the disgraced conservative media. Â It’s rather like we can see the portraits hidden in the FTFNYT/WahPoo attics.
Ken
@Scout211: Hey, it’s a free camera.
Westyny
And yet, someone got hurt, which is what his squalid “community” cares about.
Scout211
I not sure itâs free. Â He sells them for $449.99.
But if this is the camera heâs recommending for polling places, I would bet itâs illegal in most, if not all states. Itâs an undercover camera.
Harrison Wesley
So an asshole outs another asshole. I’m reaching deep into the well of my soul, but I’m afraid I’m coming up dry on outrage.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Scout211: CLEARLY the OMG morons need to get hacked, to extract the list of “operatives” with cameras.
So that when they show up a the polls they can be outed for “trying to video how people are voting”.
Plus, just recording the audio is illegal in some swing states (PA), and I’d bet they don’t bother to disable the audio.
Chet Murthy
@Harrison Wesley: Is the Commanders’ press flack (who got fired) an asshole? Maybe I missed something, but everything he said seemed to be true? I mean, we don’t call it concussion ball for nothing. And the scandals about sexism are legion. As are the scandals about covered-up rapes. And on and on. I confess that I don’t watch concussion ball, and haven’t since was a child (>45yr).
lowtechcyclist
@Harrison Wesley:Â â
Yeah, this feels like part of the Spinal Tap farewell tour.
sdhays
@Chet Murthy: Well, it sure sounds like he despises everyone involved in his job, so probably not a good fit for the organization. Calling the players “dumb as hell” is pretty rude to the people who are the performers people pay to see and saying people who pay for performances which fund your salary are “high school-educated alcoholics” is a pretty shitty thing to say. If you truly believe those things, you should find another job.
I think he sounds like a toxic asshole. Remember, he’s talking this shit to some woman he met online on his first or second date. He thinks he’s impressing her by saying everyone involved in his famous employer is stupid and worthless.
This shouldn’t have happened to him, but he is an asshole.
RaflW
OT: BF and I did an event today that we’d been thinking about for a few months. The timing has made it a bit more of a proof-of-concept in terms of one of our modest goals. For the more important goal, it was delightful good fun.
What did we do? Pon-Tunes! I was captain of our sturdy, floating vinyl-couched living room, aka our pontoon boat, and BF got three of his weekly Irish session musician friends to join him in playing live while we put-put-ed around the lake for two hours.
We even got some applause from other boaters!
We cooked up this idea when we were a bit tired of the canned ‘pump up’ pop/rock/electronic/rap music the wake/surf/ski boats play. Next year we’re doin’ this on a prime Saturday. At 7pm the lake goes no-wake, and we can boat till nearly 9 o’clock in June.
I think it’ll be a blast. We figure now that we’ve tried it that there’s playing room for 7 or maybe 8 musicians.
Heck, it was so fun just for the joy of the music today!
bbleh
Just more rancid Republicanism.
We’re not outta the woods yet! Â There is still a 40% or greater chance that this becomes the norm of American political power.
Volunteer! Â GOTV! Â Treat it like a damn crisis, because it IS!
Geminid
@Chet Murthy: I think the guy was exaggerating, trying to impress the woman he wanted to date. He does not know those players personally; he works in the front office.
Honus
The Commanders arenât exactly the epitome of woke. Â Their owner, in sort of an ironic an OâKeefe-esque twist, is all upset that a movie he funded because he thought it would be a laudatory hagiography of TCFG instead treats him as the racist jerk he is:
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/donald-trump-movie-the-apprentice-dan-snyder-feud-1236010060/
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, they’re still out there, totally outraged that “the Black National Anthem” is being played before “The Star Spangled Banner” at NFL games. Which has been going on since 2020.
Chet Murthy
@sdhays: I must demur. I worked for an enterprise I/T company for 20yr. I started in the research division, but found rapidly that in order to not get treated like shit, I had to move closer to the customer. within 5yr I was working directly with customers, cleaning up dumpster fires that threatened their entire business. And there’s something I learned: “my employer’s management DGAF about customers’ well-being, nor about the stockholders. They cared only about their own cushy little empires.” And another thing I learned:
Enterprise software customers deserve everything they get, good and fucking hard.
Now, did I say that during my working hours? Of course not. Did I post it on the Internet? Of course not. But did I say it to friends, in -private- ? Of course I did.
This idea that somehow 100% of our hours are owned by our employers is bullshit. That somehow, there is no such thing as private space, where we are allowed to have our own thoughts, again, is bullshit. This guy should be entitled to his private life, his private space, and that some asshole violated that and posted the results online isn’t his fault
ETA; I have a very clear and concrete example of just how little the entire executive suite cared about customers’ well-being: very, very concrete. And similarly, about their disdain for the stockholders.
Dagaetch
@Honus:Â âhe is the former owner, thankfully. Was forced to sell the team after various awful stories about him became public (they had been rumors for years, of course).
Geminid
@Chet Murthy: The managers running your company might have talked about you and your peers the same way the Commanders press guy talked about their players. The stereotypes used to smear you would have been different but it would have been in the same spirit.
satby
@RaflW: that sounds awesome, I would love to hear that on a lake I was visiting.
Chet Murthy
@Geminid: Well yes I’m sure they did. As we used to say, first-line manager school consisted almost entirely in how to deal with the Enemy, how to fight back at them in every way. The Enemy? your employees. Again, I understand the ban against talking shit about your employer and colleagues in public or on the clock. But private time is private time. The most I can say against this guy is maybe he should be a little more circumspect on the first few dates.
P.S. I was literally accused of being an out-of-control nutjob by a Fellow b/c I was trying to gather together enough high-ranking technical people to sign a letter to execs to get the JVM fixed. B/c clearly leaving it to the idiots in charge of that division wasn’t working. Just to be clear, I didn’t actually give a damn: I just wanted to do a professional job. So sure, I know very well that management talks shit about employees all the time.
P.P.S. after about 15yr of cleaning up customer fires, I was ordered by my management to no longer do it (which I complied with, with joy, haha) b/c while I came back with contracts not-torn-up, customers not irate, actually happy, I also came back with stories and backup for how damn busted our software products were, and …. -how to fix them-. And with salesmen at my side screaming the same thing. The execs in other divisions didn’t want to hear the latter. So sure, I understand about shit-talking.
Kayla Rudbek
@RaflW: just as long as it doesnât interfere with other people out fishing (although I bet that fish would prefer the Irish music over rap and rock). I would have also preferred that last weekend riding along the Potomac.
Geminid
@Dagaetch: I think what really did Dan Snyder in was when other owners learned that he was trying to gather dirt on them in order to protect his own position.
Bupalos
I think Roth might be the best pure writer of colloquial English alive. Not necessarily author, Iâm not even familiar with anything but the topical stuff he cranks out, and I donât know that he can structure even a short story. But good god, the turns of phrase he tosses off. 10 or 20 jaw-droppers seemingly in a hour sitting. Itâs not in the excerpt here, but in there heâs got a line describing this guy where he switches to wine-tasting speak that is ungodly.
Communication-wise, guy brings a bazooka to a slap fight, every damn time.
Kayla Rudbek
Open thread: would anyone want to see pictures from my C&O trip? I have a lot to sort throughâŠ
Trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist:
Baby Stonehenge enters the picture.
Jay
Starting in the 90’s there became an online culture created by so called “Pick Up Artists”, (like the Tate bro’s) based on “negging” to drive your date/pick up/Gf’s self esteem down and “shit talking” co-workers and friends to make you seem more “alpha”. A whole male culture was built around being the biggest asshole at the table.
Bupalos
I think Roth might be the best pure writer of colloquial English alive. Not necessarily author, Iâm not even familiar with anything but the topical stuff he cranks out, and I donât know that he can structure even a short story. But good god, the turns of phrase he tosses off. 10 or 20 jaw-droppers seemingly in a hour sitting. Itâs not in the excerpt here, but in there heâs got a line describing this guy where he switches to wine-tasting speak that is ungodly.
âO’Keefe’s taste in enemies has never been especially creative, which reflects both what vintage of conservative he isâvain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong notes of metro-NYC suburbia psychosis on the finishâand the business that he’s inâ
Communication-wise, guy brings a bazooka to a slap fight, every damn time.
Steve in the ATL
@Jay: shit, law firms and investment banks were doing that decades or maybe centuries before!
hueyplong
@Steve in the ATL: Yes
sdhays
@Chet Murthy: If he was recorded saying these things to his long-time friend or something, I don’t think we’d have much to disagree about. I think most of us have been in positions where we’re pretty frustrated with our employers (raises hand). I just think he’s probably an asshole because he thinks talking like this about other people – (all) the fans, (all) the players – to some random lady he met online makes him attractive. Maybe I’m reading too much into it.
It’s still absolutely wrong that this happened to him.
Geminid
@Kayla Rudbek: I would. That’s some nice country you peddled through.
Kayla Rudbek
@Geminid: all right, Iâll ask WaterGirl if thereâs a limit on picture numbers (and make sure to take out the identifying ones)
Jackie
@Kayla Rudbek: If thereâs a lot of photos, WaterGirl will probably post them as âPart 1, Part 2, etc.â
citizen dave
@Kayla Rudbek: I second that. I did the Great Allegheny Path a couple times, back a decade or so. I always read back then that the C&O was more rugged.
Barbara
@citizen dave:Â âMy husband and son did the GAP trail plus C&O canal from Pittsburgh to DC in one trip and found that the canal trails are not as uniformly well-maintained as the GAP trail, which they considered to be really impressive. We love the canal in spite of its rugged passages.
Kayla Rudbek
@Jackie: there are at least three days of pictures (maybe four if I count the bike ride to Union Station and Amtrak to Cumberland)
RaflW
@Kayla Rudbek: One of our happy fans was actively fishing out on the lake today :)
We were so mild compared to the ski boats that I’d be shocked if anyone fishing our lake would be bothered. They mostly fish weekday mornings when it’s chill.
TS
@Chet Murthy:
Have you followed the Post Office saga in the UK. Took 20 years for management to admit the customers were correct & the software had issues – many of those customers went to prison for stealing.
An enquiry going on – I think it is into the 4th year. It wasn’t until May this year that the UK government passed legislation to quash the convictions. The software was installed about 25 years ago
mr bates vs the post office – started the back track
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbXYQxDJQ4
frosty
@Kayla Rudbek: Sure! Start sorting and post 10 at a time to OTR. I pretty much whittle down 50 or 60 pics to get a post for a subject. Frequently it ends up being two.
A few years ago I hiked the whole C&O with my brother and three friends from our Scout Troop. Roughly 15 miles a day. It took us five years of weekends. I’d love to see pics of your trip.
ETA: Especially including Union Station and the train ride.
danielx
O’Keefe is still alive and still guilty of possessing an ugly soul? I’d have thought he’d be buried under a manure pile by now, or at least a blizzard of writs and court orders.
SFAW
I guess I’m a bad person, because my first thought was that Enteen — asshole though he may be — would have at least one NFL-player friend* whom he could ask to “pay a visit” to O’Keefe. And I would shed few tears were poor Jimmy to end up “seeing the light” from his hospital bed. After all the times he’s damaged or destroyed people’s lives via his Project Veritas BS, I’d have a hard time being compassionate toward him.
As I said, I’m a bad person for wishing harm on him.
* Yeah, I realize Enteen’s comments might have closed out that possibility.
Jackie
@Kayla Rudbek: No problem for WaterGirl to break into multiple On The Road posts. Email her and sheâll go from there.đ
Chet Murthy
@TS: Yes, I’ve followed that. And since enterprise I/T software is my business, it’s been really, really clear from the day that it was discovered that numerous sub-postmasters were not at fault, that the people who built the system were flagrantly incompetent and at fault.
But as always in enterprise I/T, the people responsible will not be punished: they never, ever are.
Chet Murthy
@sdhays: “Itâs still absolutely wrong that this happened to him.”
I’m OK switch calling Enteen an asshole; the problem is, O’Keefe is something much, much worse, and that’s why I can’t call them both assholes. We need a word for what O’Keefe is that’s much, much, much worse than asshole.
frosty
@Chet Murthy: Roasted warthog rectum? (From an earlier B-J post today!)
Jackie
Off topic: Iâm going to sleep happy that the Seahawks WON! And the Rams and Cardinals lost! Hoping for more happiness if the Niners lose tomorrow night!đ€đ»
So happy itâs football season and itâs almost Fall.
BethanyAnne
@Chet Murthy: I used to do software design and usability. Did a couple of enterprise IT projects. It was ⊠a target rich environment for improvements. I ended up feeling so sorry for the poor customers who had inevitably suffered through multiple releases designed by engineers. Honestly, I really respected the engineers, but they should be kept way the hell away from UX.
TS
@Chet Murthy:
We’ve had a not dissimilar case in Australia – and you are correct, neither the politicians who approved it, nor it who implemented it have been called to account. A few govt employees quietly resigned with their massive retirement pay & a few politicians did not stand for re-election, but the royal commission cost much, and achieved little.
In this case it was the specifications, rather than the implementation that was wrong.
KrackenJack
@BethanyAnne: I noticed the past tense, but I was wondering if you could recommend anyone who is open to a (small) paid design and usability project for SaaS software. bill.thomas AT post.com
wjca
When someone has previously proven to be unable to learn something, it is a joyous moment when he finally has a learning experience. Doesn’t seem like there’s any reason for tears.
Well, maybe tears of joy…?
Jackie
I agree!
Craig
@RaflW: awesome. You gotta invent your own fun in this world.
Matt
I just remembered that halfway through the DNC he was telling whoever still listens to him that he’d infiltrated the convention posing as some super-aggressive gay top (the better to make the exclusively bottom Democrat types swoonâlook, I’m just the reporter) and gotten ALL KINDS of dirt that he was about to share.
Did he even pretend to follow through? I mean, as online as I am, if I didn’t hear about it, I’m guessing it didn’t happen. I suppose if the suckers have already thrown money at him there’s no point in following through.
wjca
In a career spanning decades, I did software preformance analysis and tuning. I never, ever, saw a program which couldn’t be easily made at least 10% more efficient. (“More efficient” being defined as using fewer resources to do the same task, or doing it faster.) From just one change. My favorite was a program which went from 27+ hours to run (it needed to run overnight daily) to 90 minutes; cost (power, cooling, long term storage, etc.) dropped 90%. All from changing a single parameter; took maybe 15 minutes to track down the problem.
“Target rich” barely begins to describe the IT world. One of the biggest challenges in tuning is always triage: which soft target to pick first.
wjca
@Jackie: What it comes down to is this. Trump has essentially no path to victory without winning both Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Whereas Harris only needs one, and in a pinch can still win (barely) with neither.
BethanyAnne
@wjca: Damn, thatâs a hell of a return on investment!
I did a stretch at Walmart dot com, and working on the internal tools was the FNG assignment for designers. I got the projects and didnât let go for a full year. Iâm not even all that great, but having only one designer, and her taking the projects seriously helped them so much. By the end, the efficiency gains were huge, and they looked like they were being made by the same damn company at least. Got through about half the IT bossâs wishlist for her software.
Matt
@Scout211: I’m guessing that “how many hundreds of election workers” is zero. Zero hundreds.
Not that there aren’t godawful people out there, probably including a few who really are poll workers. But they’re not paying much attention to James O’Keefe. At this point, there are probably more liberals who know who he is or care what he’s up to, and we’re no good for donations.
wjca
@BethanyAnne: Early in my career, when I had a couple of years doing tuning under my belt, I had my VP an offer.
We ran our data center as a “zero profit center”, meaning we charged back all our costs (salaries, equipment, real estate, power, everything) using charges for the resources programs used. (It was a large bank.) So every time I tuned something I could look at the before and after charges and say, accurately, “This is how much I saved the company.” Noting that those savings recurred every time the program ran, so we could see accumulating, on-going savings..
Well, I was averaging about $1 million per year in new savings achieved every month. (As I say, a very big bank.) So I suggested, “Rather than my current [quite reasonable] salary, how about you pay me a salary of $1 per year, plus 1% of the savings my changes produce for, say, the first 5 years after implementation.” He sat a moment while he ran the numbers mentally, and his face went dead white: “My God, do you know how much money that would be?!?!?”  Which, of course, I did.
He then says, “You’re saying we don’t pay you what you’re worth.”
“I didn’t say that. You said that.”
He didn’t take me up on my generous offer. But I did get a really big raise that year.
BethanyAnne
@wjca: Heh. Nice.
karen marie
Fun times in Texas.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@karen marie: This is now my go-to explanation of why the US has such abysmal election voting participation: one of the major parties can only keep power by preventing people from voting.
Anne Laurie
Can’t be arsed to look it up, but last I remember of that saga, O’Keefe had managed to hook up with… Matt Walsh, aggressively anti-sex right-wing professional bigot, who was at the DNC for exactly the same sort of ‘undercover’ shenanigans.
opiejeanne
@Jackie: Today’s Seahawks game started out so dismal that I retreated to my sewing machine while mr opiejeanne watched it in the next room. It was really distressing watching them trip all over themselves in the first quarter. I mean, two safetys in the first half and all of those holding calls?
And then, they just figured it out, how to win, but they have sooo much work to do still to turn them into a whole team.
opiejeanne
@Anne Laurie: Matt Walsh “infiltrating” in that ridiculous disguise. I didn’t recognize him at first.
JML
@wjca: Ha, I got tasked with identifying R&D budget lines where we could re-purpose funds while I was working for Army Budget once upon a time and my Director suggested I should get paid based on the savings identified. I told her I was on-board. They couldn’t do it, of course, but the money even at 1% would have been…substantial. :P
Kay
David Roth is always a fun read. He’s great.
This stunt is what happens when you’re in a hermetically sealed far Right chamber. No one normal would understand 1. why they went to all this trouble to humiliate this employee and get him fired or 2. what it means ideologically or politically.
Right wing grifters just get further and further up their own asses.
wjca
Somehow, “pay for performance” gets restricted to the executive suite. If it even gets past the CEO. But then, how embarrassing would it be if some systems analyst was getting paid more than the CEO? People might get the idea that senior executives weren’t all-important, and who knows where that might lead. :-)