New Orleans Just when it seemed safe to leave home and the office without looking under ever rock and cranny, the little monsters are back. Just when it seemed Project Veritas had lost its last scammer director, expelled James O’Keefe, and was near bankruptcy, they are back with their evil work inventing rightwing conspiracies.
` In the alternative reality which is rightwing media whether Fox News or social media, amazingly Project Veritas is a cat with nine lives. No matter how many times its play-pretend undercover spy work flops or is exposed, they keep going back to the well with the same tactics. It seems like their business model these days is to suss out the far right’s tantrum of the day and then see if they edit something from some unsuspecting low-level staffer somewhere, and then feed it back to their ragers to make a mountain of the molehill for whatever their nefarious purposes might be, and of course, get paid.
The New York Times was caught flat-footed in 2009 when O’Keefe came after ACORN and threw gasoline on the fire before they realized that they were being taken in and the damage was being done to the organization. Maybe they learned a lesson then, but more likely they got religion only when it came closer to home and Project Veritas and O’Keefe, their majordomo at the time before his most recent exit in disgrace, attacked them. Now, with lawsuits flying in both directions, they are on the story with a more jaundiced view of these antics in a kind of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
All of which led them to write a very sympathetic report on a young man, Zach Efron, who got himself caught up their web. He was working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) long a whipping boy for the right. He had a minor job reviewing a piece of their grants, but was a long way from being a decision maker or distributing funds. Working in DC and depressed after the election, he got on a dating app to meet someone for a drink. The story goes downhill from here. The someone said his name was Brady. An hour later they went their separate ways. Months later he got a call from media outlets confirming whether he had made an off-handed comment that, as the Times reports, he…
Project Veritas
Veritas pushed the story and between the conservative media, DOGE, and the new EPA director looking to gut the agency, they all came together and took it from there. Efron had alerted the EPA when he first got a call. They found no problems with his statement, other than it was maybe too colorful. He was interviewed by the EPA’s inspector general’s staff and the FBI, but it was all boots and no cattle, so nothing came of it. Meanwhile the EPA director trumpeted the story that the $20 billion in EPA grants needed to be held up because Biden was giving away “gold bars.”
Needless to say, Efron left the EPA. He’s jobless now as well, because employers don’t want to kick the hornet’s nest in America’s contemporary polarity. Meanwhile, Trump’s EPA continues to beat this horse to death.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, repeatedly cited the video as he worked to cancel $20 billion that the Biden administration had granted to finance projects like electric vehicle charging stations in low-income communities and installing geothermal systems to heat and cool subsidized housing. Zeldin has blasted out media releases with headlines like “Administrator Zeldin Terminates Biden-Harris $20B ‘Gold Bar’ Grants” and “EPA Formally Refers Financial Mismanagement of $20B ‘Gold Bars’ to Inspector General.” “The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal,” Zeldin said on Fox News in February, adding, “We found the gold bars. We want them back.”
Like Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang, “when will we ever learn?” “Where have all the flowers gone, Long time passing, where have all the flowers gone.” “The answer is blowing in the wind,” but in the meantime, in fighting for justice, be ready for these antics, since they have gained popularity again in the Age of Trump.