James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is a right-wing operation that tries to carry out stings to embarrass liberal and mainstream politicians, charities, and press outlets. O'Keefe is most famous for the hoax Acorn sting. Basically, he made up a story about how he'd gone into an Acorn office dressed like a blaxploitation pimp, asking for and receiving advice on how to break the law. It was all a pack of lies, shakily supported by some heavily edited video, but it did the trick: skittish Congress members defunded Acorn, which was the goal of the hoax:
http://fair.org/extra/falling-for-the-acorn-hoax/
His lies were so effective that time that you'd almost be mistaken for thinking him an evil genius. But after watching one after another of his schemes blow up in his face by way of incredible stupidity on the part of his conspirators, I'm thinking he just got lucky -- his first big hoax lined up well with some knee-jerk racism among Congress members and he got an unearned win in the process.
You've probably heard about his latest attempt to trick the Washington Post into publishing a phony Roy Moore story. If not, the upshot is he recruited a right-wing woman to pose as a victim of Moore, with the hope that the Post would run with it, and then when the hoax was revealed it would discredit all the other women who'd accused Moore. The scheme fell apart because of hilarious carelessness on the part of the O'Keefe team: basically, the woman had a social media trail, including a GoFundMe site, that made it clear she was working for the right-wing press.
That wasn't the only example of O'Keefe being inept, though. There's a great article laying out how badly Project Veritas's efforts tend to go:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...ls-to-prove-washington-post-is-fake-news.html
… the people who are dumb enough to believe these conspiracy theories are not generally smart enough to carry out a competent entrapment scheme. O’Keefe
attempted to impersonate a
Detroit Free Press columnist at the polls, and failed, in part because the poll worker knew the
Free Press writer personally. An
elaborate effort to sting the League of Conservation Voters failed clumsily because the operatives left their recording devices sitting around. The “Canadians” who
tried to entrap Hillary Clinton staffers into accepting “foreign” donations all gave the same phone number, which turned out to be from “Students for a Conservative Voice.” O’Keefe’s
attempt to register the vote of a dead person accidentally used the identity of a voter who is completely alive. His attempt to
impersonate a Hungarian donor to the Clinton campaign floundered when its catfisher forgot to hang up the phone and accidentally recorded a long message explaining the details of the operation.
Still, as dumb as he is, he doesn't really have to be smart. If he takes a thousand shots and only makes one, he can count on the right-wing press trumpeting that one bit of dumb luck while ignoring the rest. And if the mainstream press is "only" spotting the hoax 99 times out of 100, the dummies on the right will still fixate on that last time as evidence of partisan bias. O'Keefe may be accidentally disproving the conspiracy theories he's attempting to prove, in the eyes of anyone whose news is relatively unfiltered, but through the micron-fine filter of the right-wing press, only the stories that resonate with confirmation bias will get through.
