by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, August 2019
You'll never Google the same way again after absorbing my interview with this intrepid young investigative journalist, the founder of Project Veritas, whose undercover videos and leaks from insider whistleblowers are laying bare the Orwellian scheming of Big Tech:
RUSH: Hey, James, how are you doing, my man?
O'KEEFE:, Oh, it's been busy with this Google story blowing up.
RUSH: That's what I want to talk to you about. When that story broke, a friend of mine said, "What can we do about this?" referring to your latest Project Veritas project. You had a secret video with some Google people, and one manager in particular [Jen Gennai] admitted essentially that they're not going to allow what happened in 2016 to happen again in 2020 -- the so-called "Trump situation".
That woman has now taken her social media stuff down. She is saying she really didn't mean what you thought she did -- they're really trying to backtrack. Let's start from the day you decided you wanted to expose Google. How long ago was that, and how did you go about deciding it planning it, and pulling it off successfully?
O'KEEFE: Rush, thank you very much for having me. Let me just start by saying that I think this is a watershed moment in this country, what's happening with these heroic whistleblowers. An insider from Google came to me probably a year and a half ago, and I obtained private confidential documents within Google.
These documents, Rush, I have in front of me, and I'm going to quote them. It sounds like something that would be in a George Orwell novel, but it's actually quotes from within Google, including the part about "algorithmic unfairness" that this insider brought to me. It says, "In some cases, it may be appropriate to take no action if the system accurately reflects current reality, while in other cases it may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more fair and equitable state via product intervention.
I was shocked. Algorithmic unfairness? Product intervention? Establish a "single point of truth"? There is even one document that says people are programmed. I thought, you'd be a conspiracy theorist if you said these things without evidence.
I had this information and, to answer your question, it took me about a year and a half to corroborate the information, obtain the other recordings, and get the [6/24/19] story that you saw.
RUSH: Within the past six months I happened to see a videotape of a staff meeting between Google's upper management and Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Sundar Pichai from the Friday after the 2016 election. They were all shell-shocked. They could not believe what had happened. They were acting in this executive meeting in Google like the end of the world had happened. They were saying things like, "This is not what we were expecting." "We have to acknowledge that what we had planned for didn't happen."
It was eerie watching this, because they were clearly establishing that they had a personal relationship, not just investment, with the selection. I knew they basically had a satellite office in the Obama White House, where Eric Schmidt had been in there coordinating on tech with the Obama administration.
They were clearly totally taken aback, and you could see that Sergey Brin was the most out of sorts. He was assuring people in this executive meeting, I guess there were maybe 100 people in this meeting, that this would never, ever happen again. Then I forgot about it. I figured it was just a bunch of shell-shocked liberals, like they all were. Then your story hits, and you've got this babe who admits that this is never going to happen again.
How will they do this? We all think we know how Google discriminates against certain sites in their search results and so forth, but what did you uncover that they actually have been doing and that they're planning on doing in 2020?
O'KEEFE: So, one of the things, Rush, that Jen Gennai, the Google Head of Innovation, says on the secret recording is that Google has to stay big. They can't be broken up. She attacks Elizabeth Warren and says, "We've got to stay big so we can define what is fair and equitable." She says that Trump people don't agree with Google's definition of "fair" as protecting marginalized communities. She goes on to say that Google has to stay big to make sure "we're ready for 2020." She says, "We all got screwed over in 2016," and "we want to prevent it from happening again." She says, "We have to train our algorithms."
RUSH: Now, walk me through this. "Prevent it from happening again." Does that mean prevent any Republican winning or Democrat losing? What does it mean?
O'KEEFE: These are great questions, Rush. I wish the American journalists would call Google. I was talking to a New York Times reporter and said, "Call Google and ask them just one question." Just ask them that one question. Nobody is holding them to account. I can report what the woman said: "We're training our algorithms, like if 2016 happened again, would the outcome be different?" What I interpret that to mean is they're actually meddling in elections.
RUSH: Exactly! They're meddling. People in mainstream journalism ought to care about it, because they're constantly complaining about all the advertising revenue that Google is taking and dominating, causing financial pressure on traditional news outlets. They ought to care about what Google is doing, but I guess it's all overridden by the fact they're on the same ideological team.
O'KEEFE: They're putting Party over truth. It;s an awful dichotomy. They're having to choose between their love for information, newsworthy information, a big story -- this may be the biggest story in a generation -- yet it's a crisis in American journalism because Google is sucking all the money from the news industry. The New York Times reporters are all about, "We report without fear or favor." Well, guess what? They're either afraid to report on Google because they get the revenue through there, or they have a conflict and they're afraid.
So it takes citizens, it takes what I call "anonymous heroes," these whistleblowers, these insiders who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and patriotically come forth and bring us this information. In addition to Jen Gennai, there is another individual inside Google we exposed, a software engineer, who talked about machine learning "fairness". It all relates together because it's really about, according to Gennai, affecting the outcome of elections.
RUSH: Exactly. Here we have meddling and collusion, admitted to. I'm holding right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a story from April 23, 2016, The [UK] Daily Mail titled: " Revealed: Google Staffers Have Had at least 427 Meetings at the White House Over Course of Obama Presidency -- Averaging More Than One a Week."
"The White House's close relationship with Google was highlighted in data published Friday" -- again, this is now three years old. "Records show 169 Google employees met with 182 government officials. Google's top lobbyist paid 128 visits to the White House since 2009. 'Of course' Google is a frequent guest, the company said." This is collusion right in front of everybody's nose.
How many of your average Google users do you think are aware of this kind of Google involvement in their daily lives, shaping what they learn, shaping how they think, and ultimately how they vote?
O'KEEFE: I don't think anybody knows what's going on, because there is no one to inform them. There is no investigative journalism in this country. No one wants to take on Goliath. There was a very powerful thing this insider said. I asked him, "Are you afraid?" He said, "I was afraid. I hope I get away with it. But if bad things happen, I mean, this is a behemoth, this is a Goliath. I am but a David trying to say that the emperor has no clothes." He said, "Being a small little ant, I can be crushed, but this is something that is bigger than me. This is something that the public has a right to know, and needs to know." Rush, we released this video yesterday [6/24/19] morning, it got 50,000 likes on YouTube, and was well on its way to earning millions of views.
RUSH: And they pulled it.
O'KEEFE: YouTube, the parent company is Google, pulled the video. Reddit, one of the social sites, banned Project Veritas, my non-profit. There is no place for me to go. I don't have any way of distributing this information, so this is the moment. This is the moment right here, right now, this is the line in the sand. I think people are waking up to the fact that -- again, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I'm quoting the documents -- there is a sort of social engineering and invisible hand guiding users to the "correct" beliefs, and that the results of the election show that Google had failed in its mission. There was this conceit that there needs to be a certain outcome -- again, the words from Jen Gennai's own mouth.
So my hope is that there is a groundswell. Senator Cruz was grilling people about those videos in Congress. I don't know what the solution is, but it starts with people understanding what's going on.
RUSH: Well, Congress dropped the ball so many times. They talk about thing they're going to do, but they don't do it.
I need to ask you about something else here. The whistleblower calls Google a "highly biased political machine," confirmed by your video with Jen Gennai, who flat-out said, "Google intends to prevent the next Trump situation. We all got screwed over in 2016." By "we" she means the left, Big Tech, and the media, which are a political machine. Now, I know what machine learning is. I don't know what machine-learning "fairness" is.
Gennai says social-justice-based algorithms heve the potential to change elections. But we've got to keep in mind that they lost in 2016. Everybody on the left thought they had a slam-dunk, landslide win -- and with all this, James, they still lost. So what degree of anger or fear is really justified? Do you think they can pick up the slack and make up for 2016? Because they're making it sound like they will never, ever lose another one.
O'KEEFE: I think that's the issue. Again, I'm interpreting the words here, but the results of the election show that they had failed in their mission, that the outcome is some sort of proof that they have to change.
You asked about "algorithmic unfairness", and this is very important. I know it's in the weeds and it's a little technical, but I'm going to try to keep it as simple as I can. There is a privileged and confidential document within Google called "Definition of Algorithmic Unfairness". This was all implemented after the 2016 election.
Google executive Jen Gennai says they have a definition of "fairness", that the reason we launched our" -- I'm quoting her -- "artificial intelligence principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, they were not saying what's fair and equitable. We're a big company. We have to stay big. Our difinition of 'fairness' is one of those things that we thought would be obvious to everybody." And then she says, "The same people who voted for Trump do not agree with our definition."
This is the issue at hand, as you said: Can they be stopped? That question is my responsibility to answer. Everyone gives money to all these people who work in Congress. We elect people we care about, I guess, and they have a fancy job in Wshington, D.C. Why is the federal government giving an an exemption to a trillion-dollar behemoth and calling them a "platform", when in reality they're an editorial service -- which now has no credibility as a search engine because they just tell us what they want us to hear, not what is true.
This may be the biggest story in American history. It makes Standard Oil and the monopolies of 100 years ago seem like Cub Scouts. People just need to know what is going on. I am confident in the American people. We need to shake them awake. We need to have that righteous indignation that lets them know this is happening.
By the way, there's allegedly going to be another hearing on these videos on July 16. Google can't perjure themselves, so if they go to Congress, all they have to say under oath is, "We are doing everything in our power to stop Trump from being reelected." If they say that, I'm happy, because they're being honest. We want them to be honest.
RUSH: Let me play devil's advocate. They are a private corporation and as such, they can define what free speech is within their walls and within their company. If they want to be full-tilt Democrat leftwing, they can do it. They wouldn't be the first corporation that is, and they wouldn't be the first corporation to try to sway their employees to think and act in specific ways and to punish those who don't. I mean, you can be fired for any number of reasons from a corporation. There's no Constitutional provision that will save you. Playing devil's advocate, why is it so bad? Google is big, there's nobody as big, and they have incredible opportunity to reach gazillions of people, but so what? They're leftist. Big deal. What's wrong with that?
O'KEEFE: That's a great question. They shouldn't perjure themselves under oath, first of all. There are laws against perjury in this country. In this particular case, Google is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is a federal provision. The federal government has involved itself, has regulated Google to be so amazingly powerful and to have control over people's reality. It's the federal government giving them that service, which if you're a libertarian or free market person, you should probably argue that they shouldn't get. Section 230 says, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Meaning that Google is not liable for anything on their platform. But [by behaving as a publisher] they are violating the letter of the law, and we are a country of laws. That's our republic. So when a big company given protection is violating the law, that's a problem.
RUSH: Not only that, they won't stand behind what they do. When you challenge them on what they're obviously doing, they deny it. "No, there's no bias in our search results!" "No, we're not shaping anything!" Jen Gennai wrote, "Hey, I was just having a casual chat with somebody at a restaurant, I used some imprecise language." They won't even stand behind what they are. She's trying to downplay what she said. Why? If it's all hunky-dory, why not stand behind it and promote it? Why do they lie about what their objectives are?
O'KEEFE: We want them to just come out and say what their objectives are. Private company, fine. Stay as big as you want, but be honest with people that you really want to stop Trump from getting reelected. Then just come out and say it.
RUSH: Yes, exactly. But they don't. They run away from that. Why?
O'KEEFE: I asked the whistleblower, who I interviewed in a silhouette, the question. He said they would never want people to know this publicly. I said, why not? He said it's just the implications of it. It's too much truth. People would not stand for it in this country.
RUSH: Right. It's because they don't want to tick off half of their audience.
O'KEEFE: That's right.
RUSH: But they're doing it anyway.
O'KEEFE: They're doing it because of Project Veritas's exposé. If it wasn't for this brave insider, our reporting, and these documents and recordings, they would never dream of admitting it.
RUSH: Let's talk about Jen Gennai. How did you zero in on her?
O'KEEFE: She's an executive who's responsible for innovation at Google. She determines policy and ethics for machine learning or artificial intelligence. Machine learning is just a fancy way of saying the computers design these algorithms. What we've learned is that artificial intelligence is increasingly what Google is all about.
Rush, this is a lot of work. It took us well over a year to obtain these meetings and film these encounters. Gennai has the authority to talk about how they define "fairness". Why that matters is because we have the secret documents, the privileged documents, discussing something called "algorithmic unfairness".
When I met the whistleblower he said, "Type in 'Donald Trump's emails'." I did, and it autocompletes. It gives you a bunch of different options. Then he said, "Now type in 'Hillary Clinton's emails'." I did, and it did not autocomplete. It acted as though no one ever searched for that, which is an absurdity. Whether you like it or not, millions of people search for "Hillary Clinton's emails". Meanwhile, nobody really searches for "Donald Trump's emails".
So it has staggering implications that there are people like Gennai at Google, human beings who tinker with algorithms to affect reality because in their view, they think reality is "unfair". They're literally changing reality, and it has a direct impact on politics. Political ads on TV are very insignificant compared to Google's impact on what you see and hear.
RUSH: You talk about the algorithms and machine learning. One of the challenges here is that a lot of people think they know. They hear these words and think, "Oh, a computer achieves this." But I think in Google's case there is far more actual human curating and monitoring of these searches than what they want you to believe. They want to chalk this up to algorithms and lay this off on their computers determining what results are shown in a search. But in your example, "Hillary Clinton's emails", somebody had to go in there and write a program so if these variables are entered as search terms, nothing gets returned. That has to manually be done; that is a conscious political decision. They can't lay that off on the machine. The machine can't learn what it isn't taught.
O'KEEFE: Right.
RUSH: This whole notion of machine "learning" is crazy. There isn't any such thing yet. We don't really have human intelligence inside a computer chip or silicon yet. It all has to be programmed, so these are active human decisions that are being implemented. If they've made the decision, for example, to protect the whole subject of Hillary Clinton's emails, it doesn't take much to write a little program so that any search request including "Hillary" or "Clinton" and "emails", then the result is zero.
O'KEEFE: Yes. This insider does describe that they have an editorial agenda on news sources. "Does the source fall in line with their agenda?" is what the insider said. If it does, it pops to the top, and if it doesn't, it gets buried.
This is important because everyone uses Google. It's the default. You think, "Let me type something in that search box I want to learn about, or a place I want to go." You assume you're getting reality, but what Google says -- again, their words, not mine -- is that they're "programming people", using an agenda on what they think is fair, which they would never admit publicly.
The question I have and the real question, if there was any justice in journalism, that The New York Times and the Associated Press would be asking them is, why not? Why don't you want people to know this? If this is who you are, what you stand for, and what you believe as a company, then why don't you want people to know that you have an agenda? I'm speculating; I think it's because of the implications it has with the Communications Decency Act. Because if that protection is taken away from them, if those federal subsidies, if you will, are taken away from Google, it is bad news for them and their impact on the elections.
RUSH: It's not just that, though. I think this is a defining characteristic of the left. They don't think they should have to debate anything. They don't even want to acknowledge the existence of opposing points of view. So on Google, there aren't any. They're doing everything they can to wipe out the concept that there is any opposing view. They don't want to have to explain themselves, James. It's beneath them. It's beneath all liberals to have to justify what they believe. They don't want to enter a debate arena, they don't want to have to prevail in the arena of ideas, they don't want there to be any contravening or countervailing ideas. That's what they're creating and that's what they won't be honest about.
O'KEEFE: Yes. Jen Gennai did respond. She was apparently on an airplane and when she landed in San Francisco, the story had been out for eight hours, and her phone blew up. She admitted, "I said some things I shouldn't have said. Project Veritas got me."
RUSH: There you go, exactly.
O'KEEFE: But she went on to say, "This is a debunked conspiracy theory, it's taken out of context." They always say it's taken out of context. What's out of context? She said what she said. I think, Rush, that this is the biggest story we've ever done in terms of its implications.
RUSH: She painted herself as a victim of your dastardly tactics and dismissed your video as a conspiracy theory, all the while confirming everything.
O'KEEFE: Yes.
RUSH: She's got to try to lay that off on you. That is what they all do -- not just Google. The Facebook crowd does this. All leftists, when they get mad, when they get caught, they lay it off. It's the gold standard in journalism. If the story is good for conservatives, then the narrative is going to be what rotten people conservatives are. If the story is good for Democrats, then that's what the story is going to be. So you nailed them, and you got them to admit what they're doing, so now they're out there disavowing it. That's evidence they know what they're doing wouldn't survive public scrutiny.
O'KEEFE: I know we talk about how the media is corrupt, but a New York Times reporter is claiming the video is "contextless". My video is "contextless", Rush.
RUSH: What does that mean? That's absurd.
O'KEEFE: Here's what I tweeted: "You guys at The New York Times make your entire bread and butter off of quoting people anonymously, where we can't see or hear anything. We don't see any context at all, and your nightly news broadcasts use a minute and 45 second segment. I use 25 minutes of video. You can see the source, you can hear the insider, and look at the documents, and you're accusing me of not having context in my reports?" You are right, Rush. It's doublespeak, it's beyond Orwell. It's Kafka-esque at this point. They're basically trying to deny reality, and it's scary.
RUSH: I think I read that after the release of the video, some more whistleblowers from Big Tech are coming forward?
O'KEEFE: Yes. There's a new document that we just released, a second insider, a third, a fourth, a fifth. It's amazing. They can't stop an army of heroes. The new document is a leaked email inside Google given to us by an insider showing a Google employee describing Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, both Jewish, as "Nazis using the dog whistles."
RUSH: Prager is suing them, right?
O'KEEFE: He's suing them and he's going to use this as part of his litigation. We're really getting a view of how these people implement their political agenda. This email shows steps they took to hurt Dennis Prager within Google.
RUSH: You say they're due back in Washington later this month?
O'KEEFE: Senator Cruz's staff has alerted my team that they're going to be having more hearings. I'm not aware what the nature or purpose of the hearing is.
RUSH: Actually, I think the timing of all this could be significant, because the Justice Department is beginning an antitrust investigation of Google. These things take a while, but at least the rumblings of it are underway. That's probably one of the many reasons they are reacting to your video and your postings as they are. The proof of the pudding, to me, is they've taken your stuff off YouTube. They just can't stand the sunlight on this.
O'KEEFE: Yes. I think the bigger story here, Rush, is that just like you talked about our ACORN story ten years ago and Obama then defunded ACORN, it's an indictment of the media. I'm happy to do it, I love doing this, but if the media was doing their job, there wouldn't be a need for people like me.
I'll tell you something very powerful. These insiders told me, "I didn't want to go to The New York Times or The Washington Post." I said, "Why not?" They said, "Because they would have sold me out. They would not have told my story -- or worse, they would have given me up to Google, and Pinterest, and Twitter and Facebook. So I came to Project Veritas because there's no place else for me to go. I can't trust American journalists." You know what, Rush? That's big.
RUSH: It is. They're exactly right. I'm amazed at that degree of sophistication. I'm glad they realized that and came to you.
Plus, look at what Google is doing in China, James. They're basically knuckling under to any demand the ChiCom government is making on them. They're tainting the search results in China to make sure it's nothing but what the government wants people to see. They're kowtowing to a Communist government there while trying to impose one, essentially, in the United States.
O'KEEFE: I think it's a problem. We're a nonprofit organization. I don't have the same restrictions many entities do. I do not have advertisers, no one puts pressure on me. By the way, Rush, I don't even settle lawsuits. When leftists sue me for frivolous reasons, I do not give them an inch. I litigate it all the way to a trial, and I win. You just have to stand on principle. I will simply stand on the truth. When YouTube took the video down, it was very discouraging because it was garnering millions of views. But it's like the Streisand effect. Now I'm talking to you about it, it's at the top of the Drudge Report in red. There is an army, a groundswell of citizens, embedding the video into tweets.
They just can't stop a story that's really true. They can't stop it. But it's going to require the people who are reading or hearing this to share it with everyone they know, to wake people up. We can't expect the major media to do it.
RUSH: I'm sure that at the outset of your work, you really thought the media would pick up on your exposés and run with them, and it was a shock when you learned that they were not interested. Now you know the lay of the land. But there isn't anybody but you doing this. "60 Minutes" used to do some of this, but there's nobody, James, doing what you do. Even within conservative ranks, nobody is going to the lengths that you are to try to expose what the left is. I hope you keep it up. You're going to have the support of the EIB Network and The Limbaugh Letter as you do. God bless you, man. I know it's not easy.
O'KEEFE: We're making a difference, Rush. You can't do this unless you're mission-driven. You can't do it unless you believe in it. Some people pretend. But I know we will win, meaning get to the truth, because of the heroes, the insiders. That's going to change everything. Big Tech cannot stop an army of heroic, patriotic people who believe. As Sam Houston said, "You can't stop a man in the right who keeps on coming." As Winston Churchill said, "It's the courage to continue that counts." Let's just keep moving, let's just keep going and telling the truth, because people need to know what's going on.
RUSH: James, thanks for your time. All that will happen. And remember, they lost in 2016 and they still can't believe it. They can be beaten, and they will be again.