When I started reading the 2022 book "American Muckracker," I was hoping to get the inside scoop. But author James O'Keefe instead serves up a plateful of bitterness.
O'Keefe is is the founder of Project Veritas, a band of right-wing gadflies that has produced various investigative reports using hidden cameras and microphones to "expose" supposed misdeeds of the media or organizations favored by liberals.
While some conservatives love Project Veritas, its work has largely been ridiculed as one-sided, incomplete and inaccurate.
I was hoping to sidestep the politics, because I was interested in something different: The mechanics. How do you film or record people without them knowing? How do you approach those people in the first place and how do you hide the recording devices? And what do you do when — inevitably — things don't go the way you expected?
In short, I was hoping "American Muckrucker" would take us behind the scenes of Project Veritas' investigations.
Alas, that's not what's in this book.
Rather, "American Muckracker" is a forum for O'Keefe to air gripes, grievance and grudges. In his view, the media, big tech companies, and much of the world are all lined up against him. So, as you can imagine, he's got a lot of ranting to do.
O'Keefe skitters around numerous topics like a hyperactive child, tossing out bits and pieces of unfinished thoughts, and never referring to himself in the first-person. He is, instead, "The muckracker."
Like a college sophomore who has just learned how to add footnotes to his paper, O'Keefe tries in vain to give his incoherent message credibility by tossing in random quotes from authors Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Alexis de Toqueville.
At one point, he likens himself likens himself to an "allied commander" fighting a war with the help of "guerilla fighters" — aka whistleblowers
If all this sounds like the ramblings of a paranoid man, you've got the right idea.
