Twitter suspended Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe on Tuesday for reporting on Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campai...
Twitter suspended Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe on Tuesday for reporting on Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
O’Keefe tweeted on January 22: “RETRACTION REQUEST, @daveweigel of @washingtonpost. The subjects featured in #Expose2020 are not ‘Sanders volunteers’ Both Kyle Jurek and Martin Weissgerber are STILL paid employees of the @BernieSanders campaign. Kindly retract another factually inaccurate bit of reporting.”
In its message to O’Keefe, Twitter claimed that O’Keefe violated the company’s rule about “posting private information,” adding: “You may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission.”
O’Keefe’s tweet also included a screenshot of what appeared to be publicly available campaign documents that showed what the Sanders campaign paid Jurek.
“The tweet in question was sent on January 22 and was a retraction request to WAPO reporter Dave Weigel who had inaccurately reported about our #Expose2020 Sanders campaign investigation,” O’Keefe said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “Weigel said the subjects of our investigations were campaign volunteers, not true.”
“To prove the inaccuracy our Tweet linked to page found on the Federal Election Commission website showing the ‘volunteer’ was in fact a paid staffer of the Sanders campaign. The Post reporter retracted his story,” O’Keefe continued. “The information we reported is in the public domain, there is nothing ‘private’ about it.”
O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has extensively reported on extreme statements that have allegedly been made by paid members of Sanders’ campaign in Iowa and South Carolina.
In South Carolina, Project Veritas provided the following highlights of things that Sanders campaign field organizer Mason Baird allegedly said:
- “I’ve canvassed with someone who’s an anarchist, and with someone who’s a Marxist-Leninist. So, we attract radical, truly radical people in the campaign … obviously that’s not outward-facing.”
- “A lot of those people who do that kind of work, are … their politics fall well outside of the American sort of norm. So, they’re Marxist-Leninist, they’re anarchists, they’re these types of folks, and um, and they have more of a mind for direct action, for engaging in politics outside of the electoral system.”
- “A lot of the stories we’re told in the United States about, you know, the gulags and the persecution of the Kulaks and things like that are exaggerated … we certainly don’t have, uh, a straight perspective on that stuff here in America.”
- “We would need a federal government and a labor movement that is working together to strip power away from capitalists and preferably directing that violence towards property.”
- “It would, it’s gonna take, you know, it’s gonna take militancy … like a militant labor movement that’s willing to … strike, and if necessary, you know, just destroy property and things like that.”
- “… after we abolish landlords, we don’t have to kill them …”
- “… once we break up Google, YouTube, Facebook, nationalize these things, then that would be a huge thing forward so far as education stuff goes.”
In South Carolina, Project Veritas provided the following highlights of things that Sanders campaign field organizer Daniel Taylor allegedly said:
- “For me personally, I have no problem going all in on the campaign stuff because you’re planting a seed … yeah, the whole socialist thing four years ago was a whole lot more toxic than it is today …”
- “We don’t want to scare people off, you first have to feel it out before you get into the crazy stuff … You know we were talking about more extreme organizations like Antifa, you were talking about, Yellow Vests, all that but we’re kinda keeping that on the back-burner for now.”
- “We have all this momentum, where do we go, regardless of the outcome, after it’s all over? Change won’t come easily, regardless. Even if Bernie is elected, change will not come swiftly or easily, so the connections we make now in the campaign with people, and volunteers, it’s important we retain that regardless of the outcome. It’s unfortunate that we have to make plans for extreme action but like I said, they’re not going to give it to us even if Bernie is elected.”
In South Carolina, Project Veritas provided the following highlights of things that Sanders campaign field organizer Martin Weissgerber allegedly said:
- “Let’s force them (billionaires) to build roads … rebuild our roads, rebuild our dams, rebuild our bridges. Let’s force them to do that.”
- “Well, the gulags were founded as re-education camps. … What will help is when we send all the Republicans to the re-education camps.”
- “I’m already on Twitter, following numerous groups around the country that are ready to organize yellow vest protests. I’m ready … I’m ready to start tearing bricks up and start fighting. … I’m not — no cap, bro. I’ll straight up — I’ll straight up get armed, I want to learn how to shoot, and go train. I’m ready for the f***ing revolution, bro. … I’m telling you. Guillotine the rich.”
- “I think I was radicalized from the day; first day I was born … my dad, is a Marxist. Like, straight-up from Belgium … he took part in Paris ’68 and all that, which is really cool. … I’ve always made it, I’ve always been unapologetic about it since I was younger, I always said, you know I’m a Communist … in my house, we had, you know Das Kapital, Engels, and Marx and all that sh*t. … I’m a Communist that believes in direct democracy, direct communes on everything. Pretty much, anarcho-syndicalism. Unions everything. I hope, but I don’t know how effective that is in addressing climate change, for instance.”
- “Oh, yeah. My dad is real; my mom is, but my mom is really left as well. But she can’t make her views known, because she works for WBUR, which is NPR, so she’s more held back. But you know … But then I went, I started studying it. That’s what I studied in college, I studied Russian his–., Soviet history … I became the resident Marxist. … But, yeah, I’m all about the complete seizure of the means of production, nationalizing everything.”
- “I only learned this sh*t in college when I started studying the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not horrible … I mean, for women’s rights, the Soviet Union — I think — the most progressive place to date in the world.”
- “The first gulag that was opened; have you heard about Belomorkanal? They dug a canal; the plan was, in 1922, I think, to dig a Canal from the White Sea all the way to Saint Petersburg … a long way, if you look on a map … and, the whole point — it was going to be called the Belomorkanal, and I read — I spent a whole semester actually studying primary accounts from the Belomorkanal. The whole point of the Belomorkanal, there were no machines allowed. They forced the people to dig with shovels and hoe the whole canal, right? You should see the people writing about their time at the Belomorkanal. There’s this one guy, he was a thief from Georgia who had been captured. He was sent to the Belomorkanal to work and in his writing, like ‘I reject all thievery, I reject that past life.’ He said, capitalism made me into this thief, because when there’s poor people, there’s going to be crime. He said, ‘I went to the Belomorkanal and I worked.’ He became a shock worker, which is what they call the leading workers, people who always met the quota and exceeded the quota … and, like people came from America to work at the Belomorkanal for the Soviet project, the communist project. It was a beautiful thing.”
- “Leave it to the Soviets to make the most badass f***ing, most effective gun in the world … AK-47 … the destroyer of imperialism and coloniali[sm] … that’s why I want to get it [AK-47] tattooed on me.”
- “So, do we just cease — do we just dissolve the Senate, House of Representatives, the judicial branch, and have something Bernie Sanders and a cabinet of people, make all decisions for the climate? I mean, I’m serious.”
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