Dakota Beacon

Is everyone familiar with Project Veritas? No? In Roman mythology, the word “veritas” was the name of the goddess of Truth. She was the daughter of Saturn and the mother of Virtue. Because Truth was so elusive, it was thought she lived in the bottom of a holy well.

Project Veritas was the brain child of James O’Keefe. Founded in 2010, its mission is “to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.” This sounds rather lofty, but Project Veritas is effective. As with all effective investigative reporting (of which there is precious little in the mainstream media today), O’Keefe and Project Veritas readily offend people and institutions whose behavior the culprits would just as soon remain invisible.

Here is the issue. Who controls knowledge and the way we think? A few decades ago this question might have been a non sequitur, a very illogical query indeed. Today, in view of the technological upheaval brought on by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google this question poses a very real concern. The effect produces a culture of misinformation that winnows away at contemplation, introspection, and independent thinking. The artificial culture created reduces individuality and independence. The threat is a form of social engineering guiding product users to the “correct” beliefs. George Orwell could not have scripted it better.

The Friday following the 2016 election a video news clip was aired on television showing a staff meeting of Google’s upper level management. They could not believe that Donald Trump had just been elected president. In their world, this was not supposed to have happened and they said as much. Hillary Clinton was to have been a shoe in. It is common knowledge that Google had what amounted to a satellite office in the Obama White House where Eric Schmidt coordinated things technical. (The UK Daily Mail, April 23, 2016)

Enter James O’Keefe. Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation at Google Global Affairs, had her words captured in a Project Veritas undercover video on June 24, 2019. Her comments were decidedly revealing. “Elizabeth Warren is saying that we should break up Google. And like, [she speaks like a Valley Girl] I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better, it will make it worse because now all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation. It’s like a small company cannot do that.” Did you get that? “…preventing the next Trump situation.”

She goes on speaking in her clipped manner. “We’re also training our algorithms if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?...2020, certainly on top of my old organization, Trust and Safety, top of mind, they’ve been working on it since 2016, to make sure we’re ready for 2020.”

The Project Veritas video of Jen Gennai’s remarks had been posted on YouTube and was approaching one million views. O’Keefe claims that Google, the parent company of YouTube, had the video taken down. Also, the social site Reddit has banned Project Veritas videos completely.

There are some courageous whistleblowers, call them patriots, from within the Google hierarchy who corroborate O’Keefe’s findings. He has been approached by at least one conservative insider who sees and understands the contaminated and biased culture from within. The informer came to Project Veritas rather than The New York Times or Washington Post because the mainstream media is not to be trusted. He believes these media outlets would have betrayed him as a source and ID’d him to Google.

Another whistleblower, former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that his former employer will try to block President Trump’s re-election. “I do believe so…I think that’s a major threat. They have openly stated that they think 2016 was a mistake. They thought Trump should have lost in 2016. They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda.”

Back to Jen Gennai, her perplexing diction, and her thoughts on “fairness.” She states, “My definition of fairness and bias specifically talks about historically marginalized communities. And that’s who I care about. Communities who are in power and have traditionally have been in power are not who I’m solving fairness for. Our definition of fairness is one of those things that we thought would be like obvious, and everybody would agree to and it wasn’t. There was, the same people who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness.”

Would this be considered meddling in the American electoral process, collusion on a scale greater than the bogus Russian collusion? Or, is this merely the exercise of capitalism and free speech?

Whatever the answer, we are now even more sensitive to the threat.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).