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The news is as bad as it’s ever been. I’ll write about that tomorrow: the darkest July 4th I can personally remember, yet far less dark than the one I expect to have next year. For now, let us put our cares aside and indulge in a little story about a man, his boat, and (allegedly) a whole lot of dildos. Recommended music accompaniment: Double.

All Aboard the Love Boat

(This article can be read on its own, but it will make a lot more sense if you have read my recent Rolling Stone article)

Christian Hartsock probably did not expect a 2008 California Republican Convention afterparty to change his life, but sometimes that’s what happens when you talk to strangers. Hartsock mentioned his recently-completed film school thesis project, “Sycophant,” to a fellow party-goer, who happened to have another friend with an interest in video: a tall skinny kid from New Jersey named James O’Keefe. The Leadership Institute had recently fired O’Keefe for using organization dollars to fund an undercover sting of Planned Parenthood, and the would-be videographer was currently languishing in YouTube obscurity as a second-rate conservative Borat.

The acquaintance forwarded Hartsock’s film to O’Keefe, who loved it. According to Hartsock, the two bounced creative ideas off each other via phone every couple of months but did not meet in person until 2009, when O’Keefe flew into LA to pitch his undercover footage of ACORN employees apparently condoning illegal underage prostitution to Andrew Breitbart.

“James was asking if I had any penny loafers because we were going to this club in West Hollywood, on Sunset. And it was 80s night, and James was gonna do the moonwalk,” Hartsock recalls. The next morning, O’Keefe showed Hartsock the ACORN tapes, then asked him to shoot some B-roll. He met O’Keefe and fellow conspirator Hannah Giles, in full prostitute regalia, on the Sunset Strip. That footage, along with b-roll from Washington DC, appeared at the beginning and end of the ACORN videos, with a jock-pop song aptly named “Ridiculous” playing in the background. It was the beginning of a 14-year collaboration.

Hartsock would go on to become one of Project Veritas’ first employees and would remain with the organization to the bitter end in late 2023. In the years immediately following the ACORN video, however, Hartsock was a freelancer, and his career was already off to a promising start. In 2009, he directed Guns n’Roses’ “Sorry” music video. That same year, he met Andrew Breitbart through the California Republican scene, and started writing columns for his online newspaper in 2010. He filmed over 50 Tea Party rallies and made an appearance on Fox News’ Red Eye to talk about his observations.

In 2010, award-winning CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau asked the up-and-coming filmmaker to be part of a documentary about young conservatives alongside two other activists: Lila Rose, the architect of the Planned Parenthood sting O’Keefe funded during his Leadership Institute days, and conservative author Jason Mattera. It was a great opportunity for someone early in their career, and Hartsock eagerly accepted. Boudreau wanted to film him in action on the set of his big summer project, which happened to be for Project Veritas: writing and directing “Landrieu Dance,” a 7-minute clip montage and music video for a song about O’Keefe’s recent arrest for entering her office under false pretenses to film a prank video. The video features O’Keefe winning over FBI agents with his sick dance moves, dancing with a Landrieu lookalike, and a recreation of the infamous Michael Jackson car dance scene from Black and White in which he once again donned his ACORN video pimp costume.

When Hartsock approached O’Keefe about Boudreau’s visit, however, the moonwalker balked. He pointed out that all three young conservatives profiled in the documentary had connections with him, James O’Keefe, who was clearly her real target. “She's obviously trying to do a hit job on me!” Hartsock recalled him saying. The director talked O’Keefe into at least speaking to Boudreau before rejecting the idea outright, then arranged a meeting between them.

“I woke up to a phone call from Abbie the day they were supposed to meet,” Hartsock said. “She's like, what the hell did you have in mind for me?!”

Upon her arrival, O’Keefe’s assistant, Izzy Santa, took her aside and warned her that O’Keefe was planning to lure her onto his boat, offer her strawberries and champagne, and hit on her while secretly recording. Hartsock, just waking up on the Pacific Coast, struggled to catch up. “Abbie’s like, ‘You're not saying anything. You were in on this, weren't you?!’ I was like, no, absolutely not. And I called James. I'm like, James, what the fuck?”

O’Keefe claimed the whole thing was a misunderstanding, both to Hartsock on the phone and to the world when Boudreau broke the story in late September 2010. This assertion would have been more compelling had CNN not obtained and released emails that detailed every aspect of the plan, including their plan for if Boudreau caught wind of the scheme: “If CNN gets advance warning and you find this out, you should simply cancel the operation, period.”

The emails went into great detail on the caper which, if anything, Santa had undersold. Ben Wetmore, O’Keefe’s mentor from his Leadership Institute days and current head of whatever remains of Project Veritas today, provided a helpful setlist for the prank:

3. Equipment needed. a) video: 1. hidden cams on the boat, 2. tripod and overt recorder near the bed, an obvious sex tape machine. b) props: 1. Condom jar, 2. dildos, 3. music, a. Alicia Keys, b., 80s romance songs, things that are typically James. c) avoid Marvin Gaye as too cliche. 4. lube. 5. ceiling mirror. 6. posters and paintings of naked women. 7. playboys and pornographic magazines. 8. candles. 9. Viagra and stamina pills. 10. fuzzy handcuffs. 11. blindfold — Source: Emails obtained by CNN

"James should have a more sleazy persona than normal, with slicked back hair and exposing his chest," Wetmore advised. He told O'Keefe not to "proverbially 'shoot your load' before the catalytic moment…our job is to make sure she doesn't run away or break too soon." He even included some imagined soap-opera-quality dialogue between Boudreau and O’Keefe:

AB: Are you recording this? JO: If you want, I can record it, I usually don't record it unless I'm trying out a new position or something really kinky though. I have the camera set up though, so we can do whatever you want, whatever you feel comfortable with. AB: is this a gag? JO: Abbie, I'm not really into S&M, so I don't have any toys like that. AB: No, is this a joke, are you kidding? JO: Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about S&M, what do you mean is this a gag? AB: You can't be serious, I'm married. JO: ABbie, there's never going to be a right time for you and I. There's only right now. We have to make the most of the time we're given, and we're begin given right now. AB: Are you serious? JO: I've never met a woman like you, one who had the drive, ambition, and the same creative power, the same creative juice. We're the same person Abbie, we're meant to be together. I'm serious because my heart is serious — Source: Emails obtained by CNN

The emails also included an explanation for the cruelty. “Using hot blondes to seduce interviewees to get screwed on television, you are faux seducing her in order to screw her on television," Wetmore wrote.

Other internal emails contained a secret recording of O’Keefe’s initial phone conversation with Boudreau ( a violation of Maryland’s two-party consent laws), which O’Keefe sent to Wetmore, Santa, and one other associate, with the text: “Ben, do you think I could get her on the boat?” According to another email obtained by CNN, O’Keefe told Santa to print out a large “pleasure palace graphic” for the caper.

This was 2010, not 2024, and many CNN-hating conservatives still found the alleged prank beyond the pale. Even Breitbart demanded an explanation, which O’Keefe provided in print on Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com about a week after the story broke. “In my version, the reporter was never going to be placed in a threatening situation. She would have had to consent before being filmed and she was not going to be faux “seduced” unless she wanted to be,” he wrote.

As for the “over-the-top” language about handcuffs and Viagra, he swears he “never considered that for a moment.” In his first book, Breakthrough, O’Keefe writes:

“For those who did not understand our goofy creative process, the thirteen-page document made us look considerably sleazier than we actually were. There were suggestions in the document that would have made me cringe if I had taken them seriously, but I knew Ben’s sense of humor, and he knew my limits. Unfortunately, no one else would.”

He goes on to tacitly admit that he’d planned to “greet [Boudreau] with strawberries and champagne and hit on her” and admits that Santa demonstrated “good judgment” to warn the documentarian. He categorically denies the dildos.

O’Keefe apologized to Hartsock and swore he was telling the truth about the real plan. Hartsock believed him. CNN did not buy it, but they did believe Hartsock when he said he had nothing to do with the plan. They offered to facilitate a television appearance where he could explain that he had no part in the caper. Hartsock said no. “James is my friend. I’m not going to throw him under the bus,” he recalls saying.

When the documentary came out, the Love Boat scandal overshadowed every other event shown. “James found a way to make it all about himself and make us all look bad. It was very painful to watch the third act,” Hartsock told me. He’d been trying to make a name for himself — but not that kind of name.

Eventually, the scandal simmered down. After all, who were conservatives going to side with long-term, the Fake News Media or the wunderkind who took down ACORN?

At first, the man who goes by Simon Templar, who would go on to surreptitiously record NPR executive Ron Schiller appearing to consider a large donation from an organization with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, didn’t believe it either. “I thought, There's no way. This must have been an early brainstorm draft or maybe one embellished for some juvenile amusement. There's just no way anybody actually thought that was a good idea,” he told me. “After I met James in person, that possibility became a lot more plausible very quickly.”

The meeting, which occurred about 10 weeks after the Love Boat story broke, was awkward in the extreme, Templar recalls: O’Keefe was emaciated and had clearly not showered in days. The ride from LaGuardia to O’Keefe’s house was downright unpleasant. “He was tearing up and yelling at no one in particular. He'd erupt with spontaneous outbursts wailing that nobody understood his vision or that people don't understand that geniuses are really passionate.”

Eventually, Templar asked about the Dildo Boat. “That was just a brainstorm, right?,” he recalls asking. “[O’Keefe] replied meekly, ‘yeah.’ Unconvinced, I asked, ‘there weren't actual dildos on the boat, right?’ He tensed up and started raising his voice again, saying ‘Abbie Boudreau was obsessed with me! She kept calling and texting and emailing. She contacted me like 70-80 times!’ That wasn't the answer I was hoping to hear.”

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Around the same time, while producing a Project Veritas video using one of O’Keefe’s hard drives, Hartsock says he came across a folder labeled CNN. “I opened it and there were these videotapes of slow-motion footage taken inside James’ boat: of dildos and condoms and sex toys and champagne and strawberries,” he told me. “And I knew — I just knew — that he was going to cut it to that song, Captain of Her Heart, that he's obsessed with.”

I, too, could instantly picture it: slow-motion footage of this obscene vessel’s pornography-soaked interior set to the soft strains of Double’s 80s euro-pop ballad.

Hartsock never told O’Keefe that he found the footage. He became one of Project Veritas’ first hires and, eventually, one of the last people fired from the company, just before it went under.

‘“Doing undercover journalism was never about James,” Hartsock said when I asked him why he’d stayed. “It was about the mission. The fact is that people were lying. When you have 92 percent of corporate media reporters basically acting as stenographers and just copying and pasting the canned talking points from politicians and pressers — we were the only ones who were walking through walls with the art of seduction and a mastery of disguise in the smoke-filled back rooms and finding out what these people really thought. No one else did that except for Project Veritas.”

Hartsock was one of the undercover journalists (UCJs) behind the Democracy Partners/Americans United for Change videos that Trump used against Clinton during their first debate (discussed in the Rolling Stone article). “It's because I stuck with James O'Keefe that I ended up in that bar in Milwaukee that night on April 5th, 2016. And six months later, that image that I got from my button camera was on the front page of the New York Times, and you had a rightfully informed electorate knowing that they had been gaslit and they had been bamboozled, and half the country was not, in fact, violent racist rednecks.”

Hartsock knew O’Keefe had the capacity to lie about big things to his closest friends almost from the start. He put up with it in the name of exposing what he saw as a bigger truth and striking at the heart of the real enemy. “When you're in an existential fight to save democracy, everything else seems petty by comparison,” Hartsock told me at a different part of the conversation, about why he stuck by O’Keefe for as long as he did.

I don’t agree with Hartsock’s politics, and I don’t agree that the Democracy Partners video, which showed the head of the organization talking about a national network of provocateurs who goad MAGA rally-goers into fights, excuses MAGA’s penchant to fall for the bait and start punching. That’s not really the point. It’s really easy to dismiss Project Veritas, and other conservative media outlets, and conservatives generally, as cynical grifters who enjoy lying to the American people. Most of them don’t see it that way. Like me, they believe America is in mortal peril, that democracy itself is at stake. I believe they are dead wrong about where that threat is coming from, but if I believed what they believed, I’d be doing what they’re doing. There’s hope in that, I think. Most people are trying to do the right thing. If they become convinced that what they’re doing is wrong, their actions will change too.

As I’ll discuss in a future Substack, many conservative media figures on the right know O’Keefe personally, and knew good and goddamn well that Project Veritas’ side of the story made sense when the organization blew up in 2023. But to them, O’Keefe was Veritas, in the same way that a band frontman is the band, even if he doesn’t write the songs. He was a general on the field of battle, not to be questioned or replaced.

In times of war, sacrifices must be made.

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The Dildo Boat Incident