The Megyn Kelly Show - Chilling Journalistic Crackdown by Feds, and the Future of Unions, with James O'Keefe and Max Alvarez | Ep. 299

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by James O'Keefe, founder and CEO of Project Veritas, for an exclusive interview about new information that the feds were spying on him and his organization through Microsoft, Apple and Google, his attempts to corroborate the diary of Ashley Biden, the way the FBI got involved, the journalistic tactics of Project Veritas, the chilling journalistic crackdown by the feds, the left and right uniting behind the need for journalistic transparency, the New York Times' coordination with the Department of Justice, O'Keefe's journalism that exposed a NYT's reporters' real thoughts about January 6, and more. Then Max Alvarez, author of "The Work of Living" and editor of The Real News, to talk about the unionization rise at Amazon, Starbucks and more (and the corporate roadblocks and pushback), how these companies square progressive values with an anti-union stance, the value of hard work, the challenge of the American Dream, the need for collective responsibility in America, how the Obama years drove people to support Trump and Bernie Sanders, whether union leaders are serving union members, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. On the program today, the ever controversial and always interesting James O'Keefe of Project Veritas. For the past few months, James has been locked in a high stakes, unbelievable legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice over an abandoned or stolen diary apparently belonging to President Biden's 40-year-old daughter, Ashley. We're going to get into this. You're not going to believe this story. This past November, the FBI raided the homes of several Project Veritas employees.

Okay, this is a journalism operation. Raided the homes of several journalists working for Project Veritas, including James. The government took several dozen phones and computers containing information on confidential sources, upcoming stories, and private donor information. James says the raids far exceeded the limits set by the warrants. The raid was so controversial, the ACLU, which can't stand Project Veritas, came out in defense of James, saying it, quote, could have serious consequences for press freedom. Then a few weeks ago, Project Veritas found out from Microsoft that federal prosecutors had compelled Microsoft to allow them to secretly access emails of some staffers. Microsoft wanted

to tell Project Veritas that this had happened. The Fed said, keep your mouth shut. And the only reason they ultimately found out is because Microsoft took them to court. So good for them. In court documents, Project Veritas alleges that the government seized nearly 200,000 of its emails and files. And now Project Veritas has learned the government's actions did not just include Microsoft, but the feds also went to Google and Apple. James O'Keefe joins me now in an exclusive interview on all of this new information and where the case stands. James, great to have you here. Megan, great to be with you.

This story is so unbelievable to me. And it's great. I mean, you've done the unthinkable, you've gotten the ACLU to defend you. So already, kudos to you. We never thought we'd see the day. But this is deadly serious. And I realized it must have been very jarring for you. Before we get to the latest information, Microsoft and Google and Apple, which I definitely want to get to, let's just get the viewers and the listeners up to speed on the underlying saga right like you're there you're an investigative journalist um you use controversial tactics that have been used by the left for decades it's fine when they do it but not when you do it um to get people on camera saying things that may betray their public messaging i mean this is you know this is not a new approach to journalism.

It's just one they don't like when it's employed against their side. And you tell us what happened. You were contacted by a source saying that they had the grown daughter of Joe Biden's personal diary. That's right, Megan. This is an unbelievable story. And as I get started here, it's probably one of the biggest abridgments of freedom of the press in the history of the United States. I know it's hard to shock people these days and nothing really surprises us. But this one really cuts to the heart of everything this country was founded on. We are investigative reporters. We run a nonprofit news organization called Project Veritas, and we often use undercover techniques to get information out of people, which has been used for 100 years.

It's fallen out of favor in the last 20 years, mostly because it's expensive and difficult and you get sued and you have to fend off the lawsuits. But yes, tipsters reached out to us in September of 2020, some two months before the presidential election with Joe Biden, Donald Trump. And they said they had a copy of Ashley Biden's diary, the daughter of the president. Most people don't realize that Joe Biden has a daughter named Ashley. Right. And we we got this document. This was a document that I was fairly confident it was Joe Biden's daughter's diary, but I wasn't a hundred percent certain. So we did things like we hired a handwriting expert. We tried to corroborate this document. And it turns out, Megan, I guess we're better journalists than we thought

we were because it now appears to be authenticated because the FBI has gotten involved and raided my home. But at the time, I made the decision not to publish this document. There were some personal things in the diary, some comments about her father. I don't feel comfortable sharing those with you because I felt it was a cheap shot. I felt this was some things public eyes should not see. So even if I could authenticate that it was 100% hers, I could not corroborate that the things she wrote about her father actually happened. So I made the decision not to publish the document. I then reached out to President Biden for comment. We reached out.

Our lawyer sent a letter to Ashley Biden's attorney. And that's when Ashley Biden's attorney said, we're taking this to the Southern District of New York. That's for those of you who don't know what that is. That's the federal jurisdiction, the Department of Justice in New York, where we're located in Westchester County, New York. And and they referred to this somehow. This got to the FBI, the Department of Justice, and this is where things take an insane turn. A year later, suddenly my two journalistic colleagues get raided by the FBI with a battering ram. They go into my colleagues' houses at 6 a.m., take all types of computers and laptops. These are journalists, news gathering materials, confidential sources. This has never happened before in history for the execute a search warrant like this. And then now we find out some, this was last month, that they issued secret warrants to Microsoft Corporation

and of course the news that we're breaking on your show today. So that's kind of an overview of what has happened, Megan. Completely insane and unlawful and a violation of the First Amendment. It's shocking. I cannot imagine my own reaction if such a thing were to happen to me. And I saw all of my phones, my laptop and all the places where you store information from sources who call you with a story, especially in your business, because you're really breaking controversial stuff. I can't imagine the fear, the anger, the sense of frustration and betrayal by one's own government. And now it gets worse by the day because I mentioned in the intro, the only reason you found out that the government went to Microsoft,

I mean, so they executed these raids on your employees and then ultimately you. But the only reason you found out that separately they were basically spying on you through Microsoft is because Microsoft had a problem with the feds coming to them and demanding all of your information. And you tell me, but it looks to me like they were kind of trying to fight against the feds all along. And ultimately, the reason you found out is because they won the legal battle. We use Microsoft Outlook for our emails. And this is a before I get into this, this has been terrifying, Megan. It's it's psychologically that they came to my house at six a.m. I was not fully clothed. They banged on the door with

some dozen, 10 or a dozen agents. They had flashlights, they had vests, just like a movie, blue jackets. And they opened the door, handcuffed me, put me in the public hallway of my apartment building. I've got neighbors in an apartment building and I was in my underwear. So I guess it was designed to humiliate me. And I would say for about a day or two, I was pretty, it shakes you up. I don't think, I think you have to live through it to fully understand how, how absurdly terrifying this sort of thing is. And again, I'm a, I'm an American journalist and we use, we work with a lot of people in the government. We have sources inside tech and the federal government and even the Department

of Justice. We have sources inside these different organizations that, and we're one of the only places for these people to go, right? They can't go to the Washington Post and the New York Times because those organizations tend to work in alignment with the powers that be, right? They work in reciprocation with the powers that be. So they come to Project Veritas, and this is an insane chilling effect on the people that I work with because they obtained, Megan, 200,000 emails from Microsoft. So then fast forward a few months after the raid in January of this year, the FBI, after my home gets raided, goes back to Microsoft. The Department of Justice asks them to gag Microsoft, asks a magistrate

judge in New York City to issue a gag order, a secret gag order, and say, you can't talk about this. Microsoft, to their credit, thankfully, we have some honest people with integrity at Microsoft Corporation, drafts a motion opposing that gag. And when the feds see the draft of that motion, they back down in extraordinary fashion. On March 10th or thereabouts, these gag orders become public. And it is insane. There's nine different magistrate judges, or I think it was six or nine judges. They went around and shopped this around and got them to stamp this secret order going back to January 2020, eight months before I even found anything out about this diary. The sources didn't come to us until September. They got emails going back to January 2020. It was unlawful. It was unconstitutional. It was a violation of the Privacy Protection Act.

It was a violation of the Attorney General of the United States. That's Merrick Garland's order in July saying that you can't do this to people who purport to be members of the news media. You can't issue secret warrants against journalists, obviously, because the whole point of journalism is to get people to trust you. And the U.S. attorneys, the federal prosecutors in New York, made the argument for the federal judge that James O'Keefe and Project Veritas are not journalists because they don't get permission, they don't get consent when they record people, which is an absurd argument, really, because the whole point of investigative journalism is to expose things that powerful people don't want exposed. So this case has become, Megan, an absolute, it's so central now. And of course, the breaking news on your show here today is they didn't just do it to Microsoft.

They went to our Gmail accounts, Google, and they went to Apple computer and gagged them and extracted things, not just from my team, Megan, but my security team as well. They went after our security guards, Megan, in an apparent effort to intimidate us, humiliate us, and hurt us. This is insane. We've never seen anything like this. And that's saying something, honestly. And we're talking about a diary. I mean, it's not like James O'Keefe is part of a terrorist plot to blow up America. You may or may not have gotten your hands on the president's daughter's diary. That's what we're talking about here. Have they suggested to you, James, in any way that because the rule is you

as a journalist, you can get stolen goods and you could publish the stolen goods. You just can't help orchestrate the theft. You know, you can even encourage the theft, but you can't orchestrate the theft or be a part of the theft. You can't be the thief and then profit off of the goods. Anyway, have they suggested to you that they believe you encouraged the theft or helped the theft or knew about the theft, alleged theft, I should say, of Ashley Biden's diary? Right. They that the Supreme Court of the United States in a case called Bartnicki v. Bopper, authored by John Paul Stevens, it says you you can you can receive stolen information as a journalist. In fact, that's what journalists do every day. All the time. You just can't you just can't participate in the theft. And you could even according to another case recently,

this is in 2019, DNC versus a Russian Federation case. You can solicit stolen information. That's what journalists do. You just can't play a part in this. And we didn't. And there's no evidence to suggest that we did, Megan. They have no evidence because it doesn't exist. This is a non-crime. It's insane. They've handed over all these emails. The Fed's assigned a special master, which is sort of like a special overseer. And the federal judge, this is Annalisa Torres in the Southern District of New York, federal judge, Article 3 judge said that we're entitled to journalistic privileges. So the judge called us a journalist. I'm sure the FBI did not anticipate

that. They thought they could just railroad us and silence me into submission. But there's no crimes here. There's no evidence of any crimes because none were committed. The sources had this diary and we transported the diary to New York from where it was in Florida. And this is insane. The feds and the warrant, it said transportation of stolen documents across state lines, which is, again, an absurd insinuation because it's a crime to transport documents across state lines, which is, again, an absurd insinuation because it's a crime to transport documents across state lines. They'd have to charge every journalist in every newsroom

in the country. It's just actually so absurd that I actually think that right now people always say, you know, Megan, I'm sure they say this to you, they say to me, when are these people in the FBI ever going to be held accountable? This actually might be one of those times because the motion that we filed this week, these 41 G motion, it's a motion to get my property back. This is an amazing document because it outlines all the abuses of power from the department of justice against my team. And, and it is staggering. They violated the Privacy Protection Act. They broke the law.

The attorney general, you cannot get permission to execute a search warrant against a journalist, especially when it comes to news gathering activities. So no, to answer your question, there's no evidence of any crimes here. There's no evidence of that. And I think they're in too far. These federal prosecutors are hiding behind their badge. They're abusing their power. And they thought they could be a schoolyard bully. And yes, it has had a chilling effect on my sources. Of course.

But I think it's also inspired a lot of people to see how much they fear Project Veritas. People should be getting on a bus now and just dropping off packages with information at your headquarters. Forget the email, forget the texting. But wait, my understanding of the law, journalists aren't immune from federal subpoenas or federal raids. It's not like it's a cloak that protects you

in all circumstances. But my understanding of the law is it's the bar is just very high. The DOJ knows that any federal magistrate judge would know that before you sign off on a warrant, allowing the FBI to go into a journalist's home and seize his computers and his phones. The burden on the government would be very high. That would be typically how it would go. And so that's what's curious about this case. Like unless unless they have something right that against you that we don't know, like they've got somebody saying something nefarious happened. None of this makes sense to me. Yes. And so that's a great point. And that's why the reporters committee,

which is, again, you pointed out that the ACLU hates us, but this is one of those cases where there's a Venn diagram between the left and the right in this country that's ever shrinking, right? We're very divided in this country, obviously. This is one of those issues where we still are united on. You don't take journalist stuff without probable cause. And you might say, well, didn't you break the law? So people are like, well, didn't you break the law? Didn't you break the law? Well, no, we didn't. But let's assume you're falsely accused or someone makes a claim of something. Let's assume for a minute that Ashley Biden made a claim to the FBI that was untrue. And it was in a sworn affidavit, for example. And they said, James O'Keefe tried to extort me. Well, that didn't happen. We asked

for comment. That's not extortion. Let's assume she made that claim in a sworn affidavit. Let's assume for a minute that she even lied. You can't just seal the affidavit against a journalist. You have to see the charges against you because society, and this is all in the Supreme Court and all these lawsuits that have happened prior, the Supreme Court of the United States has established that when it comes to journalism, society has a right to see those things. They have to be unsealed. And right now, the affidavits that were given to all these judges, we're talking nine different magistrate judges. They shopped this around. They tried to keep this secret from

the federal judge. All those affidavits need to be unsealed. And we're not making that argument. The Reporters Committee, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, we're talking Wolf Blitzer, Andrew Mitchell, Josh Gerstein of Politico, people that you would think don't like me, even they recognize the principles at stake here. And when you when you raid a journalist's home like you have done here, which I don't remember a case where this has happened. This is in fact, I don't think it's ever happened before, especially secret warrants against journalists in 20 in 20. And during the Trump administration, they went to Google, but they didn't seal the warrants when they tried to get the New York Times's leaks. They New York Times was able to fight it publicly. Well, here you have a case where they have secret affidavits that are sealed.

And we've asked the judge to unseal those affidavits, Megan, and the reporters committee have asked that because we need to see- Well, let me ask you this, James. How do you square it? Normally, if there's a grand jury investigation, that's what we understand is happening here. There's a grand jury investigation against a target. The feds don't have an obligation to tell the target. They can execute, they can get warrants, they can get all sorts of information, and there's no obligation to tell the target it's happening at all until they're ready, right? Isn't that their defense here? Like, I'm sure you would have liked to have known, but too bad. And so that's how they defend all the secrecy around this. Like we weren't ready yet to, you know, alert you to anything prior to when they

had to like the rate. Right. And that, and, and the case law says that the, the, the chilling effect on the freedom of the press, that this has to seal these supposed allegations or say they interviewed someone who made some claim that was spurious or false. The chilling effect that it has on the principles this country was founded on, which is very central, informed consent, people knowing what's going on, that chilling effect is more important. It outweighs whatever marginal interest there is that the prosecutors have in a quote unquote ongoing investigation. Because you're right. Usually you wouldn't see the sealed, you wouldn't unseal the affidavit until there's an indictment. Okay. That's what they say. Well, we were an ongoing investigation.

Well, what's to prevent them from going after a journalist in the future under a Trump administration? Every journalist, right? Anybody who's working on a bad story. Right. Let's go after them all. I'm sure there's some evidence. Let's just falsely accuse journalists of things. And then, you know what? We're going to seal the affidavit. It's a tautology. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's precisely why these things need to be unsealed. And the only argument they might make, which we don't know if they made before these magistrates, well, James O'Keefe is not a journalist. Well, I'm happy to litigate that to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. I'm happy to litigate that. That'll go to the United States Supreme Court. And the issue before your honor is, well, let's just not consider him a journalist. Well, they're going to lose that.

That's not going anywhere. Because the Privacy Protection Act makes it clear that even when you purport to be a member of the media, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, if my job is to disseminate information for the public interest, if that's what I do, then the law has to consider you that the reporter's shield is so critical. And that's why this is so particularly in a country where citizen journalism and independent journalism right now is often the only way for people to get what's going on. Yeah. Wait, okay. So let's back up. I have so many questions. Have you seen anything to this day? Like, have you yet seen it laid out what their claims are, whether they claim you committed some underlying crime, you know, participated in the alleged theft? Have you has that been spelled out yet in any way that has been shared with you? 41 motion, we lay out the facts. It's a pretty extraordinary motion we filed before a federal

judge because not only most people, when the feds raid them, there's an immediate indictment. I haven't been charged with a crime. In fact, my lawyer is in this 50-page document, which is really an amazing document we filed in court. We laid out all the facts as we know them. I went on the record. I talked about everything I did. I've got nothing to hide. They're going through my emails. They're going to be like, this guy's a Boy Scout, which literally I am an Eagle Scout. And I have a couple people on my team.

We got lawyers to look at everything before we do anything. And they're looking at all this evidence. I think they went through 200,000 emails and the special master returned some 200 or so texts and things that pertain to this. I've seen all the, although there's no, there's no, there's no crime. So I know, I know the facts because I'm, I know what I did and they know the facts because they're looking at all the texts I'm looking at because you don't know what they're accusing you of. That's the frustration here. I mean, you're not being afforded due process.

And the freedom of the press, which is another piece of the Bill of Rights, is not being protected right now. There's a reason it's right up there in the First Amendment. That's how important the founders considered the freedom of the press. So they're stepping on that. They're not affording you due process. And you're still unsure what it is you've been accused of. That and unclear of who made what allegation, who which source made which claim. So that that would have to be a hypothesis or an assumption that we draw, Megan. But we do know the facts

here going back to January. This is this is no longer a matter of fact. Now it's a matter of law like you don't. We already know enough facts to know that they broke the law. The federal government broke the law. And I think they're too far into this deal. They didn't expect the judge to assign the master. They didn't expect the secret warrants to be unsealed. And let me add that the DOJ regulations, I have them printed out here because I want to make sure I get my facts right. The DOJ regulations say that when you do execute a search warrant against a journalist, and the prosecutor has to, quote, pursue negotiations with the members of the news media, they have to make a good faith. So my lawyer, Paul Calli, reached out to the Department

of Justice in the days prior to the raid when we found out that they were knocking on the doors of our sources to do the very thing that the law says we're supposed to do, which is to kind of talk to the prosecutors and negotiate. And then a couple of days later, they raided my journalist's homes. So they broke the rules of criminal procedure. They broke the Privacy Protection Act. They violated the memorandum by the Attorney General of the United States. Well, the real question, Megan, is did the Attorney General of the United States authorize this or not? If he did, that's a scandal. If he did not, then the people in the Southern District of New York broke the rules. This is like this is like Watergate level stuff here. There's more to it because even if the raid was proper, OK, giving them the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of this conversation, let's say it was proper. We don't know why it was proper because they're not showing their hand.

They they took everything. They didn't screen for privilege. They didn't screen for even relevance from the sound of it. And your lawyers went into court and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There are communications between us and James and our clients' representatives on those phones and on those emails. In no world should the government

be allowed to look at any of that. And separately, you have a defamation lawsuit going against the new york times that predates all of this and that involves attorney-client communications again the government should not have access to that that would be irrelevant and privileged there the government doesn't get to see everything just because they have a warrant to see some things. They've seen everything, Megan. Yes, so tell us what they did. They went after our Apple. They went after my director of HR's Apple account.

Think of what is, the listeners listening to this program, I know this is a lot of legal in the weeds, but it's important. Think of what's in your Apple photos. Think of what's in your Gmail, for those of you who's Googled Gmail. Think of what's in your Gmail. For those of you who's Googled Gmail, think of what's in there. And imagine you're a citizen, like journalist, and some of you are citizen journalists listening to this program. Maybe you go on Instagram, you post. Imagine someone sends you a document. In this case, it was a diary, but whatever it is, it's your ethical obligation to try to corroborate that, which is what I attempted to do. Let's remember two facts here.

Fact number one, I never published the document. If I really was a right-wing scumbag, which is some people, I think that's happening less and less, particularly now the ACLU has come to our defense. I would have published it to try to hurt Biden or humiliate. I did not do that because I felt it was a cheap shot and I couldn't fully corroborate what she wrote in it. Look, I'll just jump in and say if what's because somebody has now leaked the headlines of what was in it. And if what's in it is true, it's a story. It's definitely a story. And it has to do with an inappropriate relationship, allegedly, between Ashley and possibly Joe Biden. Not corroborated. We don't know. I'm just the audience deserves to know what it is we're juggling with here. And again, no one's suggesting it

actually happened. No one's suggesting we verified it. But this is what you were dealing with. If that's true, if there's a story like that, it's of course a story. It's a national news story. Joe Biden wouldn't have wanted to be embarrassed by it. You would have been within your rights to publish it if you if you had it. You know, if you if you really were the first time we've heard of the feds investigating an abandoned diary, the feds don't even have jurisdiction. It's a even if it was stolen, which it appears to not have been, even if it was by a source who then sent it to us, it would still not be a federal crime. So, and there's nothing in the government pleadings, nothing that suggests that this diary was,

journalists stole the diary, nothing. You're talking about transportation of stolen material across state lines, which is an absurd, the implication of that crime, Megan, you'd have to incarcerate all the people in every newsroom. The Pentagon Papers, you couldn't have published the Pentagon Papers. Of course. No one had any problem with it when the Times published Sarah Palin's

emails that were obtained not by the Times illicitly, but by somebody illicitly. And they published away. They loved it. It was exciting. They had a big scoop. But I guess when it's Ashley Biden's diary, It's a different story. As you point out, the within minutes of the raid of my home, these FBI agents are in my apartment building and it is terrifying. I was handcuffed. They put me in handcuffs. They can rummage through my house. They took my two phones and then these agents stopped and said something to me like, Mr. O'Keefe, we know you have a flight at 2 PM. I was like, how do you, first of all, how do you know that? Second of all, I did, I wasn't getting on that plane as of the day before because of what had happened at my organization, my other colleagues. And then they go, do you have any more questions?

It was, it was just, it was so invasive. It was an act of violence against the First Amendment, against me and my team. It was an act of violence. And they took photographs of my phone and they backed out of my building and took photographs. And then Megan, minutes later, I get a text message from a national security reporter at the New York Times by the name of Mike Schmidt. Wait, now hold that thought, because that's an important piece of what's been happening to you, the coordination between the Department of Justice and the New York Times, who again, remember, James was suing for defamation prior to all of this. We're going to pick it up fresh there after this quick commercial break.

So much more to dissect with James O'Keefe coming up. Let's talk about the New York Times and how they are sort of on a parallel track to the DOJ in, I don't know if I want to say out to get you, but certainly adverse to you. Tell us what happened. It was at the day before the raid, the day of the raid, the day after the raid, or all three that the New York Times started reporting on the raid? All three. All three. Megan, what happened was I was in handcuffs and I was in my apartment. The FBI had just executed a search warrant against an American journalist unlawfully and broke the law, as all the things we just talked about. And then minutes later, I get a text message from Mike Schmidt, national security reporter, New York times, who somehow he knows all these details. And I don't think the neighbor has tipped him off that this is something that he knew he had leaks from the department of justice. And we have the entire national security team at the New York

times, Adam Goldman, Mike Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti. These are Pulitzer Prize winning reporters who've done some dozen plus stories about this diary, working with the DOJ, trying to advance this unknown theory that we somehow had something to do with this diary being stolen. We didn't. Even they, Mike Schmidt later admitted that it appears perhaps the government may have overreached. But the New York Times, Megan, as you point out, I've sued them for defamation stemming from an investigation I did in 2020. And in extraordinary fashion, we got past motion to dismiss in New York State. And the judge in New York said that the New York Times was engaged in disinformation against Project Veritas when they said that our videos

were deceptive. So we got past this huge barrier. And the New York Times has kind of been on a seek and destroy mission against our organization. And days after this raid, the New York Times publishes my attorney-client privileged communications. They publish private documents. The documents make me look good, but on principle, I mean, the documents were saying that we don't break the law and we check with lawyers to make sure everything we do is legal. But on principle, why and how,

how is the New York Times obtaining these private documents from within my organization? James, you know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of Erin Andrews, a sports reporter who had some creep spying on her through her hotel window or a hotel peephole in the door and taking videos of her nude that she didn't consent to and didn't know about. And at the time it broke, there was all the speculation amongst guys in our industry about whether she orchestrated it because she looked so good. She looked amazing. Erin, she's a friend. She's gorgeous. Erin was deeply traumatized by what happened to her. Trust me when I tell you she had absolutely nothing to do with it. It wasn't a setup and remains traumatized by the whole thing

to this day. But the point is not how good you look when someone inappropriately looks through the peephole. The point is, why are they looking through the peephole? And when you have the New York Times with your attorney-client privileged information, the question is not, why does he look so good? And does that make us think he allowed this? The question is, what the hell are you doing looking through the peephole? Yeah, it's in American jurisprudence, attorney-client privilege, you can't, we're in litigation against the New York Times because some people, I said that because, well, James, you're an undercover guy. You're a hypocrite.

No, no. I would never publish the attorney client communications of an adversary that I was currently in litigation with. That's sanctionable conduct. Just like you wouldn't publish. There are certain things I just don't publish. I stay away from people's private lives. I don't publish conversations with therapists that people have. So this happens and a judge in New York, now keep in mind, we got past motion to dismiss. The judge

issues this stunning order against the New York Times saying that they're engaged in disinformation and deception. They're projecting onto Project Veritas what they do when they accuse me of editing. And then on Christmas Eve, December 24th, some six weeks after the raid, the judge in New York, Supreme Court in New York, orders the New York Times to sequester these memorandums. They order them that they've misbehaved. And the New York Times just goes bonkers. They write an op-ed. This is like the Pentagon Papers. You're against the First Amendment, which is, of course, absurd. Publishing

the attorney-client memorandums of Project Veritas, who you're in litigation with and whom you're entering discovery in a lawsuit, is not like publishing the Pentagon Papers about national security. And furthermore, the New York Times continues to dox our sources, Megan. These reporters, Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti, go to Florida and they dox our sources that communicate to us about Joe Biden. They publish the names of the sources, which is the very harassment, quote unquote, that they project onto me. What they accuse me of is what they do. Well, but the bottom line here is that the times and the DOJ are clearly coordinating because

there's no way the times would have known about the raid or had your attorney client privileged communications if they hadn't received a leak and you're not the leak. So who it's not going to be your lawyers leaking in the New York times. As you say, it's not your neighbors who wouldn't have had your attorney client privilege information. So, you know, like you say,

it smells like a duck. And in this case, it appears to be a duck that's coordinating in the guise of the DOJ with the New York times. So you, they have many reasons to dislike you. It's not just your lawsuit, but it's,

there's this other guy. So you get this guy on tape. I just, I have to play this soundbite because people need to understand why these guys hate your guts and want to shut you up and why it's important for the rest of us to not let that happen. There's a reporter for The New York Times named Matthew Rosenberg, who I want the audience to understand, writes pieces for the Times entitled, for example, this is about January 6th, The Next Big Lies, January 6th Was No Big Deal, or A Left-Wing Plot. Okay, so that's the kind of stuff he writes. You get him through one of your operatives, a journalist, a young woman on tape in a more candid moment speaking about January 6th. And listen to this.

It's if you watch on YouTube later, you see it transcribed. I think you can understand it well enough for us to play it for our listening audience as well. Listen. It's like January 6th stuff that is like so we're at this point that's so the less overreaction the less reaction to it in some places so over the top there's me and two other colleagues who are there or outside i mean you're just not in your phone dude come on buddy you were not in any game i think you could tell how much fun we had in january oh that's great are you allowed to have that much fun on January? It's like a crazy morning. I know, I know.

It's so traumatizing. But like all these colleagues who are in the building, looking at the music, I'm like, oh, this is so scary. I'm like, oh, f*** off. Is that really the vibe? From them. I'm like, come on. It's not the kind of place you can sit and tell somebody to man up,

but I kind of want to. You're like, like dude come on buddy you were not in any danger you were not in any danger the Les reaction was so over the top and on and on but the piece again the pieces that he wrote next big lies

January 6th was no big deal then he writes a piece 90 seconds of rage then he goes on about capital attack could fuel extremist recruitment for years, experts warn. How to decode the far-right symbols of the capital right. I mean, he's very, very interested in stirring up emotions on January 6th when he's writing for The Times. Behind the scenes with your operative, not so much. He's laughing about what fun the day was. So put that in perspective for us, James. He contradicts. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times contradicting himself in private in a social situation where he did not know he was being recorded. He was speaking to one of my colleagues, a journalist who did not identify herself as such.

And he says, and I can't even say on the radio some of the things this man says, but he called his colleagues effing B words. He said, you're traumatized. And in the New York Times, there's a schism right now between the woke elements and kind of the traditional newsroom elements that these two are clashing and they're contradictory. And this guy appears to have some sort of common sense, reasonable thoughts, like we're over-hyping this. This is too much. It might be something that someone in this audience would say. And he got in trouble for saying these things.

Dean Baquet, the head of the New York Times, had a meeting, people were upset. And Dean Baquet said, we don't want to empower James O'Keefe by responding too, responding too harshly to this. If it was anybody else that published this tape, except me, this man probably would have lost his job and there would have been hell to pay. But what's remarkable about this tape is that Rosenberg, I sat down with Rosenberg,

kind of Chris Hansen, NBC Dateline style. I sat down in the chair when she got up to go to the bathroom. And he then said to me, and this is on, it's on YouTube, it's on tape. He goes, you got me in private. I was just in a social situation. And then I showed him a video himself, quite literally saying it's fair game at the New York times to get people in social situations. So everything that came out of this man's mouth was a contradiction. It was almost straight out of George Orwell's 1984 to tell deliberate lies and contradict oneself and to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. And this is a New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner. This is not just some Joe random guy.

So what does that tell you? We're putting this into context, the people that inform us, the people that manufacture the public's consent, the powers that be that give us the information are full of BS. And don't take my word for it, just watch the video. And that's why when they work with the Department of Justice, when they have the sources in the DOJ and they collaborate with the prosecutors, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not doing their jobs. They're not holding power to account. They're the messengers of the people in power to attack people like us who are trying to give you the actual information. So that's why this case is present. Even fellows, you'd think for self-preservation reasons alone, they would have had some pause about what was being done to you guys rather than just jumping on board and being complicit with it.

Just to jump back to that, okay, because we're asking what could they be alleging against you? Okay, they could be alleging that you helped in the theft. There's no evidence of that whatsoever and you deny it. But that would be the potential basis for a criminal charge in this kind of level of interest. They could be alleging a bribery scheme. There was a reference to bribery in one of the documents seeking a subpoena. In reviewing your case, the only thing I could find that I was like, okay, maybe it's, maybe it's that when you, when you went to Biden and said, do you want to comment on this after you decided not to publish it? Right. Was that an attempt to extortion really is what we're talking about. Not bribery, but like to extort him.

Address that because this is even more extraordinary. They put on the subpoena or the warrant blackmail. And obviously that was referencing me reaching out for comment to, to the Biden. And I had made the decision not to publish it. I thought, well, it's my responsibility to go to the Biden campaign because maybe they'll offer some corroborating evidence here. You know, like my thought process was, well, there's a one in a thousand chance or even less, but, but I got to make the attempt. That's what journalists do. It's actually the ethical thing to do is to ask for comment.

It doesn't mean you're going to publish it. You're just reaching out, right? And we reached out. Can I just say, it also means like, I'm not going to publish it now. Doesn't mean I'm never going to publish it. And what we normally do is we continue working our sources. And then you reach the point where you realize it's fallen apart. It's no good.

Yeah. Or I've got it. But you got to make the attempt. You got to reach out to people. You reserve the right to publish it. That doesn't mean you're blackmailing someone, obviously. And furthermore, that was on the warrant. Guess what, Megan?

That came off the warrant when it came to my place. So that was on the secret warrant back in November. So whatever probable cause, remember the magistrate judge stamp when they present her the secret affidavit? Well, apparently that was BS because the feds dropped that as a possible crime on the warrant that they delivered to me. So that means that whatever was on that initial affidavit wasn't true. And that's where this is. It's all falling apart.

I got it. I got it. Just to back up too, because we have a short time left but i'm interested in the underlying can you explain as you have before on your papers because i'm sure the audience is wondering how did ashley biden's alleged diary get into the hands of these people who gave it to you and that's all you know you've you've talked about it now but like as i understand it it was in a house in flor Florida that of a guy she used to live with or stayed with for a while during the pandemic. And she left and she left a bunch of her stuff.

This is the allegation. She left piles of her stuff and included in that was a diary. And then a couple of that guy's other friends found it and brought it to you. Is that right? It's something to that effect. All the facts laid out in this document we filed, apparently it was abandoned. We were informed of that. It appears to have not even been stolen by the sources that gave them to us. Abandoned in this house in Delray, Florida. We sent a couple of our journalists down there and transported the

diary back to New York. And we hired a handwriting expert. We did everything I could do to try to get the 100% certainty. Okay, I get it, I get it. But wait, I want to ask you this. And I know the handwriting expert said, I think it's hers. Were the entries, and again, we're not going to give the audience a sense of why it's controversial, but the content in the diary that's controversial, is it out of place? Does it appear to be sequential to the other content in the diary? In other words, is it like, oh, now there's a two-page insert alleging inappropriate things, or does it appear to have the entire national security apparatus the United States government is trying to intimidate and stop me, evidently the diaries have been authenticated by also the New York Times. So now in hindsight, the answer is yes. And again, if someone is, the Biden children appear to be seriously troubled individuals,

right? So if they're writing, the musings of them in a diary, I don't know how much credibility to give those words. Even if they're authentic, I don't know if what they're alleging occurred. So it's hard for me to make an assessment. I'm not qualified to make an assessment about the penmanship and the writing and what it means. It could be poetry. It could be a lot of things. People say a lot of things in private that I don't feel ethically as a journalist,

particularly as a journalist who deals in visual cooperation, not just according to people familiar with the matter like the New York Times does. I have to see it for myself or I'm not comfortable publishing it. I'm not a psychologist or an addiction counselor. Or get her or someone who knew her at the time. I don't know. I can't comment on that. Yeah. To go on the record. Well, you did the right thing in trying to run down the sourcing. You didn't wind up publishing it. And the feds are going to have to show their cards that they don't get to keep it a secret forever. And I know you've got a great legal team and we'll, and if they're watching Megan,

I hope they are watching. Cause I'm going to say it on the record here, your bullies, you hid behind the badge and it's a disgrace what you've done. It's terrifying. It's obviously hurt my team, but you're in too deep now and there's no way out. What you've done here is unprecedented. It's unconstitutional. It's wrong. It's morally wrong. And even the ACLU and the reporters committee are now on our side. In fact, even the New York times published a positive article. Even they, Mike Schmidt was like, whoa, this is crazy. Secret warrants. They said it was highly unusual, never happened before. And now we have Apple and Google warrants as well. So I hope they're watching this, Megan. Wow. James, thank you so much. We'll continue to follow it. Thank you for having me on. We'll be right back. Don't go away.

This hour, we wanted to take a deep dive into the recent moves by workers in several major U.S. companies to unionize, including companies like Starbucks, known for its progressive stances on social issues, but it seems not so progressive when it comes to its workers unionizing. Here to help explain to us what's happening and the future of work in a post-pandemic world, a guy who's got his finger on the pulse of the working class and wants us to know a bit more about them, Maximilian Alvarez. He's the editor in chief of The Real News Network, host of the podcast Working People, and author of The Work of Living. Max, great to have you here. Thank you so much for having me.

So I understand you have an interesting background. You grew up more conservative, very Catholic. Your dad is a Mexican immigrant, and you were listening to Larry Elder and Rush Limbaugh, and just sort of that's where you were politically. And then something changed, and it happened right around the financial crisis of 2008. Walk us through it. Yeah, well, thank you for asking. I was raised very Catholic, very conservative, like you said, in Southern California, Orange County, right? In many ways, it's kind of the heart of the Reagan revolution. And yeah, when you grow up in Southern California and you're driving on the freeways everywhere

and you're stuck in traffic, talk radio has a really outsized ideological influence on you. And so Larry Elder, Rush Limbaugh, my mom listened to Dr. Laura Schlesinger. These were very much the voices of my childhood. And then after 1996, we had Fox News on all the time. I would say my mom largely described herself as a Reagan Democrat. My dad was very much, you know, died in the wool Republican. The first person he ever voted for when he became a citizen was Ronald Reagan. And in 2016, he also voted for Donald Trump. But like you said, we've had kind of a long period of transition that is very much tied to, you know, what a lot of other folks in this country have

been going through over the past 30 or 40 years. So I think that in the 90s, when we were in the kind of post-Cold War moment, when we had the dot-com boom, when it really felt like capitalist industry and liberal democracy had triumphed and the pie was going to be big enough for all of us to get a piece. It really felt like that was the case in the 1990s. And so that's why my generation, you know, focused so much on going to the best college that we could possibly get into, worked our butts off, you know, like to get there. And then everything kind of came crashing down in 2008. And I graduated college in 2009. So like many others got spat right out into the recession. And it wasn't great. It wasn't great for millions upon millions of people in the country and around the world.

And eventually, that American dream that my folks had worked so hard for that had secured us that elusive middle-class existence where they were able to buy a house, they were raising a family, they felt pride in their work and their place in the world, it all disappeared. So we ended up losing the house that I was raised in. And my folks, their economic lives were turned upside down, as was mine. So after college, I ended up working mainly as a temp at factories and warehouses in Southern California for 12, 13, 14 hours a day, which is very brutal work. But I've also worked as a pizza delivery guy, retail waiter, so on and so forth. But this particular moment about 10 years ago was really, I think, eye-opening for me because we're not a perfect family, but we very

much felt like we had done what was asked of us, right? That we had worked hard, we had put our heads down, studied as hard as we could, saved what we could, yada, yada, yada. And it just wasn't enough like it was for so many people. And then we kept hearing about this recovery, right? During the Obama administration, we were looking around like, recovery for whom, right? It looks like just the people at the top are getting off scot-free and the rest of us are being left to flounder. And that's what it felt like as we were in the process of losing everything. But, you know, again, it was that sort of period for all of us that I think forced us to sort of confront, you know, the reality in front of us and how disconnected that reality was from the America that we believed in, right?

This seemed to be a government and a financial and economic system that was more concerned with protecting the profits of the people at the top than the millions upon millions of people who were floundering, right? Which, you know, is where a lot of people ended up voting for Trump, like my dad, where a lot of people ended up getting really excited about Bernie Sanders because they were speaking to the very real pain that so many people were feeling. And they were feeling the desperation that so many of us were kind of stewing in. And so I think, you know, as I've talked about on my podcast, Working People and on other interviews, that was really the moment where I think I started to sort of move more in a leftward direction. But it was also a moment where my folks really kind of

started to change their thinking as well, because I think for a number of years, we were just punishing ourselves. A global recession was entirely our fault, and we just kept thinking about what could we have done differently to avoid this tremendous pain, this embarrassment. We receded in to ourselves. We cut ourselves off from our church, our family, our friends, and we just stood in silence and suffered in silence. And even our family started to fall apart a bit. And we were losing each other because we were punishing ourselves so mercilessly for what was a very big system-wide global problem. And I don't think it was until I was taking smoke breaks and regular breaks, just kind of talking to the other guys at the warehouse. We came from such different

backgrounds. Some were ex-convicts, some were undocumented folks, some like me, like a college degree, but we were all there. We were all talking about how much that job meant to us, but also how hard the work was and how little of a say we had in our working conditions and so on and so forth. At the same time, my dad, to get by, to pay rent, was driving for Uber and Lyft. And I think that there was something really important there because just to keep his ratings up, right, he started talking to his passengers. You know, my dad's a very affable guy, but he's not a very talkative guy. But in

that situation, you know, he's trying to make polite conversation. And it was then that he started to realize that he was driving people his age who were also immigrants, who had also lost their homes, who were also lost their homes, who were headed to their second or third job. And that was when he started to realize, oh, it's not just me, right? Other people are going through this. And my mom had similar experiences herself. And so that really clued me into the power of workers sharing their stories with one another and not just taking all of that burden on ourselves and suffering in silence and feeling like every single injustice of this system is our personal fault.

There has to be more going on here. And so that's why I started doing the work that I did. I joke that in a lot of ways, I started the podcast. You believe in personal responsibility. You believe in hard work. You believe in the American dream. But when you keep bumping up against it and doing all those things without results for too long, you learn other lessons, right? There might be a shared responsibility here amongst corporate America to help keep the roads clear that I want to travel on, or at least travel a bolt. You if it can't just be full of roadblocks and then you just keep looking at me saying, try harder. I think that's exactly right. Right. And that was, that was one of the big things that I realized, right? Because again,

growing up, I had always just kind of assumed and I, and I had been told, right, that if folks weren't advancing in their jobs, if they weren't, you know, working towards that comfortable, dignified middle-class or upper middle-class existence, or even if they were, if they weren't advancing in their jobs, if they weren't working towards that comfortable, dignified middle class or upper middle class existence, or even if they weren't shooting higher to be one of the entrepreneurs, that it was their fault, that they just didn't want the rewards enough and they deserved a lot that they got in life. That was very much how I thought of the situation when I was growing up. After the recession, again, I started talking to my co-workers and I was like, these aren't bad people. These people work harder than anyone I've ever met. Why aren't they advancing? There are other structural issues here that is keeping us from being able to advance,

like the fact that at this particular warehouse, they had figured out that they could stock their workforce with over 80% of temps who had no bargaining rights, no protections, could be fired at the drop of a hat. And then you could just bring in whoever was waiting at the temp agency that morning. Every morning I would show up at 4.30 in the morning and there was a huddled mass of folks outside of the gate just hoping that someone didn't show up that day. And that's what my folks started to realize as well. Everyone does have that personal responsibility. I still very much, yeah, of course, believe in that. But I think it became increasingly clear to a lot of people around the country that we had been holding up our end of the bargain. We had been working hard and you can see the results. American workers' productivity has just been a straight upward line for the past 40 years. And yet our wages have more or less stagnated over that time. And the fruits of that productivity have largely been siphoned off by the people at the top. So we have been more productive. We have been working harder. We have been working

longer and producing more. And people have been getting richer, just not you. That's the thing, right? It's like you look at Jeff Bezos. That's the best example, right? Like, look at him. How many yachts does he have? How many private jets? How many spaceships? And the Amazon workers are unhappy and miserable and trying to find a way to have a better life. So can I ask you before we get to modern day and the unionization attempts and so on, what changed between, you know, the 1940s, the 1950s, when you could have, you could make a sort of livable wage and you could have the house and the two car garage and the 2.3 children and the dog to, you know, flash forward to 2009,

where we had the housing collapse. It was a nightmare. It was the Great Recession. And all we were told was, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine without people actually feeling it. You know, corporations were still greedy back then. We were still capitalists. The goal was still to make money. So why did the system work better then versus the way it works now? It's a fantastic question that I don't have enough time to answer in full. So I would just I would start by just encouraging folks to read as much as you can about this, because we are often kind of conditioned to forget this history. But it's our history. If we want to know how to get out of the problems that we're talking about here, we should look to how we got out of them before, or we should try to understand better the conditions that have created the crises that we're dealing with now that have prevented more working people

from being able to advance, from being able to have that dignified life to having a voice in their workplace, so on and so forth. I'd say it was a number of things. I actually went on Marianne Williamson's show last week, and I kind of gave a more fuller history of this. So if folks want to hear me talk about it there, I would say go check that out. In a lot of ways, what I said then is that there were kind of poison pills put into labor law in the 1940s that are still plaguing us today. And this was largely a response to the tremendous explosion of the labor movement in the mid-30s up to the mid-1940s. We saw just a humongous wave of unionization efforts, really militant worker action like the Flint sit-down strike, workers actually occupying plants to bring the most notorious anti-union employer

in the country to the bargaining table and they didn't come to the bargaining table until the governor of the state basically refused to send in troops to put down the worker strike so like it was a very contentious time workers made a lot of gains they had every right to be pissed off after you know going through the great depression um But then the moment that the kind of forces on the other side had an opening in the 1940s, they took it. And so they pushed through things like Taft-Hartley in the late 1940s, which really limited the tools that labor had in the previous decade and the tools that allowed labor to grow in that decade.

So I won't go into the details there, but that Google tapped Hartley, look up the ways that it is limited, you know, what unions can do and how they can grow and so on and so forth. Then we kind of have, you know, this longer arc that includes problems within the labor movement, larger, larger sort of geopolitical and economic forces, and then also very targeted policy changes that, you know, I guess we put under the umbrella called neoliberalism that took hold in the last third of the 20th century. But obviously, we remember the 1970s were not a great time. It was kind of when the post-war boom sort of ran out of steam. We were dealing with inflation. We were dealing with economic and political turmoil. And so the mechanisms that,

like our government and industry came up with to solve that from the late 1970s onwards, a big part of that was we need to go to war with labor, right? We need to kind of declare open season on the labor movement and decrease labor costs. And that's kind of what happened from the Volcker monetary shock that jacked up interest rates and changed the calculus of business owners for how they factor in labor costs, the ability of corporations to move with free trade agreements to move to different countries more freely, where they could find cheaper labor and so on and so forth. That was very much a way to undercut the gains that the labor movement had meant. And as I said, I grew up hearing about all the problems with labor and having learned more about them, there are problems there too. The fact that labor was always split within itself, it gave up

its more militant focus on improving folks' conditions, and it focused more on holding on to what it had. It attacked its left wing. It made a more concessionary kind of agreement with management. So there are a lot of factors here. But as you said, the fact is, union density in this country has been on just a steady decline. It is now at record lows, barely over 10% of the American workforce is unionized, as I said, even as workers have been more productive and have been seeing fewer and fewer shares of the productivity that they are generating. When we're talking about life under Obama after the alleged recovery and how you're being told not to believe your lying eyes, it's interesting because you mentioned this is what drew a lot of people to Trump and Bernie Sanders.

And I think that's exactly right. And then under Trump, things did get better. I don't think that's disputable. We just had Jason Reilly on the show not long ago, writer for The Wall Street Journal. And he was writing in particular about how one of the untold stories of the Trump presidency was the extent to which black economic fortunes improved and just lower, you know, working class or lower educated, more working class workers lot improved. This is from an article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal January 28th. But he has a book out called Black Boom. He is black. And he writes over the first three years of Mr. Trump's

presidency, blacks and Hispanics experienced record low rates of unemployment and poverty, while wages for workers at the bottom of the income scale rose faster than they did for management. And he goes on to say that part of what made the Trump boom unique was who benefited the most. The economy grew in ways that mostly benefited low income and middle class households, categories that cover a disproportionate number of blacks. He writes between 2017 and 19, median household incomes grew 15.4% amongst blacks, just 11.5% amongst whites. I know I realize you're not making this a racial issue. I just think it's interesting. And then he says the investment bank Goldman Sachs released a paper in March 2019 that showed pay for those at the

lower end of the wage distribution, rising at nearly double the rate of pay for those at the upper end. Average hourly earnings were growing at rates that hadn't been seen in almost a decade. CNBC reporting that the bottom half of earners are benefiting more than the top half under the Trump presidency. In fact, about twice as much. So to me, that's very interesting. I'm not a number cruncher or a math person, but this is, I think, is why Trump wound up doing so well with those groups electorally, despite some of his rhetoric, is that they did feel an improvement under him. It wasn't perfect, but it was an improvement. Do you agree with that? I mean, I think like under any administration, it's always like a mixed bag, right? Because I think, so first, yeah, there were, you know, plenty of workers at those lower tiers who did

see kind of wage growth, which was awesome. I don't care who does it. If that's the case, I'm all for it, right? You it. Right. But at the same time, I think that one facet to that that is very much bipartisan is, as I said, after the 2008 financial crash and then the long recession, inequality continued to sort of skyrocket. Workers were very much left to flounder. So like their wages going up, their working conditions improving a bit is awesome, but they were coming from a very low point and they still had a lot of ground to make up, which I think is also why you saw a lot of strikes at this point. So the strike wave, quote unquote, that we had last year during COVID-19, it's important for folks to remember

that it's not like strikes just happened right then like there were strikes going on before the pandemic like the red for ed movement where you had teachers in red states and blue states like cal from california to oklahoma launching these massive strikes saying we have been underfunded and understaffed and and our resources have been gutted for decades we are not able to do our job and serve our children and our communities the way that we can. We're losing teachers. And so they struck. Right. And they actually just universes ahead of us. So that's a very much a long running problem that anyone on the Republican or Democratic side is going to have to figure out how to do something about it because it's a really, really big problem. But the other thing that I think is really significant, Megan, that if anyone does refuse

to acknowledge this, they are being dishonest. But like something happened during the COVID-19 pandemic that was really paradigm changing. Right. It started under Trump and Trump's administration, carried over for a bit into Biden's administration. But unlike the 2008 recession, where the establishment essentially threw its arms around the banks and big capital and protected them at all costs, while the rest of us were left, you know, like to our own devices. And we've spent the past decade really trying to make up that loss before COVID-19 hit. Unlike that time, we actually experienced something incredible where the government injected money directly into people's pockets with the stimulus checks, with the child care benefits

and the unextended employment benefits. We saw massive, even historic drops in poverty levels in large part because of this government aid, which was incredible. And now, unfortunately, we're sort of seeing the ruling class claw it all back by jacking up prices and rents. Inflation over the past year has already outpaced the wage growth that happened last year. And so whatever gains workers are making year by year are important, but in the grander scheme of things, we still have a very, very long way to go. Makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I've always been somebody who distrusts unions because it seems to me that the unions get in control and then they don't even actually do what's best for the union members. They seem to do what's best for the union leaders. And the teachers union has been so irritating as somebody who's got three kids in these schools. I follow it. I follow it closely, though. My kids are in private school. And I know that you've spoken out in defense of teachers unions. But, you know, for me, like what happened in Chicago this year was just dreadful. And I felt like the kids came last. The leaders of the teachers unions came first. And many of the teachers themselves were supporting this never ending refusal to go back to work. And who suffered?

The kids. The suicides rates were climbing astronomically, the depression rates. And it was basically the Chicago teachers saying, well, we're not going back. It's not safe. As they released video of themselves dancing, dancing in their homes and their interpretive dance. Like, don't send me back. It's not safe. It's like, well, you look perfectly safe. And what's actually happening now is that we have dramatic mental health, a dramatic mental health crisis happening for the students who

aren't allowed to go back to school because no teachers are showing up. So I think there's a lot there. So I'll to i'll try to um approach it piecemeal right i mean i think the first thing to say is there is no one in this situation who is not suffering right um you know this is this is something that i i would i think that we can at least agree on right is that i don't know just just talking to teachers not just in chicago but all over the country teacher like i, there were massive strikes before the pandemic because we have had a sustained crisis in our education system that is also hurting children, right? And this is what a lot of teachers have told me over the past two

years. They said, like, look, trust us. Like, we are as concerned with students, you know, like mental health as anyone because we're guarding them every day. We're working with them. We're trying to help them learn. And if they, you know, are feeling depressed, if they are undervalued and having issues, like we can't do that. We can't do our job, which is why teachers struck in such massive numbers beforehand. And they were pointing out, they said, if we actually cared about students' mental health, then why are there so few mental health counselors in schools across the country? Why has that been gutted over the course of decades where you have like one counselor essentially floating around a massive district who could only be in certain schools for certain hours during the week? That's not helping anybody.

So the problems that students are facing. That was not. But during the pandemic, Chicago and many other cities got tons of money. I mean, Chicago got $1.8 billion. And a lot of that was meant to be dedicated toward finding counselors and people who would help the teachers do the teaching and so on. And they weren't hiring them. I mean, I think it was just March, right? We're in April.

It was last month that there was a report something like over 540 million hadn't been spent yet. Just sitting there. Like piss poor management, um, from the people who get the money. That's not the teacher's fault. I agree. I'm pissed about that. Well, I'm just saying it's not, it's not a question of money. They have plenty of money, but like the teachers and I get it, I get it. They're mad. Cause it's like, in addition to teaching, now you have to sterilize the chair and you have to like, make sure all the protocols are being followed. And it's like, well, that's a lot. There's a lot

for me to do, but I'm really not that sympathetic as you can hear, because at the end of the day, it's like, get the kids in there. They, when the kids sit at home, they get abused in Chicago, South side, they get shot. They, um, their mental health goes down the toilet in ways that are not going to be recapturable for many of them. So I don't really care. You know, I feel like I'm sure it is hard. A lot of us have hard jobs. You had a hard job working in the factory. My mom's had a hard job working as a nurse, but we do it and we do it. We especially do it if you're taking care of a sick patient or taking care of kids. Well, so I, you know, I think that that's an important point. And I guess I would say that for folks feeling and listening, right, like, yeah, I think it's important that we're having this discussion because there have been too few

of them over the past two years, right, between left and right to say, okay, we clearly got a problem. How are we going to fix it? And so, you know, if I don't sway anyone, that's fine. I guess I would just really stress to people that as like, it is my job, as you said, to, to interview workers, not just teachers, but folks in healthcare, gig workers, manufacturing workers, farm workers, so on and so forth. Like this is what I do every day. And I can tell you that regardless of how we feel about it, whether we're sympathetic or not, there is a crisis happening right now. And we're going to be feeling the effects of it because we're running out of workers, right? The exodus of healthcare workers after two years of this is incredible. Like, I mean, these healthcare workers are just so beaten down. They've lost so much faith

in the CDC and everyone, and they're leaving. As our teachers, there was a Minneapolis teacher strike a couple of weeks ago. And this is what they were saying. As are teachers. There was a Minneapolis teacher strike a couple of weeks ago, and this is what they were saying. They're like, we can't retain teachers because we're so understaffed, people are so overworked, and they're tired of being vilified that they're just leaving. Eventually, we're going to run out of people to actually stock these classrooms, and that's going to hurt the kids too. So again, if you don't think that unions are the solution, that's fine, but you have to think of some way to fix this because we are actually in the middle of a slow moving crisis that is going to extend for years. And if we all want our children to have the best

education possible, and if we all acknowledge that something about our current Frankenstein's monster of an education system is not working, then we should sit down and try to talk about how to fix it and improve it for everyone instead of just making these life rafts that help some and not others. It's a much bigger structural problem that's going to impact everyone. So we have to sit down, put our heads together and come to a solution on this because it's not going to go away. No, you're absolutely right. I've been following the mass exodus of teachers from the teaching profession. And yes, health care is another one. Of course, that got hit hard during the pandemic. So we have to be solutions oriented because we need we need people in there. I just see union leaders as an obstacle as opposed to

somebody who's going to help us fix this. But I don't see corporate America stepping up and doing its part either. So I don't have the solution. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing and having the discussions. And there's the public sector unions, of course, and then there's the private sector and the private sector is starting to, they're falling like this domino and that domino and the other domino, because there you can really see how much is the CEO making? How much am I making? How how's he enjoying his yacht? I haven't taken a vacation ever. And I heard you talking with my pal Emily Jasinski over on The Federalist about how some of these workers are like, I just want to see a beach. I don't I've never seen a, I've never taken my child to see a beach. They don't need

to go on the spaceship, right? So it's, that is a real problem that needs a real solution. That's where I'm going to pick it up right after this. I'm going to squeeze in a break and we'll talk about what's happening at Amazon and some of these other mass corporations where those at the top are riding high without much thought it appears for those who are at the bottom. All right, don't go away. That's where we're going to pick it up with Max right after this. As I understand it, at Amazon now, we've had a couple of attempts at unionization,

one in Staten Island that worked, one in Bessemer, Alabama, right, Alabama, that didn't work. And what does that tell us? Like, what's happening? What's the bigger picture about what's happening here at Amazon? Yeah. So I would answer that by way of, like you said, big picture first, then kind of winnowing down, right? Because I would say to folks watching and listening, right, that if you're trying to make sense of the sort of labor action that's happening right now, consider the fact that we just got two very clear examples of what workers are so pissed off about and why they're increasingly resorting to unionization efforts or kind of like ramping up militancy within the existing unions to fight these issues. The first

that we kind of talked about a little bit earlier is the inflation problem, right? As I said, inflation grew 7% last year, already outpaced the average wage growth, which is around 4.7%. And so we're being told right now that it's, oh, it's the war, right? It's supply chain issues, or it's workers demanding higher wages that's driving up costs. But the very simple lie that more and more workers and consumers are seeing through right now is the fact that, you know, like on average, corporate profits hit a 70-year high last year. And this is very much something that I heard from a lot of folks who were on strike last year. I'll give one example. We all remember the John Deere strike, or maybe you didn't hear about it, but 10,000 John Deere workers in multiple states went on strike last fall. And one of the things that they kept pointing to was they had made that company more profitable than it had ever been in the very year that this strike was happening, the very year that the company was trying to take more

from workers and push them into this two-tier wage system or even a three-tier wage system where future workers are going to get screwed over and everyone's going to gradually lose their benefits and their pay and so on and so forth. John Deere was trying to take more from its workers who had sacrificed and worked during a pandemic during its most profitable year on record. So when that's the case, you as a worker are going to say, well, I'm getting gypped off here, right? And at the same time, this is not an aberration. We have CEOs and private equity fund managers on earnings calls bragging about seeing these record revenues, bragging about jacking up prices on all of us. And the list goes on and on. Exxon, BP, Kellogg's, which also

experienced a strike last year. McDonald's, Amazon, whose business model has exploded over the course of the pandemic because more people are staying home, more people are ordering from Amazon. The amount that Amazon has grown over the past two years is truly astronomical. And yet it is still pushing its workers to the brink. It is still treating them like robots. I was down there in Bessemer this time last year when the first union election vote was happening. And just because that first election failed and the pro union votes were soundly defeated doesn't mean all the issues that we were talking about regarding working conditions at Amazon just suddenly went away. They didn't. Does anyone remember at the end of last year, we had horrifying stories like an Amazon warehouse in Illinois that collapsed during a tornado. Six workers died. And we later found out that Amazon managers were telling them to stay there, to keep working. They couldn't leave. They couldn't call their families. And now people are dead and they're never coming back. To say nothing of the workers,

again, at Amazon who have been cycled in, broken down, and spat out. This is part of Amazon's business model. They have a turnover rate on average of 150%. And what I tell people is like, if you're workers trying to organize your workplace in an Amazon facility that has 5,000, 6,000, 8,000 workers, that's like trying to organize a bathtub because Amazon has made it so that you're constantly pouring in new workers while other workers are leaving because the work is so brutal and folks can hardly stay there long enough to recoup the benefits that Amazon touts as a good reason to work there, yada, yada, yada. And so the inflation thing, again, like when workers' wages and their demands for better pay and benefits,

and they're told no at the same time that the companies they work for are raking in record profits and flying to space. There's going to be a big disconnect there. It's annoying. I understand that. It's a bit annoying, right? And Christian Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, had a great quote where he said, after they successfully unionized, voted to unionize in Staten Island, he said, I want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space because while he was up there, we were down here organizing a union. And Jeff Bezos really spat in the face of his workers after he took his little vanity space trip by saying, oh, I want to thank all the workers because you paid for this. That is just such a callous way to spit in the face of your workers who are peeing in bottles because they can't make it to the bathroom without getting their records docked for taking time off tasks, so on and so forth.

Amazon workers are heavily surveilled. We already know this, yada, yada, yada. So that sort of disconnect between corporate profits and worker wages has been a big driving force throughout a lot of the strikes that we saw over the past year. Let me ask you some numbers. This is what the other side says. My pals over at the National Review are more conservative. And they they were writing up about the Bessemer, Alabama facility where the unionization attempt failed. And they said, okay, they weren't exactly, these workers were not exactly on the fence when they were last asked to vote on this question. More than 70% of the Amazon workers in Bessemer voted against forming a union chapter.

They said the median pay there is between 15 and $20 an hour in the warehouses with delivery drivers making around $70,000 a year and getting nice benefits. That is not big money compared to what a software developer makes at Amazon or anywhere else, but it is pretty good money compared to what workers typically make in warehouse jobs. So what are they missing? Well, they're showing you only part of the fuller picture, right? Because as folks who were in the warehouse in Bessemer last

year and those who are still in it there have been quick to point out when Amazon's kind of outside consultants that they hired to essentially turn people against the union, when those consultants kind of make that same point, the workers can point directly to the statistics and say, well, yeah, in Bessemer, which is a de-industrialized town, majority black town that is twice the national poverty rate, around a $15, you know, like hourly wage for warehouse workers is higher than the average in that town. But in the greater Birmingham area, union workers doing similar work get paid on average $2 more. Right. And so, like, it's, you know, like, if we're going to have a real discussion about this, we got to be honest and stop trying to treat workers like dupes, right? We got to,

we got to show them that like, actually there are, you know, like other people doing similar work to you who have different conditions. If you have all the facts and want to make that decision, have a union election, right? And I guess the other thing that I would say, because we can't push the defeat under the rug. However, we can point to the fact that the National Labor Relations Board deemed that Amazon had illegally tampered with that election, which is why workers at that facility in Bessemer have gotten a second shot at an election, right? That doesn't just happen. That happens when the actual agency that is charged with reviewing labor relations says, hey, this

massive company broke the rules and tilted the chessboard in favor of itself against, you know, like its workers desire to hold a union election. They deserve another shot. I think it's a good example that like if you don't like the whole thought about right to work states and so on was that it would give corporate America to do right by the workers. Like you you want to you don't want to be told what to do by the unions. Do right by the workers and you won't have to deal with this problem. And if you don't do right by the workers, things are going to go south.

They're going to they are going to revolt at some point. And we're seeing it just feels to me like we're seeing more and more of that. Love the corporations not not doing right by the workers, not wanting to take care of their staff in the way they should. And I mean, I know you've been talking about Kroger. That's a great example. Now we're seeing Starbucks, big union push there. The numbers are OK. Starbucks said quarterly profit jumped 31 percent at the end of last year to 816 million.

That's amazing. Per The New York Times. Meanwhile, more than 200 Starbucks locations across the country and some 30 states have filed petitions to organize because the old trickle down doesn't seem to be happening outside of the coffee pot. You're right. I mean, like in the end, it really is that simple. Like, you know, the trickle-down theory was nice. It sounded good in principle. We have enough data to see now it didn't work. It didn't work for us, right? It worked for a very small few people, right?

But for the vast amount of workers who, as I said, have been working longer, working harder, and been more productive over the past half century, and yet have seen the majority of their wages stagnate as the cost of living continues to go up. We've gone the longest period in American history without raising the federal minimum wage like there. And all the while, the fruits of that productivity are getting pocketed by shareholders and CEOs and so on and so forth. Starbucks, as you mentioned, is having this kind of really incredible sort of unionization effort, a grassroots bottom-up effort at the very moment that it recorded 31% profit increase last quarter.

And Kevin Johnson, the CEO, had a massive increase in pay to $20.4 million in 2021 before resigning. And now CEO Howard Schultz is back in there. So again, you're seeing people say like, okay, from inflation to COVID policies that we had no say over whatsoever. We've lost coworkers who have died. How can we ever measure it like that? Or how come we got no say over when we reopened or any of that? We were just told to go back to work, to shut up, to be happy with what we were given at the same time that our companies praised us as essential in the public-facing realm, but they didn't actually treat us like we were essential on the shop floor. So there's a really big problem there, and workers are saying we've had enough of it. And I just wanted to pick up on the Kroger thing because I know that we're at time, and I'd be

remiss if I didn't mention two things. Because when it comes down to it, having a union, being in a union should mean and always should mean that you and your coworkers have each other's backs. That is really it. If it becomes this bureaucracy that you have no say in, there's a problem and you need to fix it. And workers are trying to fix their unions, like in the UAW that just passed a referendum. Now workers can have direct elections of their union leadership and they can vote out the people who aren't serving their interests. So there are people trying to revive and fix unions. But ultimately, what it means is having people's back at work. And that's something that I think we should support, because if you Google the name Evan Seyfried, you will see the

true cost of someone whose co-workers, whose business, the managers and the union itself did not have his back. He was bullied at Ohio Kroger. He was a 20-year employee, dedicated employee, loved his job, and he was bullied by management into committing suicide. And now he's no longer here. And the union failed him. The company failed him. He tried many times to get help and no one was there for him. That should not happen. That cannot happen. At the same time, the 1100 coal miners in deep red Alabama have been on strike for over a year now. And many of them are conservative. And every election year, I hear Republicans go on the campaign trail and say like, oh, we're friends of the humble coal miner. Where have they been over the past year? Where's right wing media been? There's so many people in Alabama who are dying for attention

and they want us to help lift up their struggle and we are ignoring them and we can't, but they have each other's backs. That is why they've been able to hold the line for over a year under great duress. And that is what the labor movement ultimately means. It means we're not all on our own at work. We're not all solely at the behest of top-down decisions made by people who don't have to listen to us. It means that we should have more of a say in our working conditions in the world that we live in. And even when I was a conservative, I would have said, you know what, that sounds good because I'm looking around me and I'm seeing the results of a society that is managed by a handful of powerful decision makers who don't listen to working people. And we are seeing the destruction

that that system wrecks. So I am all for workers having more of a say in how this society is run. And that starts in the workplace and it goes beyond that. Yeah. Well, very well said. I know it's during the pandemic, obviously, it wasn't a great time, but there were some upsides to it, including the chance by some to reflect on whether they'd been living their lives the way they wanted to, whether they'd been spending their time on this earth the way they wanted to. And that was working class and on up. Of course, the rich, it was like a vacation.

You know, they got to work from home. They was like the laptop class. But even the working class deemed essential and thrown in there and so on, started to see things differently. I've heard you talk about that too. And I think if there's one advantage of all of this, if people are unhappy with the way they're living, with being forced to work this number of hours for very little pay and having no life and not seeing the ocean and not seeing their children, then they will demand change. The human spirit will demand change. There's only so long people can handle living in oppressed circumstances like that when their heart desires something else. So that's hopeful. That's hopeful because that change

ultimately won't be denied. The people are leaving the workforce because it won't be denied and they'd need jobs eventually. They're going to have to come up with another solution. So hopefully the marketplace will respond. Max, thank you for shining a light on it and for coming on and telling your story. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. All the best to you. Don't forget to tune in tomorrow when we have Peter Schiff's coming back. He was one of our most popular guests. We're going to dig into the latest inflation crisis and what it means for all of us. We'll see you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.