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“I used to hunt pedophiles,” a man in a tuxedo who calls himself Raider tells me. “It’s a big problem in America.” It’s evening at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, and we are at a black-tie event celebrating YouTubers, news influencers, and an expanding constellation of MAGA-affiliated self-identified reporters: the Citizen Journalist Gala, hosted by Raider’s boss, James O’Keefe. The house band, perched at the edge of a pool, is lacing into a smooth Al Jarreau hit. The singer shouts, “Welcome to paradise!”
For about two decades, O’Keefe, who is forty-one, has captured ostensibly incriminating hidden-camera footage of mid-level government officials and employees at major corporations, in some instances by hiring men and women to pretend to go on dates with targets—a number of whom have subsequently sued O’Keefe and claimed their comments were selectively edited. He is best known for Project Veritas, an organization he founded in 2010. In 2023, he was forced out; the board sued O’Keefe, accusing him of “financial malfeasance” and spending “an excessive amount of donor funds in the last three years on personal luxuries.” He denied wrongdoing, saying, “I don’t know how I can do my job here if I can’t transport myself around the United States.” A lawyer for Project Veritas says the organization dismissed its claims about eight months ago. But O’Keefe has filed counterclaims, which Project Veritas recently moved to dismiss. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is set to rule on Project Veritas’s motion in December.
When he was spurned by Project Veritas, O’Keefe went on to establish O’Keefe Media Group, where Raider oversees a team of undercover reporters who go by names like Bulldog, Pantera, Nova, Starlight, and Jael. O’Keefe Media Group posts videos on YouTube, to more than four hundred thousand subscribers, and many are seen in the form of viral social media clips. To his critics, O’Keefe is an unethical bad actor committed to creating false or misleading narratives that serve his political agenda. To his fans, including a snaking line of people at Mar-a-Lago grabbing photos with him tonight in front of a step-and-repeat backdrop, he’s a muckraking superstar.
As I talk with Raider, news—reported by major outlets of a kind not represented in the house tonight—is emerging about Trump blessing the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. This would seem right up Raider’s alley. I ask what he thinks of the story. “The DOJ failed,” he says, pointing me to evidence that incriminates Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton—and, via a surreptitious recording of a Justice Department investigator, apparently absolves Trump. Then we’re interrupted: O’Keefe has taken a spot in front of the band to sing a selection of songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!
At the gala, a ticket costs three thousand dollars; reserving a “Platinum Table” for ten—which includes an “Invitation to Sail with James O’Keefe (Weather Permitting)”—runs you a hundred thousand bucks. The event is a chance for the new right to gather and celebrate itself: While Trump freezes out or directly attacks legacy media, MAGA content creators exist in an influential, symbiotic relationship with the White House, where they are welcomed into the press room as never before. The creators echo Trump’s worldview, in which American cities are overrun by undocumented immigrants and roving antifa bands; in turn, federal agencies are uniquely attentive to their content. (Trump’s foundation donated to Project Veritas while O’Keefe was in charge.)
Just a few weeks ago, after O’Keefe filmed a government contractor seemingly admitting to defrauding a federal program for economically disadvantaged businesses by subcontracting beyond the legal allowance, the Small Business Administration quickly suspended the contractor and announced an investigation. (The contractor did not respond to a request for comment; in an interview with O’Keefe Media Group, a member of the indigenous American tribe that owns the contractor said they have not benefited financially from the alleged fraud.) A Biden-era investigation into what Project Veritas depicted as Pfizer’s plans to “mutate” the COVID-19 virus had an advocate in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, who posted on X at the time: “Amazing reporting by James O’Keefe showing us what we already knew: Pfizer is a craven venal homicidal morally bankrupt criminal enterprise that has captured and corrupted its regulators.”
I do some more mingling. A journalist named Julio Rosas—a twenty-nine-year-old former Marine who posts on X, where he has more than two hundred and thirty thousand followers—tells me that, earlier that day, he got some news: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, had messaged him to say, in response to prodding from him and fellow news influencers that the government look into what they identified as European antifa groups, the State Department had officially designated four such groups as terrorist organizations.
The new-right media is a tight-knit scene, Rosas says: “All the homies are here.” Many were also present at the White House this fall during an “antifa roundtable.” Several have worked for or contributed to Turning Point USA, the young-conservatives network created by Charlie Kirk. Rosas is one of the lesser-known names here, but he’s bullish about his career prospects “as long as there’s a left-wing insurrection and the deportations continue and people stay mad about it.” For now, he’s not interested in working for any media company: “Not to sound like a fucking communist, but I want the money to go to me.”
Elsewhere, there are cowboy hats and star-spangled cummerbunds and you have to be careful not to step on the trains of very long, very sparkly dresses. Inside the Trump Spa Store—where you can buy everything from Mar-a-Lago baby onesies to collectible statues depicting Trump’s near assasination (“The Day God Intervened’)—business is brisk.
This evening doubles as an awards show to celebrate the community’s wins. Tonight’s nominees for the “Citizen Journalist Award” include Andy Ngo (1.8 million followers on X), the author of Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy; Cam Higby (more than seven hundred and fifty thousand followers on TikTok), who was part of a wave of influencers visiting the Gaza border before the recent ceasefire to post content exculpating Israel; and Nick Shirley, the first YouTuber to be granted access to El Salvador’s CECOT prison (nearly a million subscribers). There are other notable figures around, including Madison Cawthorn, the former North Carolina congressman, who tells me, regarding O’Keefe, “I’d die for him,” and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, who, while seated behind me, takes off a shoe and a sock and puts his bare foot on my shoulder. (“I did it the way someone with no arms would put their ‘hand’ on his shoulder,” he would later explain. “As in, ‘Excuse me, could I talk to you for a moment, please?’ It was fucking funny.”) O’Keefe’s voice booms: “And now,” he says, “a little Frank Sinatra.”
Over and over again, the gala’s attendees are told that by being here to support O’Keefe and tonight’s honorees, they are doing nothing less than supporting justice. A program printed on thick cardboard tells us that “truth has its enemies, but you have chosen to be its protector.” Inside a gilded ballroom, under a canopy of chandeliers, a donor onstage says, “This is more than a gala, tuxedos, gowns, a check—this is about changing the arc of human history.” As my tablemate Tiffany Dehen, a lawyer and, she jokes, a micro-influencer with a thousand followers on Instagram, puts it, “You’re at the center of the universe. You’re at Mar-a-Lago, baby!”
As the MC, O’Keefe knows just what the crowd wants to hear. “I have no price,” he tells his fans. “I cannot be bought. They do not influence what I do!” Later, he engages in some call-and-response. “We’ve spent millions of dollars paying lawyers because I don’t settle lawsuits! And they know that! Do you guys want me to settle lawsuits?”
The crowd boos: “No!!!” (O’Keefe has been involved in settling at least a few lawsuits.)
Finally, the big moment comes: “the first annual Academy Award, if you will,” O’Keefe says, for “citizen journalist of the year.” Aldo Buttazzoni, O’Keefe Media Group’s director of communications, explains that the winner was selected by a panel of judges including O’Keefe, Steve Bannon, and Lara Logan, a former CBS reporter who has become a prominent right-wing critic of legacy media. “Their videos have been seen hundreds of millions of times,” Buttazzoni says. “Some of them have come within inches of death, all in pursuit of bringing us the truth.”
The award goes to Nick Shirley, who goes up to accept amid cannon blasts of stage-front pyro. In a short speech, he thanks his mom, Brooke, for filming many of his videos. At my table a fan hollers, “This guy made it all the way to CECOT! Wow!” I mosey over to speak to Brooke. As a kid, Shirley was an aspiring YouTuber with no particular political aspirations. When he returned from a Mormon mission trip in Chile, fluent in Spanish, it was Brooke—who was a former journalism student and a content creator herself—who pushed her son to cover the southern border. “When COVID happened and we were being lied to constantly, I just had this in me that I had to tell about the border,” she says. “When he got home from his mission, I was like, ‘I know what we need to do.’ He hadn’t been living in America. I was feeding him information. ‘Ask this, do this.’” She laughs. “And it just skyrocketed. And now he’s learned it all.”
Friends and supporters come up to say congratulations, but before she turns to them, Brooke offers a full-throated defense of her son’s work. “What Nick is doing is journalism,” she says. “He’s documenting what is going on in America and in the world. And independent journalists are the ones that are out there. I never saw one reporter down at the border. I’ve never seen any mainstream media at any protests. No one is documenting any of it except for independent journalists.”
Like any work, theirs requires money, and O’Keefe devotes the final portion of the evening to soliciting donations. To the delight of the audience, one of O’Keefe’s undercover reporters—a young blond woman in a red dress—appears, identifying herself by a pseudonym, Heidi Doe. She walks onstage fist-pumping to EDM. “Doing the right thing” is “really scary,” she tells us, but with an “amazing team and amazing God that fills you with courage,” we can “change the world.” She adds: “I can’t do what all of you are doing by donating,” but then again “not everyone can dress up in a tight outfit and go undercover!”
O’Keefe asks the crowd, “What will you do without citizen journalists? What will you do without all the reporting you saw today?” The house lights come on and O’Keefe Media Group employees fan out through the crowd with microphones, soliciting donations on the spot. “Don’t be afraid,” O’Keefe’s director of development says. “You saw the courageousness onstage. Who wants to support James O’Keefe tonight?”
Throughout the night, O’Keefe portrays his expulsion from Project Veritas as a ruthless betrayal—one possibly influenced by company board members with financial interest in Pfizer—that he’s admirably bounced back from with the help of God, his team, and his self-belief. According to Project Veritas, he spent donor money on flights, tequila for his girlfriend, and DJ equipment allegedly bought in pursuit of fulfilling a dream he had to perform at Coachella. O’Keefe has denied misusing funds; when asked for a comment, Buttazzoni says that O’Keefe has an upcoming DJ set to celebrate the life of Charlie Kirk: “We’re very excited for this event! Tickets dropping soon!” In the room, O’Keefe’s message resonates: as Dehen tells me, “He got stabbed in the back.” We hear pledges of five, ten, thirty, fifty thousand dollars—then one for five hundred thousand. “That’s gonna fund a lot of videos,” he says.
While the content creators party at Mar-a-Lago, legacy news outlets grow increasingly fixated on the possibility that newly released DOJ files will clarify Trump’s connection to Epstein. But to this crowd, the mainstream media isn’t merely suspect or corrupt; it is altogether irrelevant. At the Citizen Journalist Gala, all the independent journalists need are each other and an antifa crisis.
As the sun set, the band took a break. A pumped-up rendition of “America the Beautiful” played over the speakers. Outside, everyone turned to one side of the pool, where Scott LoBaido, a MAGA-famous artist, was furiously painting what looked like an abstract American flag. As the song crescendoed, LoBaido peeled a panel off the canvas to reveal a hidden central element—O’Keefe’s proud, beaming face. The crowd shouted: Bravo!
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