Remember when Project Veritas was running a video they'd taken of a church van driving people to polling stations and their whole point was "THEY'RE DRIVING PEOPLE TO POLLING STATIONS" and their followers seriously treated it like they'd caught someone doing something illegal? https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1310598034796019713

What Project Veritas very carefully did not say but what their followers equally carefully heard was "This is evidence of people voting multiple times, as organized by a progressive social institution on behalf of the Democrats."

And not, say, "Some people need rides."

Some of what Project Veritas does is straight-up lies. Some of it is presenting stuff that is true but doesn't mean the thing they know their carefully primed fanbase will think it means. A lot of it is both; that's how they make sure the audience IS primed.

For instance, one of their videos was trying to show that Donald Trump's enemies are the ones inciting violence; they did this by showing footage of someone at a planning session for a protest involving a mascot costume talking about what they would do if someone attacked it.

And it's a very simple and reasonable concern: if you put someone in a full body mascot costume to protest a Trump rally... you're responsible for the safety of someone who can't see well or move quickly and is a highly visible target.

This few seconds of recording of people talking about how they would protect the person in the suit from violence was prefaced with an intro explaining that you would hear them planning to use the suit to incite violence.

The footage was real, but it depicted the exact opposite reality from what Project Veritas wanted to show. And if they'd just shown it without the priming in front of it... well, some of their fanbase still would have heard the intended message, probably.

(In case you're wondering, it was a duck suit. Because "Donald ducks his taxes," if I recall. A timely message!)

By priming the audience, telling them in advance that they were going to hear the planners admitting that they were hoping to incite violence and then playing that very brief footage of them planning for how to handle violence if it happened...

...they steered their audience towards that interpretation. The rest of the video was concerned with linking people visible in the video or mentioned in conjunction with it to that moment, to show they were "in on it" and thus plotting violence.

There's a moment in the Simpsons when Homer, angry over an area code change, stands up after the phone company shows an informational video about it and says, "I ACCUSE THE PHONE COMPANY OF MAKING THAT FILM ON PURPOSE!"

And the executive rolls her eyes and says, "Well, of course we did."

"SHE ADMITS IT!"

And that's Project Veritas in a nutshell.

Sometimes they go the extra mile and fabricate or stage or provoke more outrageous content, like recording a bored official at a party as he nods along and goes, "Oh, yeah, sure, definitely." in response to whatever conspiracy nonsense their mole spouts.

But a lot of the time they will literally just "investigate" something normal and innocuous that is happening completely in the open and then frame it as a dramatic accusation/revelation.

"We caught them red-handed DRIVING PEOPLE TO POLLING STATIONS!"

"Of course we drove people to polling stations. Not everybody has a car."

"THEY ADMIT IT!"