I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but when even the liberal Los Angeles Times opens an article with a paragraph like the one that follows, I think fascist is apt:
“California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris is drawing fire from supporters of an anti-abortion activist whose undercover videos and identity cards were seized by the state Department of Justice this week after Harris’ political campaign sought to drum up support for Planned Parenthood.”
The activist is David Daleiden, 27 at the time of the April 2016 raid on his Huntington Beach apartment. In 2016, Harris was running for California’s open U.S. Senate seat. At the time of the raid, Harris’s campaign website was asking supporters “to take a stand and join Kamala in defending Planned Parenthood.”
In the course of Planned Parenthood’s history, no one had presented a greater threat to the organization’s federal funding than the young journalist whose apartment Harris’s agents had just raided.
In the way of background, Daleiden and his partner Sandra Merritt had gone undercover for two years posing as the brokers in the fetal tissue market.
In July 2015 Daleiden started dropping the undercover videos the pair had shot at Planned Parenthood clinics in several states, including California.
The combination of callow words and cruel images, repeated in one video after another, rocked Washington. The timing was good. The 2016 presidential campaigns were revving up, and many Republicans spoke out about what they saw.
“The out-of-sight, out-of-mind mantra that propelled the pro-choice movement for decades is forever gone,” Kellyanne Conway, then a Republican pollster, told the New York Times. Reeling from the blow, even the Times had to wonder whether “the new offensive will succeed in crippling Planned Parenthood.”
Obama, the first president to speak at Planned Parenthood’s national convention, kept his distance from the hubbub. An indifferent media got no closer to the president than his press secretary, Josh Earnest.
On July 30, 2015, a young reporter asked Earnest if Obama had seen the video that was released on that day. The video in question begins with interview footage of harried Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards insisting, “It’s not a fee. It’s not a fee. It’s just the cost of trans- mitting this material.” The undercover footage that follows undercuts everything Richards said.
A doctor at a Planned Parenthood megaclinic in Colorado is seen explaining the clinic’s traffic in body parts. Aware that it is illegal to transfer “human fetal tissue” for “valuable consideration,” the doctor plays semantic games with the would-be purchasers.
“We don’t want to get called on, you know, selling fetal parts across states,” she jokes, unaware she is being recorded. This interview is followed by an on-site review of actual body parts with the doctor and a clinician.
What is impressive is how well Daleiden and Merritt play their roles as buyers. What is unnerving is how casually the doctor and clinician pick through trays of baby parts -- a heart, a brain, a lung -- while talking about the commercial viability of the “fetal cadaver.”
Running for president at the time, Hillary Clinton could not afford to be so dismissive. Although her first instinct was to attack the video producers, Clinton herself began to waver as each new video dropped.
“I have seen pictures from [the videos] and obviously find them dis- turbing,” Clinton told the New Hampshire Union Leader late that July. No one knew better than Clinton, however, what overwhelming force Planned Parenthood and its allies in the Democratic-media complex could bring to bear against a pair of citizen journalists.
For immediate assistance, Planned Parenthood turned to the well-connected fixers at -- where else? -- Fusion GPS. The beleaguered organization contracted with Fusion to review the unedited footage Daleiden had posted online.
Armed with a ten-page report from Fusion, Richards went on the offensive. Convincing people they did not see what they saw would not be easy, but the networks made the task possible by refusing to show the actual videos.
As to the newspapers and online journals, they did their bit by leaving the assessment of the videos to Fusion GPS. Faced with real journalists doing real work, the Obama courtiers reflexively turned stenographer. They welcomed this “forensic study” as heartily as they would Fusion GPS’s notorious “Steele dossier” a year later.
To complete the rout, the ambitious Harris had her agents seize Daleiden’s multiple computers and hard drives as well as the materials he had gathered from Planned Parenthood conferences.
Alexandra Snyder, the director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Harris’s “loyalty to Planned Parenthood” required “her to turn a blind eye to the organization’s criminal activities.” Harris did more than turn a blind eye. “Instead,” said Snyder, “she has launched an inquisition into David Daleiden.”
In 2017, Harris’s successor as attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt and has tied them up in court ever since.
In May 2020, Daleiden filed suit against Becerra and Harris, claiming Harris violated his civil rights by conspiring with Planned Parenthood to silence him.
In Kamala’s America, killing and dismembering unborn babies and marketing their body parts is perfectly acceptable. Reporting on the practice is criminal. If that is not fascistic, I am not sure I know what is.