The Fascist America That Kamala Promises

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. Anatomy of the State Murray N. Rothbard, Mu... Best Price: $8.12 Buy New $4.75 (as of 07:55 UTC - Details)

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.

The Betrayal of the Am... Murray Rothbard Best Price: $18.83 Buy New $18.00 (as of 04:10 UTC - Details) 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.”

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