Lethal Lies: When 'Free Speech' Kills. (We MUST make these liars pay)

[Frostlight]

Every time there's an update on the inexorable retribution that Powell, Giuliani, Lindell, and others soon face at the hands of Dominion, I'm reminded that the lies go MUCH farther than sullying the reputation of corporations. There MUST be a way to hold these inhuman cretins accountable for the damage and even death the poison they spread causes.

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On the morning of On November 27, 2015 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Robert Dear Jr. pulled into the parking lot of the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood. Ke’arre Stewart, 29, had just stepped outside to make a phone call when Dear shot him with a semi-automatic rifle. Stewart made it back into the facility to warn the people inside that an armed man was coming, whereupon staff attempted to move everyone to safety while he succumbed to his wounds. At some point before police arrived, Dear also shot and killed 35 year-old Jennifer Markovsky who was there for a friend of hers, and University of Colorado, Colorado Springs police officer Garrett Swasey, 44. After police broke into the waiting room where Dear was holding out, there was an exchange of gunfire. Eventually Dear surrendered and was taken into custody. By the end of the attack, 9 other people, 5 of whom were police officers, had been wounded and taken to hospitals.

Before his arrest, while being arrested, and during the interview after his arrest, Dear was rambling, barely coherently, about his anti-abortion ideas, the government, and Obama, but he uttered one very clear, particular, and peculiar phrase repeatedly; “No more baby parts!“.

Even in the anti-choice movement’s parlance, ‘Baby parts’ isn’t a regular buzzword. It really wasn’t a phrase they used as a stand-alone description of any procedure… until the video came out.
Four months before Robert Dear would storm a medical clinic and murder innocent people, a video was released by an organization with the misnomer; “Center for Medical Progress”. The ‘CMP’ was actually a front for its director, David Deleiden, to set up a ‘sting’ operation whose goal was to entrap Planned Parenthood executives in admissions of illegal activity. In that goal, Deleiden failed. However, in the year between recording footage of conversations between Planned Parenthood executives while themselves posing as stem cell researchers and the video being released, Deleiden directed that the raw video be ‘creatively edited’ in order to give the very strong impression that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the deliberate use of unethical techniques for the purpose of harvesting ‘baby parts’ to sell for a profit. In creating this impression that PP was out to ‘kill babies and sell the parts’, Deleiden was somewhat successful.

After a year of editing and injecting context through narration, the video titled, “Planned Parenthood’s Top Doctor, Praised by CEO, Uses Partial-Birth Abortions to Sell Baby Parts” was posted on July 14th, 2015. The video spread like wildfire over the internet. Anti-choice activists went apoplectic over the ‘revelation’ that Planned Parenthood was slicing and dicing living babies to get at those sweet, lucrative, baby-organs and turn a massive profit.



Of course, this was abject bullshit. Planned Parenthood, like many medical facilities, give their patients the option of donating tissue for use in research. If a request for certain tissue is made, PP provides the material and is only compensated for the cost of storage, transport, and processing. In other words; they make ZERO money from ‘baby parts’.

Nonetheless, the video spread its insane narrative far and wide. Far enough for Dear to watch it, along with all the other insane anti-choice propaganda he consumed to feed his growing hatred for an ‘enemy’ that did not exist in anywhere near the form he imagined. Apparently it was that video, after stewing in his chaos-pit of a head for a couple of months, that set him off.

But Millions of other gullible fools who buy into every horror story that confirms their biased world views saw and believed the video. Robert Dear may have been the only one to kill people over it, but he wasn’t the only one who acted on the lie. That lie launched over a dozen investigations to find ‘wrongdoing’ by PP. Added together, the cost to taxpayers, for three congressional, one Justice Department, and nine different state investigations was astronomical. Many states cut funding to the local PPs based on the lies in the video.

In response to the shooting, the CMP stated: “The Center for Medical Progress condemns the barbaric killing spree in Colorado Springs by a violent madman.” Because of course they can hide behind ‘plausible deniability’.

If we work back through recent history, however, we can see very clearly that individuals do not resort to violence from inside a vacuum. They are programmed, like any terrorists, in alignment with their ignorance and fears, to develop an abiding hatred for those they are conditioned to despise. In some cases, the fears are well-founded, in most cases, the fears are not. In all cases, uncivilized violence is seen by the perpetrators as the solution of last (or sometimes first) resort. For those who are prone to violence to begin with, pushing them to cross that line is only a matter of choosing the right language to compel them.

On January 6, 2021, a crowd of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol Building in the moments that elected officials were discharging their Constitutional duty to formalize the electoral victory of president-elect Joe Biden. Like Robert Dear, those rioters did not develop their mindless rancor in a vacuum. They were there because they were commanded to be there by Donald J. Trump; the man they worshipped as a savior. Think I’m exaggerating? I shit you not:

(For the rest, with humor and links, go here.)