Sen. Kamala Harris, the former attorney general of California, has joined Sen. Dianne Feinstein in being fact checked by mainstream media. Both made inaccurate claims during the course of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. While Feinstein falsely stated that up to a million women may have died from illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade, Harris’s deception was more subtle and insidious.
Harris tweeted a deceptively edited video clip which made it appear that Kavanaugh was calling all birth control “abortion inducing drugs.” This video left out Kavanaugh’s beginning remarks in which it was clear he was stating the argument made by the plaintiff in the case he was referencing — not that he, himself, holds that particular position.
Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog whistle for going after birth control. He was nominated for the purpose of taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health care decisions. Make no mistake – this is about punishing women. pic.twitter.com/zkBjXzIvQI
— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) September 7, 2018
Harris said in her tweet, “Kavanaugh chooses his words very carefully, and this is a dog whistle for going after birth control. He was nominated for the purpose of taking away a woman’s constitutionally protected right to make her own health care decisions. Make no mistake – this is about punishing women.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what an actual “deceptively edited video” looks like.
The Washington Post gave Harris a stunning Four Pinocchio rating for her tweet, saying “her fellow Democrats should drop this talking point.” Despite this, even though Harris later posted Kavanaugh’s full remarks, she isn’t backing down from her claim that his statement had a hidden agenda. And neither is her spokeswoman, former Hillary Clinton campaign employee Lily Adams — the daughter of Planned Parenthood’s longtime (now retired) president and CEO, Cecile Richards. Richards, as you might recall, is very fond of accusing pro-lifers of deceptive video editing:
The issue at hand is Kavanaugh’s reference to “abortion-inducing drugs.” A plain reading of his sentence, with its reference to “they said,” suggests that he is merely reflecting the plaintiffs’ argument. Harris’s decision to snip those crucial words from her first post on the video is certainly troubling.
But, as we noted, Harris is not backing down. “It had been originally just edited for length like almost all videos are, but we wanted to make sure that if there was any confusion, we posted the full video so people can see,” said spokeswoman Lily Adams. “Our point in the original tweet is unchanged, which is that he uses this term that is extremely political and medically inaccurate with no critique or effort to note any type of disagreement.”
After an uproar, Adams claimed the video “had been originally just edited for length like almost all videos are,” but added that full video was posted to eliminate “confusion.”
It is incredibly ironic for the daughter of Planned Parenthood’s former CEO to have to deal with backlash from an actual deceptively edited video. Even left-leaning Politifact rated Harris’s statements as “False,” noting, “Harris’ tweet takes Kavanaugh’s statement out of context.” The group adds, “Harris cut an important second out of the clip — the attribution. Kavanaugh said, ‘They said filling out the form would make them complicit in the provision of the abortion-inducing drugs that they were, as a religious matter, objecting to.’ ‘They’ refers to a Catholic nonprofit group, Priests for Life.”
This video was deceptively edited to take a person’s remarks out of context to further an agenda. But what about the videos from the Center for Medical Progress, exposing Planned Parenthood and its abortion industry friends and their grisly trade of profiting from the harvesting of aborted fetal body parts? Planned Parenthood, run by Harris spokeswoman Lily Adams’ mother at the time — was relentless in using the term “deceptively edited video” to refer to this footage.
However, CMP’s David Daleiden and Susan Merritt posted full footage as well — almost all of which is freely available for public viewing on YouTube — and were still accused of deception. (Other CMP videos were deemed to be so potentially damaging to the National Abortion Federation that they were suppressed by a court order from a judge with Planned Parenthood connections, and remain hidden from public viewing to this day.) CMP’s full footage reveals that no context changed from the edited to the full videos. People haggling over prices for body parts in edited footage are still haggling over them in the full footage. Likewise, nothing changed in context of discussing the most effective methods of aborting babies so companies can harvest the most intact fetal organs possible.
Two forensic analyses proved that CMP’s videos were not deceptively edited — including one contracted by Planned Parenthood. But when Planned Parenthood’s hired analysis showed nothing deceptive, the abortion organization just decided to claim it was deceptive anyway, even though the actual analysis proved otherwise… and as always, the abortion-friendly media parroted every line. To this day, some media reports refer to CMP’s footage as “deceptively edited” when forensics proved it wasn’t.
But it doesn’t take a forensic analysis to show that Kamala Harris’s video changed the context of Kavanaugh’s remarks. And it further proves that abortion supporters — from abortion industry workers to politicians — are more than willing to lie and deceive in order to further their abortion agenda.
