Matt Walsh:
Good news, abortion fans! Turns out the hours and hours and hours of footage showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of baby limbs and organs can officially be discounted and dismissed. According to a report sent to Congress yesterday, the videos are “heavily edited” and “inaccurate.”
Whew! Finally, we can revert back to completely ignoring the continued holocaust of helpless, innocent children. What a relief! All this selling dead baby stuff was really giving my conscience a workout. I guess I can return it to the shelf and get back to the business of displaying utter disdain and disregard for basic human decency.
Or maybe not.
Despite the claim, reported as fact, that the videos are “totally manipulated” and “altered,” making them essentially worthless as evidence, the truth remains exactly the same. Planned Parenthood sells dead baby parts. This is a fact, and it has not been even remotely debunked.
Someone should inform the media about this, by the way. They demonstrated no interest in Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of dead baby parts up until now, but since an analysis has supposedly “disproved” the claim, suddenly the whole issue seems relevant to them. The Center For Medical Progress has been releasing footage for two months, but it wasn’t front page news until a report declared it “deceptive.” The media acknowledged the revelations for long enough to categorically dismiss them. Now, we’re supposed to just move on.
Unfortunately for the abortion industry and its disciples in mass media, I actually took the radical step of reading the entire report myself. I encourage you to check it out. Americans should probably learn to investigate information for themselves rather than relying on the Huffington Post and CNN to give them the cliff notes.
On that front, my own independent analysis of the independent analysis came to vastly difference conclusions.
Here are my findings:
1. No matter what — even if the videos used computer animation and special effects and the Planned Parenthood officials were actually Tom Cruise wearing realistic masks like in “Mission Impossible” — we still know that Planned Parenthood kills over 300,000 human beings a year. That’s established. Nobody denies it. The defunding of Planned Parenthood should still proceed, even if this all turns out to be an elaborate and morbid Broadway production, because no civilized country should fund the murder of human beings. Period.
Now, stop and think about this for a second: abortion enthusiasts are tripping over themselves to paint these videos as “false,” because they can’t bring themselves to accept that their beloved Planned Parenthood would sell human limbs and organs. Yet, these same brainwashed sycophants eagerly accept, and in fact applaud, the fact that Planned Parenthood kills children to begin with. This is like defending Jeffrey Dahmer by passionately insisting that the reports of cannibalism were falsified. Even if they were, he still, uh, like, murdered 17 people, didn’t he? Cannibalism would make his crimes more dramatic, I suppose, but either way, he’s a damned serial killer. So is Planned Parenthood.
2. I want everyone reading this right now to please remember one thing for as long as you live: Planned Parenthood can never be trusted. Ever. Under any circumstance. They are liars to their core. Filthy, murderous liars. They lie about everything. Of course they do. Again, they kill human beings, what do you expect? Planned Parenthood lies when it says “3 percent of its business is abortion.” It lies when it says it does mammograms. It lies to women. It lies to everyone. It lies all the time, in every situation. When raped teenage girls come in for abortions, it lies by not reporting the abuse to authorities. It keeps women in the dark. It lives in the dark. It thrives on lies. And lies. And lies. And lies.
This is a relevant point because the “independent analysts” who inspected the videos were hired by Planned Parenthood. They were not, in fact, independent at all. They were working for, and being paid by, the very organization being investigated. On top of it all, the report comes to us courtesy of a company called Fusion GPS, which is a deeply partisan opposition research firm tied to the Democrat Party.
Surely, none of us are stupid enough to think there was every any chance Planned Parenthood would hire liberal partisan “analysts” who’d potentially come back and say, “Yep, Planned Parenthood broke the law!” The outcome was predetermined. This report, which is now being disseminated as gospel by an ethically bankrupt media, is the result of Planned Parenthood investigating itself. Surprise! Planned Parenthood says Planned Parenthood is entirely innocent of wrongdoing (except for murdering the equivalent of the population of Delaware every year — that part is true, but never mind). Is that really supposed to settle the issue?
3. As for the report itself, like I said, read it. Please read it. Lord, it’s laughable. I really want you to read it so you understand just how thoroughly, profoundly, irreparably dishonest the abortion industry is about everything, and how beholden our nation’s “reporters” are to it. Then again, maybe these water-carrying media members are just angling to the be the latest recipients of the trophies Planned Parenthood hands out to the most cooperative and obedient journalists.
Here’s the deal: not only does Planned Parenthood’s report fail to disprove CPM’s findings, it actually verifies them. In the first couple of paragraphs, the report admits, and I quote, “this analysis did not reveal widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.” Alright. So there you go. The end, folks. Why are we still talking about this?
It says it did find “cuts and skips” but qualifies that “many of the edits likely removed irrelevant content.” Well, obviously. This was a months-long undercover investigation compiling thousands of hours of tape. Would it make any sense for them to put out a YouTube video with 180,000 minutes of uncut footage? I don’t even think YouTube allows videos that long, and in any case, nobody would watch it. It’s hard to get anyone to sit still for something more than 30 seconds long. A minute is pushing it. Two minutes might as well be the director’s cut of “Gone With The Wind.”
As it happens, they did release extended versions of each condensed video, which means they went vastly above and beyond what most undercover journalists would do. Naturally, no matter what, there are going to be substantial gaps of time where nobody is saying anything and nothing is happening. They took that out, just as anyone making any video for any reason would. Why are we pretending this is somehow suspicious? Is this the first time we’ve encountered the concept of “making a video”? Almost every video you see anywhere on the internet or TV is edited. Only now, because Planned Parenthood is being called to task, do we feign shock at the fact. “Wait, there’s a four minute gap where someone leaves to go to the bathroom? WHY DIDN’T YOU INCLUDE THAT PART? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO HIDE?”
The point is, the whole “the videos were edited!” thing is incredibly disingenuous, and this report only underscores that point. They took hours and hours and hours of video and gave us a long and a short edition to inspect. The question is whether the footage they did provide is substantively manipulated. On that score, Planned Parenthood itself admits it wasn’t.
4. The report does detail some “deceptive” edits, however. For instance:
“Fusion GPS consulted with an experienced reality and documentary television producer, Scott Goldie, for an expert opinion of the editing techniques used in the short videos. Mr.Goldie identifies the use of ominous music, replays, color manipulation, “scratch” effects, strategic display of frame counters and timestamps, all chosen to create “gotcha” moments.”
This is what we’re dealing with. Planned Parenthood sent an analysis to Congress which purports to vindicate it because a reality TV producer noticed background music. Yes, and also everyone else noticed it. I’m not sure why they had to drag in someone from Hollywood to tell us about it, but so be it. There was music at the beginning and end, and replays in the middle to highlight some particularly damning pieces of film. These edits are obvious and absolutely irrelevant. To even include them in the report is at once embarrassing and hilarious.
The report also spends a considerable amount of time contradicting two tiny, immaterial portions of transcript from one of the videos. It states that Fusion GPS didn’t find “any evidence of audio manipulation,” and says again later that it never found anything indicating that audio was “inserted or manipulated,” but it does take issue with CPM’s interpretation of two supposedly “unintelligible” bits of dialogue.
In one of the videos, a Planned Parenthood staff member refers to a murdered unborn child as a “baby,” and in another part, a lab tech looks down at the mangled corpse of a dead baby, laughs, and remarks, “another boy!”
Here is Planned Parenthood’s smoking gun. Out of 10 pages, the analysis spends the most time here, which should tell you something. They can’t defend themselves against the substance of the accusations — that they sell organs and limbs for profit and alter their procedures to preserve specimens — so they dedicate paragraph upon paragraph to refuting the most trivial aspects.
Even there, they can’t disprove anything. Nothing. Nothing is disproved anywhere in the report, even the things that don’t make a difference anyway. Instead, they tell us their forensic analysts and Hollywood producers couldn’t verify that “it’s a baby” and “another boy” were actually said. Maybe they said “hey there lady” and “I want a toy” or “call me maybe” and “I’d like some soy (sauce).” Maybe they said a million other things, or maybe they said precisely what it sounds like they said.
It’s of no consequence.