This coming Tuesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia will present “A Hearing Investigating Baby Organ Harvesting Black Market Live Stream,” with special guests David Daleiden and Terrisa Bukovinac.
What is that about? you may be asking yourself. Have babies been waking up in motel rooms in baths of ice with notes telling them to call 911, but then they die because they are babies and cannot read? Because, not gonna lie, that is the first place my brain went to. I also assumed, because this is Marjorie Taylor Greene we are talking about, that the organs were being harvested for the purpose of turning them into an exquisite, Hannibal-esque fine dining experience for America’s baby-eating elites.
But no, it’s about abortion shit.
Terrisa Bukovinac you may remember from the time she and her good buddy Lauren Handy got in some trouble over their collection of dead fetuses, which they stole from a clinic they were illegally trespassing in. She is also running for president as a Democrat and has so far raised a grand total of $28,000.
As for David Daleiden, nearly a decade ago now (and yet it seems like yesterday), he made headlines when he released a series of heavily edited videos purporting to prove that Planned Parenthood workers were illegally selling dead fetuses. Which they weren’t — there are financial charges associated with procuring fetal tissue, but no, no one was charging, say, $3,000 for a tiny liver.
Daleiden posed as the “procurement manager” of a tissue procurement company the group invented called Biomax and held meetings with Planned Parenthood staff, which they recorded for the purpose of proving the organization was “selling” fetuses. They then published the heavily edited videos to the internet and were subsequently sued by Planned Parenthood, I explained in a previous article about him.
As full of shit as Daleiden was, his nonsense was incredibly effective. It created a whole ass hysteria from people who didn’t bother to find out whether what he said was true or those who thought they were being “reasonable” by saying “Well that video might have been edited but we don’t know it’s not happening for real other places.” Which, to be fair, is true — but they also didn’t know that other Planned Parenthoods were not secretly operating as 1920s speakeasies at night, so that meant literally nothing.
The whole thing was part of a larger hysteria and push to flood people’s understanding of abortion and groups like Planned Parenthood with lies and misinformation, thus making every other lie they told seem more plausible. And, I’d argue that it certainly helped along the process of overturning Roe.
I think that what Greene is doing here is trying to recreate that whole hysteria in hopes that it will drown out real concerns about reproductive rights and help Republicans in the next election.
I’d love to say that people are smarter now and won’t fall for it … but unfortunately I have absolutely no reason to believe that.
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