Don Lemon, Meet David Daleiden

The Dems Arrest Real Journalists To Silence Them

While the details of church stormer Don Lemon’s arrest sort themselves out, I thought it would be a good time to remember the active oppression of real journalists doing real work by Democrats, national and local. I could go 10-deep on this story, but one prosecution stands out for its coordinated ruthlessness.

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 was David Daleiden. In April 2016, California authorities raided his Huntington Beach apartment. At the time, Harris was running for California’s open U.S. Senate seat. Her 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 and public support than Daleiden and his partner Sandra Merritt.

In 2013, the then 24-year-old Daleiden launched the most sustained and effective undercover journalism project in decades. Working through a journalistic entity of his own creation, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), he and Merritt learned the language and the mechanics of the fetal tissue procurement business and went to work.

Over a period lasting more than two years, the highly disciplined twosome eased their way into the good graces of Planned Parenthood clinicians in several states and captured on camera the chilling words and deeds of the practitioners in the nation’s least regulated major industry.

In July 2015, Daleiden started dropping the videos one by one. They were damning. In one video, for instance, a doctor at a mega Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado is seen explaining the clinic’s traffic in body parts. “We don’t want to get called on, you know, selling fetal parts across states,” she joked, unaware she was being recorded.

This interview was followed by an on-site review of actual body parts with the doctor and a clinician. What is unnerving is how casually the doctor and clinician picked through trays of baby parts—a heart, a brain, a lung—while talking about the commercial viability of the “fetal cadaver.”

Running for president at the time, even Hillary Clinton began to waver as each new video dropped. “I have seen pictures from [the videos] and obviously find them disturbing,” Clinton told the New Hampshire Union Leader late that July. No one knew better than Clinton, however, what overwhelming force Planned Parenthood and its allies in the Democratic-media complex could bring to bear against a pair of citizen journalists.

To discredit the reporting, Planned Parenthood turned to the well-connected fixers at—where else? —Fusion GPS. Faced with real journalists doing real work, the Obama courtiers in the media reflexively turned stenographer. They welcomed Fusion’s “forensic study” as heartily as they would its notorious “Steele dossier” a year later.

Not content with smearing these journalists, prosecutorial friends of Planned Parenthood, both in Texas and California, brought utterly bogus criminal charges against Daleiden and Merritt. Mainstream journalists yawned, even cheered.

Eager to do her share, the ambitious Harris had her agents seize Daleiden’s multiple computers and hard drives as well as the materials he had gathered from Planned Parenthood conferences.

Alexandra Snyder, the director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Harris’s “loyalty to Planned Parenthood” required “her to turn a blind eye to the organization’s criminal activities.” Harris did more than turn a blind eye. “Instead,” said Snyder, “she has launched an inquisition into David Daleiden.”

In 2017, Harris’s successor as attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt and tied them up in court for the next eight years. In May 2020, Daleiden filed suit against Becerra and Harris, claiming Harris violated his civil rights by conspiring with Planned Parenthood to silence him.

In 2025, after nine years of politically-driven lawfare, the State of California essentially dropped all charges against Daleiden and Merritt. The damage, however, had been done. With the pair silenced, the baby parts industry continued on its barbaric way.

In the Democrats’ America, killing and dismembering unborn babies and marketing their body parts is perfectly acceptable. Reporting on the practice is criminal. If that is not fascistic, I am not sure I know what is.

My newest book, Empire of Lies, is available in ebook and print versions at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you sign up to be a paid subscriber, you will receive a free signed copy when you email me, jackcashill@yahoo.com, with your name, address and any preferred inscription.