The Media Willfully Ignores the Connection Between Killer Drugs and Illegal Immigration

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Organized crime cannot exist without political protection. That is an old law enforcement adage you can take to the bank when studying the nexus of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Both are among the highest-profile, most visible, and most preventable forms of crime — if our politicians actually wanted them stopped. Meanwhile, the media is continuing to distract people by debating how much of the actual drug product comes in between points of entry, as opposed to at points of entry, rather than focusing on the people who actually organize, produce, and traffic the drugs and the politicians who protect them.

Our country is no longer facing a simple drug crisis, it is facing a chemical warfare crisis from Mexican cartels and the illegal aliens who peddle the drugs, usually coming in between points of entry. First it was the fentanyl-laced heroin, then it was the bizarre mix of meth or cocaine with fentanyl (an opioid with a psychostimulant); now they are marketing fake blue “Mexican oxy” pills that kids take for a “buzz” but all too often are found dead because they are really mixed with fentanyl to varying degrees.

Over the weekend, the AP reported on the surge of fentanyl deaths in Arizona and how young kids are now dying from these Mexican oxy pills that are laced with fentanyl and produced by the Sinaloa cartel. I confirmed with the Phoenix DEA office that the main hubs for trafficking these drugs into the country are in Tucson and Phoenix, where high-level “wholesale” cartel officials are operating and shipping to distributors in the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the East Coast after the drugs are brought across the border. According to the Arizona DEA, in fiscal year 2017, they seized 45,940 pills. That number shot up to 379,557 in FY 2018 and stood at 123,000 just for the first three months of FY 2019. It’s all coming from the Sinaloa cartel and is brought in mainly in the Nogales area and sent to the vast network of cartel officials in the major Arizona cities. They also confirmed that the increase is driven by fake Xanax pills as well as fake oxy.

What the media and most in Congress have missed about this poly-drug crisis (not opioid crisis) for the past few years is that it’s not being fueled by chronic pain patients on painkillers. It’s the worsening of the culture among our youth who are seeking a buzz or an out from their mental and emotional problems. That cultural demand is being met by the deadliest drugs we’ve ever been confronted with. This is why as synthetical opioids have surged, Arizona state and federal officials have seized 124 percent more meth in FY 2018 than in the previous year. Meth has the opposite effect of opioids and would certainly not be sought out by pain patients.

This is why there are major problems with drugs in schools in San Luis, a border town in Yuma County. The Yuma Police Department put out a warning this month about “recent overdose incidents in San Luis, Arizona” from ingested pills that look like oxys but contain fentanyl. We can intimidate doctors into never prescribing pain medication and we could harm post-operation and cancer patients from now until the end of time, but it will do nothing to protect our youth who get ensnared into the culture of drugs so long as the cartels are able to operate with impunity and make the price of these drugs cheap and therefore accessible to kids.

But the problem is not just in border counties and states. That is the wholesale point for the cartels, and funnily, they try to keep the violence to a minimum so as not to disrupt their operation. It’s more at the destination and distribution level on the East Coast where the violence of transnational gangs mixes with drug distribution for the cartels.

This is where we see that cartels not only have control of our border, but operate with latitude on our shores and have endless illegal alien and transnational criminal networks working for them in all our major cities and even mid-sized cities on the East Coast. This is the key to understanding how illegal immigration is driving the drug crisis.

A network of six drug traffickers in the Carolinas working for Cartel Jalisco New Generation, one of the rivals of the Sinaloa cartel, was recently broken up by federal authorities. They were moving large amounts of meth and cocaine for this brutal cartel, and all of them were illegal aliens. Central North Carolina is now dealing with cartel violence.

So why do liberals continue to deny that illegal immigration is driving the crisis?

To begin with, as we’ve pointed out before, the entire notion that drugs only come in at points of entry is laughable. Tell that to the ranchers who deal with the drug trafficking every day. Obviously, we don’t have hard statistics because we catch almost none of those drugs, given that the cartels purposely use illegal immigrants to tie down the border agents while they strategically bring in the drugs and the criminals who cook, distribute, and collect profits from them. As Mark Morgan, Border Patrol chief during the Obama administration, told CR, “There is no way with any degree of certainty to know the quantity of drugs entering our country because at least 50 percent of the southwest border is wide open.” He explained how “we know the cartels exploit this vulnerability every day while using illegal immigration as a diversion.”

“Additionally, the irony with this false narrative is the same people who acknowledge massive amounts of drugs are seized at the POEs to debunk the need for a physical barrier are the same individuals who deny there is a crisis.”

Robert Murphy, special agent in charge of Atlanta’s DEA office, told CR in an exclusive interview last week, “We are arguing about the wrong thing here. It’s not the product that matters. The product doesn’t sell itself or produce itself. It’s the people who make the cartel run, collect the cash, do the distribution, engage in violence, and run operations for the cartel.” And while a lot of the drugs come in at points of entry, “the people coming across the border to make and distribute the drugs are coming here illegally.” As Murphy warned, “The people who are here operating the networks are all illegal immigrants” and “are not coming in at checkpoints.”

Illegal immigration fuels the cartels in multiple ways. The magnets that attract illegal immigration give the cartels billions in revenue to produce and grow their drug trafficking. The cartels orchestrate strategic diversions of illegal immigrants engaging Border Patrol agents. Also, teenagers often serve as drug mules because the cartels know we won’t prosecute them. Even the more innocent illegal immigrants are often forced to report to stash houses on our side of the border after being released by agents pursuant to court orders in order to pay off their debt.

It’s really simple. If we pursued interior enforcement, banned sanctuary cities, and ended catch-and-release at our border, which enables the cartel smuggling, they wouldn’t have a profitable drug network that could operate in this country. It’s not about the product; it’s about the people doing it, and the people doing it always have political protection in the illegal immigration issue.

Immigration and drug officials in New England have told me they could clean up the drug problem there in no time if they had the license to actually follow immigration law and simply remove all those aliens engaging in drug trafficking in Lawrence, Massachusetts, many of whom have family or organizational ties.

Why don’t we do it? Because illegal immigrants and drug traffickers have political protection. The whole reason the war on drugs has been unsuccessful is because the combined elements of law enforcement have not been focused on the human chain between the border and point of ingestion of the illegal drugs.

Look no further than the local politics of the Rio Grande Valley, which has been the hot spot of illegal immigration for years. How can human and drug smuggling continue to thrive out in the open? The New York Times summed it up this week in lessons learned from the El Chapo trial:

El Gallo — Tomas Reyes Gonzalez, a drug trafficker now in federal prison — supplied the cash to the former Hidalgo County sheriff, Guadalupe Trevino, for his re-election campaign. Another former Hidalgo County sheriff took bribes to allow a convicted drug dealer to have conjugal visits at the county jail, including in the jail library and in the sheriff’s private office. Yet another former sheriff in neighboring Cameron County protected and assisted cocaine dealers, and is now Federal Inmate No. 51689-179.

The corruption that took down those three border sheriffs in 1994, 2005 and 2014 continues today. Next month, the former police chief in the town of La Joya is scheduled to go on trial, after he was indicted on drug charges and accused by federal authorities of helping a drug-trafficking organization transport narcotics while working as a police sergeant in Progreso, Tex.

Now, keep in mind that the liberal Rio Grande Valley is the only region where the budget bill allows Trump to build fencing, yet local officials are purposely given veto power. Jaeson Jones, a retired captain for the Texas Department of Public Safety who directed counter-narcotics and counter-smuggling operations for years, told me that local officials in these counties wouldn’t even allow them to cut down the tall grass around the Rio Grande River where the cartel operatives would hide out.

In other words, the lesson of drugs and migrants is that the flow can only continue if the political powers both in Washington and around our border want it to. And they do.

What would you call this statement made by Elizabeth Warren?

With the incontrovertible data that prescriptions have plummeted and that most overdose deaths are due to illicit drugs trafficked by illegal alien networks, for a politician to say we need to stop focusing on Mexican cartels and start focusing even more on cutting off pain medication to those in need is the ultimate political corruption.

Until we address the systemic upstream political corruption, the drug issue will only intensify along with the illegal immigration crisis. (For more from the author of “The Media Willfully Ignores the Connection Between Killer Drugs and Illegal Immigration” please click HERE)

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CAIR Rallies to the Defense of ISIS Bride Who Wants to Come Back to USA

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A senior official in the terror-tied Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is serving as a pro bono attorney for Hoda Muthana, a Yemeni terrorist and former U.S. resident who wants to come back to the United States following the dissolution of the ISIS “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.

In interviews with western journalists over the past couple of months, Muthana has attempted to portray herself as an innocent victim of ISIS’ indoctrination. Muthana, 24, left her home in Alabama in 2014 to join the Islamic State in Syria. Her attorney, Hassan Shibly, an Islamist sympathizer and the director of CAIR’s Florida chapter, has been on a media blitz this week making the case that his client should be allowed back into the United States.

Shibly has continuously described Muthana as a victim of people who manipulated her and stated that she is “simply trying to make amends.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Shibly argued that the ISIS devotee should be allowed back into the country so that she can help deradicalize others who face similar circumstances. “People are saying she betrayed this country, she shouldn’t be able to come back home,” Shibly said on NPR Thursday, adding she was a “vulnerable young woman who was brainwashed and manipulated.”

Shibly reiterated that message on CNN Thursday morning, speaking to CNN host and Obama political appointee Jim Sciutto:

Shibly has also repeatedly attacked President Trump as the “Dictator in Chief” for refusing to allow his ISIS client back into the United States.

The CAIR attorney has his own history of deception and extremism. Conservative Review reported last week on Shibly’s upcoming appearance with Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar at a CAIR fundraiser:

Shibly is a dedicated Islamist and bigoted gay basher. A fan of radical clerics, he has routinely refused to categorize U.S.-designated terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, according to the Clarion Project. Moreover, Shibly regularly takes to social media to demonize the U.S. military as equivalent to the jihadi terrorists that they are fighting.

Shibly’s claims that Muthana is an innocent victim are directly contradicted by the many social media posts showing that she was fully committed to pursuing murderous action against innocent Americans.

“Americans wake up! Men and women altogether. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades..go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them,” Hoda Muthana tweeted in 2015 under the pseudonym “Umm Jihad.”

While living in Syria, Muthana married three ISIS fighters in succession, all of whom died fighting for the terrorist organization, according to reports.

Now that the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS has destroyed the terrorist group’s territorial caliphate, Muthana wants out. Unfortunately for the ISIS widow, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have announced that she will not be allowed back into the country.

Both CAIR’s Shibly and his client face an uphill battle to import the jihadi bride back into the United States. It is almost certain that they will pursue further legal action in an attempt to force the U.S. government to take Hoda Muthana back from her failed caliphate experience. (For more from the author of “CAIR Rallies to the Defense of ISIS Bride Who Wants to Come Back to USA” please click HERE)

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China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise

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Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign, according to human rights groups and Uighur activists. They say a comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.

Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.

To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a prominent Yale University geneticist. (Read more from “China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise” HERE)

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The WV Teacher Strike Wasn’t About Students and Teachers. It Was About Protecting Unions

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School choice is dead in the state of West Virginia, at least for now. That’s the main takeaway after state lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature buckled to demands from teachers’ unions after two days of striking earlier this week.

It’s not surprising that teachers’ unions banded together to kill a school choice proposal. What is surprising is how much West Virginia teachers were willing to sacrifice to keep even the smallest market-oriented innovations out of the state’s education system.

The massive education reform bill contained a five percent teacher pay raise, on top of the pay raise that the state’s educators got out of last year’s teacher strike. It also included a $2,000 bonus for certified math teachers, a $250 tax credit for school supply purchases, and around $145 million in total investment in the state’s public education system.

A summary of the final amendments made to the bill can be found here, while full text of the tabled version can be found here.

So what did the pro-government monopoly crowd take issue with? The bill also provided for the creation of seven (as in fewer than 10) public charter schools statewide and the creation of 1,000 Educational Savings Accounts (ESAs) for children with special needs or who had undergone documented cases of bullying.

Yes. That’s all. That’s why one union boss claimed that West Virginia educators were “left no other choice” but to strike. It’s why schools across the state closed down for two straight days. That’s what was worth passing up a pay raise, bonuses, and all the other investments that lawmakers were willing to put into the state’s public schools.

Seven Charter schools and 1,000 ESAs. That’s what made it a “dangerous education privatization bill” that had to be defeated at the cost of public education investment. But hey, any market-oriented innovations mean competition, and the best way to protect a monopoly racket is to make sure competition never makes it to market.

“The defenders of the status quo, the enemies of progress, won, and the losers were the teachers, students, parents in West Virginia,” Republican West Virginia Senate President Mitch Carmichael told Blaze Media just hours after the bill was scuttled on Tuesday, “by not accepting the reforms and the massive investment in public education in West Virginia.”

“It makes no sense,” Carmichael said when asked why public teachers’ unions would be opposed to that kind of investment. “It’s not a logical analysis of the provisions of the bill. It’s more a fearmongering by the union bosses.”

“This is a way to flex political muscle,” explains Garrett Ballengee, executive director of the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a think tank that supported the reforms.

The point school choice opponents made, he says, was that “to some extent, at least as it relates to education policy, that education unions will dictate what kind of education policy that we have,” despite the Republican control of West Virginia’s House, Senate, and governorship.

“Extortion is a strong word,” he added, “but if the definition fits, I think that’s exactly what we saw here.”

According to national school choice organization EdChoice, West Virginia is one of a remaining handful of states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a single educational choice program of any kind. Meanwhile, the state’s public education numbers were near the bottom for 2018.

“We want to do what other states have done to implement positive change,” Carmichael told me, noting the success of the charter school movement in other states. If a football team were coming in last in its conference every year, “you’d change something,” he continued. “And yet we tolerate a last-place finish in our education system.” (For more from the author of “The WV Teacher Strike Wasn’t About Students and Teachers. It Was About Protecting Unions” HERE)

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Jussie Smollett Releases a Scathing Statement — and He’s Attacking Someone New

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According to a new statement from Empire star Jussie Smollett released Thursday, he is blaming a mayoral race in Chicago for the unfair treatment he says he is receiving from the Chicago police and law enforcement officials. . .

“The presumption of innocence, a bedrock in the search for justice, was trampled upon at the expense of Mr. Smollett and notably, on the eve of a Mayoral election,” the statement continued.

“Mr. Smollett is a young man of impeccable character and integrity who fiercely and solemnly maintains his innocence and feels betrayed by a system that apparently wants to skip due process and proceed directly to sentencing,” it concluded.

Smollett appeared in court Thursday on felony charges that he filed a false police report in a case that has been debated nationwide for weeks. He has denied accusations that he was involved in orchestrating the attack he reported since the beginning.

(Read more from “Jussie Smollett Releases a Scathing Statement — and He’s Attacking Someone New” HERE)

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Here’s How Democrats Plan to End Trump’s National Emergency Declaration

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By The Blaze. Democrats reportedly plan to introduce a privileged resolution in Congress in to terminate the declaration of a national emergency at the border by President Donald Trump.

The plan was reported by NBC News Capitol Hill producer Alex Moe on Wednesday.

The resolution would end the declaration by Friday, if it is passed. Moe reported that the effort is led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (R-Texas) and has more than 90 co-sponsors. . .

If the resolution passes the House of Representatives, it would need to be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate. The president has already indicated that he would veto any resolution that came to his desk. The Congress could then override his veto, but only with an unlikely two-thirds majority in both houses.

(Read more from “Here’s How Democrats Plan to End Trump’s National Emergency Declaration” HERE)

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Texas GOP Rep Opposes Trump’s Use of National Emergency to Get Border Wall

By The Hill. Republican Rep. Roger Williams (Texas) said this week that he opposes the national emergency declared by President Trump to build a border wall.

Williams, asked about Trump’s national emergency declaration by a constituent at a town hall event Tuesday, gave a clear “no” to supporting it, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

“The reason that I have not been supportive of the declaration is because Congress has done a really poor job, we … Congress, both sides of the aisle, put the president in this situation, OK, but I don’t support it from a selfish standpoint,” Williams said at the event, according to the Statesman.

He then reportedly went on to explain that the emergency declared by Trump could take border wall funding that currently goes towards military bases, specifically noting Fort Hood, and saying he’d “hate to see a lot of those dollars diverted from that.”

Williams’s district, which he is in his fourth term representing, includes a majority of Fort Hood and is not on or near the border. (Read more from “Texas GOP Rep Opposes Trump’s Use of National Emergency to Get Border Wall” HERE)

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Oh, so Beto O’Rourke Is Coming Around to Border Walls Now?

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Former Texas Congressman Beto (Bob) O’Rourke is mulling a presidential run. Yes, he lost to Republican Ted Cruz in the 2018 Senate election, but many within Democratic circles are seeing this performance in the deep red state as a sign of hope that the party could flip the state someday. He’s also considered a rising star. He’s still a dweeb, but Democrats like him, so let’s just let them have their fun. One of Beto’s war cries as of late has been being against Donald Trump’s border wall, which apparently ends lives, or something. Beto made these remarks last week during a rally that was held a quarter-mile from the president’s event. He also spoke to supporters through a fence, which makes this all the more ironic. Yet, let’s get to the heart of the issue here, Beto might be backtracking on the wall. Yeah, he thinks there should be barriers along some parts the border. Yeah, CNN found a nut with this story:

O’Rourke has blasted President Donald Trump’s push for a border wall in recent weeks, and last week said he wants to see the border separating El Paso from Juárez torn down.

But asked Tuesday whether that means he wants fencing along the entire US-Mexico border removed, O’Rourke said, “I think there is a role for physical barriers in some places.”

(Read more from “Oh, so Beto O’Rourke Is Coming Around to Border Walls Now?” HERE)

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Trump Admin Announces Global Push to Decriminalize Homosexuality

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The Trump administration revealed Tuesday that it will be spearheading a global effort to get countries to end their criminalization of homosexuality, according to a report by NBC News. While the move is likely to distress many of Trump’s Christian-base supporters, it has interestingly been met with a cold shoulder by U.S. pro-LGBT voices.

The effort is being led by U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, a homosexual conservative rumored to be in consideration as President Donald Trump’s next ambassador to the United Nations.

“It is concerning that, in the 21st century, some 70 countries continue to have laws that criminalize LGBTI status or conduct,” a US official told NBC News of the effort, which begins this week with an American-hosted strategy meeting in Berlin of LGBT advocates from across Europe.

The report notes that the effort is “narrowly focused on criminalization” instead of pressuring countries to adopt policies such as same-sex “marriage,” and is motivated in part by Iran hanging a man last month for violating the Islamic nation’s ban on sodomy, a capital offense (the man was also accused of kidnapping two teenagers, though it’s unclear how both offenses factored into his sentence. Grenell believes the kidnapping charges are false).

“This is not the first time the Iranian regime has put a gay man to death with the usual outrageous claims of prostitution, kidnapping, or even pedophilia. And it sadly won’t be the last time,” Grenell said. “Barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalized and punishable by flogging and death […] politicians, the U.N., democratic governments, diplomats and good people everywhere should speak up — and loudly.”

(Read more from “Trump Admin Announces Global Push to Decriminalize Homosexuality” HERE)

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Andrew McCabe Can’t Keep His Story Straight

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Former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe was fired for lying to the FBI inspector general on multiple occasions, and faces potential legal trouble for his many abuses of power. But he’s still the leftwing media’s new darling, as he’s on a media tour to preempt any prosecution, and promote his new book—which he surely hopes will fund his pending legal troubles.

But poor McCabe can’t keep his story straight. McCabe was let go from the FBI for lying in March of 2018. Then, in September of last year, someone leaked to The New York Times that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had sought to trap the president in a crime or attempt to remove the president, by proposing to wear a wire for his conversations with the president, and by attempting to recruit cabinet officials to invoke the 25th Amendment, respectively.

This was a hit on Rosenstein from someone who wanted to spread the blame away from himself or herself, and from someone in the FBI who sought to excuse his or her actions by pointing fingers at the Department of Justice (DOJ). That’s why many assumed it was McCabe and his people orchestrating this leak. . .

But then McCabe went in front of the cameras for his soft-ball “60 Minutes” interview. McCabe was asked about Rosenstein recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment, and Rosenstein offering to “wire-up.” McCabe proceeded to go into great detail to affirm the September 2018 New York Times story. All this, despite the Rosenstein issues not being included in McCabe’s book. . .

In other words, it is becoming obvious that McCabe is probably the leak orchestrator against Rosenstein, and has the inside view of an illegal and certainly improper plot on the president of the United States, undertaken by unelected intelligence officials who were all involved in abuses of power that occurred before, during, and after the 2016 election. (Read more from “Andrew McCabe Can’t Keep His Story Straight” HERE)

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Shocker: Media Still Trying to Pretend Planned Parenthood Didn’t Sell Baby Body Parts

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When CNN recently hired Sarah Isgur, Jeff Sessions’ former spokeswoman, to be a political editor at its Washington bureau, the predictable backlash from left-dominated media types and activists followed. Even the allegedly unbiased CNN newsroom was reportedly “demoralized” at the mere thought of a Republican on staff. No word on how former Obama official, now CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom,” Jim Sciutto, felt about the development.

Isgur was accused of holding various right-of-center positions. And when a former political activist-turned-Vox writer claimed that Isgur “pushed Planned Parenthood conspiracy theories that were grounded in misleadingly edited videos,” the talking point quickly gained popularity with Isgur’ detractors.

The alleged proof of this conspiracy theorizing resides in a single retweet of a Federalist piece written by my colleague Mollie Hemingway, praising Isgur’s former boss Carly Fiorina for highlighting a series of undercover videos released in 2015, clearly catching Planned Parenthood executives and doctors admitting to illegally profiting from the sale of the fetal tissue of aborted babies.

The only conspiracy theory attached to the incident was spread by pro-abortion activists and Planned Parenthood apologists, which included CNN’s news division and other major media outlets, who either ignored the shocking videos or falsely and repeatedly claimed that videos of executives breezily discussing the harvesting and illegal selling of baby parts had been “heavily” and “deceptively” edited.

The fact was that Center for Medical Progress had edited the footage in the same manner news organizations always edit footage: they highlight the newsworthy parts of conversations. Unlike most of their media detractors, though, the Center for Medical Progress posted the entire raw footage of the tapes for anyone to watch. (Read more from “Media Still Trying to Pretend Planned Parenthood Didn’t Sell Baby Body Parts” HERE)

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