CHAOS: Thieves will steal your goods, Thoreau said!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2024

Levin, Campos-Duffy are worse:  Way back when—last Saturday night!—The Man Who Screams was letting off steam concerning Candidate Harris.

On our meters, he was already shouting by 8:03 p.m., just three minutes into his Fox News Channel program. 

The program is called Life, Liberty and Levin. At 8:14 p.m., the agitated host said this:

LEVIN (10/19/24): I want to get to this! Look at the Harris-Biden war on pro-lifers. It's grotesque. You don't even have to be in support of the pro-life movement to see it.

Pro-life activist and mother of small daughter Beverly [sic] Beatty Williams announced this past Tuesday that her state of appeal request has been denied. 

What did she do? She protested in front of a Planned Parenthood Clinic. And so they used this FACE Act—Freedom of Access to Clinic Access Act—more aggressively than any administration since this law was passed to do what? To put these people—mothers! grandmothers! just people, activists, who are protesting!—in prison for years! 

For the record, the woman's name is actually Bevelyn Williams. You'll note that Levin is transforming the Biden Administration into the "Harris-Biden" Administration, the better to play you with.

At this point, Levin played tape of Bevelyn Williams' husband. Along the way, he said this:

Obama—(snorts)—has the audacity to speak to black men and tell black men they need to vote for Kamala Harris when the Kamala Harris Administration separated me from my wife, and my wife from her daughter at two years old, for unlawful assembly...I want people to know in this country—mothers, fathers, single mothers—that this cannot be tolerated, and you should not vote for Kamala because voting for Kamala would do things like this.

By now, viewers were being told that Bevelyn Williams had been sent to prison by something called "the Kamala Harris Administration." The Harris Administration had sent her to prison "for unlawful assembly," Fox News Channel viewers were told.

That's what was said on Saturday night. The very next morning, on Fox & Friends Weekend, we saw the egregious Rachel Campos-Duffy tell her channel's misused viewers this:

CAMPOS-DUFFY (10/20/24): She sent [Williams] to prison this week this week for three years...It's kind of her deplorable moment, really...She sentenced a pro-lifer who was standing in front of an abortion clinic praying to three years in prison.

(With the Internet Archive down, we're working from the notes we took in real time.)

The "she," of course, was Candidate Harris. According to this disordered chaos agent, Harris had sent William to prison for the act of "standing in front of an abortion clinic praying." 

Apparently, Harris had taken time from her presidential campaign to engage in this prosecution on a personal basis. Or at least, so Campos-Duffy now said.

As we've noted in the past, we're not sure we've ever been happy to hear that someone is going to prison. We feel the same way here.

That said, we felt that we should possibly fact-check the things we'd been told by these corporate tools on the Fox News Channel. The basic question was this:

Had Bevelyn (not Beverly) Williams really been sent to prison for the act of praying? Had she been sent to prison for the act of praying by the heinous Candidate Harris, who was demonized in the most ludicrous. soul-destroying ways all through the course of this Fox & Friends Weekend "news" program?

We decided to check it out! As it happened, a news report in the New York Times had reported this matter in July of this year. The news report started in the manner shown, principal headline included:

Woman Sentenced to 41 Months for Blocking Entrance to Planned Parenthood

A Tennessee anti-abortion activist was sentenced to over three years in prison on Tuesday after she tried to block patients from entering a Planned Parenthood clinic in Lower Manhattan in June 2020.

A New York jury found in February that the activist, Bevelyn Beatty Williams, had violated a federal law protecting access to reproductive health clinics when she threatened patients, and in some cases physically confronted them, as they tried to enter Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan Health Center. Ms. Beatty Williams, who is originally from Staten Island, cited her Catholic faith in defense of her actions, according to court documents.

On Tuesday, a judge sentenced Ms. Beatty Williams to 41 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release. The judge recommended that Ms. Beatty Williams be transferred to a prison in Tennessee with mental health facilities.

According to the news report, the judge felt that Williams should have access to "mental health facilities." But what exactly had Williams done? Had she simply engaged in prayer, as Campos-Duffy had been willing to tell the Fox News Channel's viewers?

So far, Harris hadn't been mentioned at all—but what had Williams done? Eventually, the news report offered more detail:

“Bevelyn Beatty Williams repeatedly intimidated and interfered with individuals seeking and providing critical reproductive health services,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “She did so by physically blocking access to clinics, threatening staff and by force.”

On June 19 and June 20, 2020, prosecutors said, Ms. Beatty Williams “participated in an organized protest” outside the Manhattan Planned Parenthood. The clinic sees up to 100 patients each day and provides a variety of services, including abortion, birth control, pregnancy testing and cancer screening. Ms. Beatty Williams livestreamed and boasted about her actions on her Instagram page, according to court documents.

Ms. Beatty Williams stood in front of entrances to the facility and directed her fellow protesters to help her obstruct them, prosecutors said. She bragged on June 19 that “out of all the appointments today, only one couple came in,” according to prosecutors. She also threatened employees as they tried to enter the building, telling them that she was going to “terrorize this place” and “we’re going to terrorize you so good, your business is going to be over, mama,” according to court documents.

On the second day, Ms. Beatty Williams’s behavior turned physical, prosecutors said, as she shoved police officers and Planned Parenthood employees outside the clinic. At one point, Ms. Beatty Williams leaned on the front door of the facility to prevent a staff member from escorting a patient inside. The employee’s hand was injured after it became caught in the door, prosecutors said.

Ms. Beatty Williams similarly tried to block access to Planned Parenthood clinics in Florida, Tennessee, Georgia and Brooklyn between 2019 and 2022, prosecutors said. After her arrest outside a Planned Parenthood in Nashville in 2022, Ms. Beatty Williams was charged with criminal trespass and sentenced to 30 days in jail, according to court documents. Her lawyer, Calvin Scholar, did not respond to a request for comment.

Should the person in question be going to prison? That's a matter of judgment. With respect to the egregious behavior of Levin and Campos-Duffy, we'll offer two basic points:

First, we know of no reason to think that Candidate Harris had anything to do with this prosecution—anything whatsoever.  Presumably, the egregious pair of Fox News "journalists" had framed this matter in the way they did for the obvious reason. 

Also this:

Fox viewers were told that Williams had "protested" and "prayed" in front of an abortion clinic, full and complete total stop. According to the news report, her actual conduct had gone perhaps a bit beyond that. 

It's hard to know why an actual news organization would allow people like Levin and Campos-Duffy to ever appear on its air. Fuller disclosure:

Even by its own ludicrous standards, the Fox & Friends Weekend program was especially demented that day. Most absurdly, the three friends who were present that morning conducted a braindead interview with the two college students who had interrupted a Harris rally in Wisconsin a few days before, apparently with shouts of "Jesus is Lord" and "Christ is King."

This may have been the dumbest "interview" ever conducted on TV. Among other highlights, the pair of pro-life college juniors said no one had explained to them why they were made to leave the event which they'd been loudly disrupting. 

One of these fervent young men even complained to the trio of friends that he'd been "pushed by an elderly woman" as he was made to leave! He said that Candidate Harris "kind of gave me an evil smirk" as he was being led out.

Eventually, the coup de grace, stated several times:

The unbelievably dumb Charlie Hurt said that, because their parents had paid tuition to the college where the event had taken place (Wisconsin-LaCrosse), the pair of boys should have been allowed to "state their opinion." 

It would be hard to get much dumber than that, but Hurt will surely try.

Journalistic and intellectual chaos has long since swallowed our nation's discourse, such as it ever was. This process has been underway for decades, a point we'll be discussing next week.

We wish we could transcribe that Fox & Friends Weekend show in more detail, but with the Internet Archive still partially down, we aren't able to do so. Still and all, it's much as sacred Thoreau once said.

In this famous passage from Walden, Thoreau was speaking about the acquisition of material goods, not about the acquisition of reliable information. Still, a basic point remains:

Men [sic] labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Thieves will break through and steal material treasures, Thoreau warned in that passage. In the modern setting, hackers will destroy the Internet Archive's ability to record the way other thieves—corporate thieves like Levin and Campos-Duffy—have stolen their viewers' access to a clear-eyed view of the world.

Under the stressors brought upon us by "the democratization of media," has our nation's project, imperfect though it always has been, begun to grind to a halt? Everything is possible, some other old book must have said.

In the current circumstance, one major "news org"—the Fox News Channel—is busy playing the ancient role of the thief. At another major org, the finer people have agreed to avert their gaze from this remarkable corporate misconduct.

Under the corporate direction of Suzanne Scott, the Fox News Channel behaves this way all through the course of the week. The New Yok Times won't report or discuss this fact. 

A type of thievery is involved there too as our nation's discourse fails.

Final question: Did Candidate Harris have anything to do with that prosecution? Did she even know about it?

We're going to guess that the answer is obvious. Levin struck like a thief in the night. Campos-Duffy also struck, early the next morning.