John Zmirak, a conservative activist and a senior editor of James Robison’s The Stream website, said yesterday that as a group of anti-choice activists continues to put out new videos smearing Planned Parenthood, “I think they’re going to need to put police in front of Planned Parenthood clinics to keep them safe and intact because the public outrage will just be so great.”
In an interview with Iowa talk radio host Simon Conway, Zmirak praised the “pro-life journalistic heroes” at the Center for Medical Progress for their strategy of slowly releasing videos that they falsely claim show that Planned Parenthood is selling “baby parts” for profit.
“I’ve got to think that what’s coming next is even more damning,” he said. “If that continues, I think they’re going to need to put police in front of Planned Parenthood clinics to keep them safe and intact because the public outrage will just be so great.”
The prediction that Planned Parenthood clinics will need “police” to keep them “safe” is not an idle threat coming from a movement whose extreme fringes have a long history of violence. In fact, one of the activists behind the Center for Medical Progress, Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, has a disturbing history of ties to activists who have perpetrated violence against abortion providers.
In a separate interview last week with Florida talk radio host Joyce Kaufman, Zmirak compared the anti-Planned Parenthood “investigators” to people who go “undercover to infiltrate Al Qaeda” or the mob.
“We know people who go undercover in the drug trade, and we send people undercover to infiltrate Al Qaeda,” he said. “I knew someone who did that and it changes you. I can’t imagine what it must be life to spend three years among these people, having to deceive them — you know, it’s your duty, they don’t have the right to the truth because they’re engaged in a criminal enterprise.”
“It’s like infiltrating the mafia,” he continued. “It really is an instance of organized crime. We should start thinking about Planned Parenthood as human organ traffickers, just like the Russian mob.”
