IRVINE, CALIFORNIA — David Daleiden told reporters on Saturday that he was having an “extremely difficult time” washing off blood that “seemed to magically appear overnight.” Daleiden is the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, the right-wing anti-abortion group that started making headlines over the summer by releasing what they called sting videos that allegedly showed top Planned Parenthood officials negotiating prices on aborted fetal tissue and organs. Though the veracity of the videos has all but expired, Daleiden and his supporters have maintained that they show criminal wrongdoing, and as a result there have been several state-led investigations into the low-income health provider, none of which have verified any of the wild accusations made in the CMP’s videos.
Then, on Friday November 28th, 2015, a gunman by the name of Robert Lewis Dear allegedly entered the Planned Parenthood operation in Colorado Springs, Colorado and began opening fire. When the incident finally resolved itself and Dear — a fully-armed, white, right-wing man — had been taken alive by the authorities, and in his wake he left one police officer and two civilians dead. Daleiden told reporters at a press conference early Saturday morning he woke up and found his hands had been “thoroughly caked in crimson.”
“I don’t get it,” Daleiden told reporters, “I’m not the one who we edited to make look like baby butchering barbarians! So why do I have the blood of the innocent on my hands,” he asked incredulously. ” Mr. Daleiden has been repeatedly rebuked in the media and by fact-checkers for his sting videos, with most independent analysis showing the videos couldn’t be trusted as anything other than propaganda. “Just because I helped up whip-up violence against people who are just trying to help women with very little money get health care,” Daleiden said, “does that mean I have to now have this blood all over my hands?”
Daleiden told reporters he’d tried everything he could think of to wash the blood off his hands from “praying real hard” to “editing together another video to make it look and sound like Planned Parenthood sells baby parts on the street like a food truck” but that nothing would wash the red from them. “I don’t get it,” he kept bleating into the microphone, “why is it my fault that these people died? Just because I helped fabricate a narrative that I knew damn-well would foment into pure, unadulterated outrage, and just because the people who I was trying to gin-up into a frenzy are also many of the same people who are gun nuts, that means it’s my fault when people get murdered over those videos?”
Later that day, Daleiden was seen throwing gasoline on a grease fire in an attempt to put it out, after which he held another press conference where he incredulously asked why everyone thought it was his fault that his house had burned down when all he was trying to do was extinguish the flames.
