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Nov. 1, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:25
ON TRIAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep698
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Welcome to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I'm Brandon Gill, filling in for Dinesh today while he is on the road promoting his latest documentary, Police State.
I had a role in helping bring some of the movie together, which I'm very proud of.
You'll see me in some small parts in the movie.
And I have to say, in my honest opinion, not because I was in it, but this is Dinesh's best documentary.
It's definitely his most chilling.
It's his scariest one, and it's one that every American needs to see.
because every American needs to see what America is turning into under Biden and the left and his politicized DOJ and FBI and CIA. So if you haven't seen it definitely check it out. It's streaming on Rumble right now.
It's been a huge success so far so make sure you watch it if you haven't already and get your friends and family to watch it as well. Like I said I'm Brandon Gill.
I'm the founder and editor of an America First news outlet called DC Inquirer.
That's DC Inquirer with an E dot com.
I'm also on social media.
I'm at realbrandongill on Twitter and at brandongill on Truth Social.
I'm on Facebook and Instagram as well.
We're actually going to be talking about the police state and the weaponization of the federal government and of law enforcement in our legal system more broadly.
We've got two guests who are going to be joining us.
They've both been victims of this weaponization.
First, we have Joey Lynn Massaros.
She's currently embroiled in a long and costly and invasive legal battle for exercising her First Amendment rights to protest a Biden bus that came through her town.
through her town.
They're now trying to say that she violated the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.
In absolutely just flagrantly absurd charges.
Then we're going to have Mark Hook.
Mark is a pro-life activist who had his home raided by the FBI, guns drawn, pointed at his wife and kids.
He's going to be telling us his story.
So it's definitely one you don't want to miss.
So let's get started.
American needs this voice. When times are crazy, when time of confusion dies and then rises, we need a brave voice who is easy to understand and truthful. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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Welcome to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I'm Brandon Gill, filling in for Dinesh while he's taking a bit of time off to promote his newest documentary, Police State, which if you haven't seen, make sure you do.
It's on Rumble right now.
It's been in theaters. It's had its virtual premiere.
All been very successful.
The feedback has been phenomenal.
So make sure you watch it.
And make sure you get your friends and family to watch it as well.
It's one of those things that if you don't, you're going to be missing out on one of the biggest political stories of the day.
So make sure you do and make sure you're informed and you get everybody else to see it as well.
And speaking of the police state, it's something that has been on the forefront of the news cycle for the past several months or really the past couple years, especially since Biden has been in office.
But I think it's interesting if we take a step back and realize that this isn't something that's particularly new.
It's definitely ramped up and gotten a lot worse, but it's not new now.
This really started in a very politicized way under President Obama.
You guys are listeners to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast, so you know Dinesh's story.
It was Barack Obama who first turned the federal law enforcement agencies into weapons against his political enemies.
Remember, it was Dinesh who He was found guilty of a $20,000 campaign finance violation that for anybody else would have been either a slap on the wrist or virtually ignored.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal tax dollars were put into prosecuting him for a case that was virtually irrelevant.
This has been going on for a Right before they went after him, he made a movie about President Obama.
It was a movie that exposed President Obama for being, frankly, the fraud that he actually is.
Remember, he was the president who used to tell us that you are your brother's keeper, quoting scripture.
And yet, it was Dinesh who showed us that President Obama had a half-brother living in Africa in what we would call abject poverty level.
Who's been virtually ignored by his family, despite the fact that his own brother was the single most powerful man on the globe.
Whenever Dinesh made that, obviously it was humiliating to Obama, I think on a really, really deeply personal level in a way that normal media attacks don't really get to him.
So he realized that he had a certain amount of legal resources at his disposal as president, and he directed those against Dinesh.
But it wasn't just Dinesh.
We know it was also the Tea Party.
It was Obama, remember, who weaponized the IRS against Tea Party, conservative and Christian organizations.
Giving heightened scrutiny to certain conservatives, auditing them and things like that that they weren't doing, to liberal organizations.
We all remember that.
But if we take a step back even further, and we think, why does the federal government even have the power to do a lot of these things?
Why does the federal government, why are they able to wiretap our phones, for example?
We're all American citizens, right?
We all should be operating with constitutional rights that are due to us because we're American citizens.
And you realize that, actually, this comes from things that a lot of conservatives, even at the time, supported.
And that's the Patriot Act.
This is one area where the libertarians, I have to say, were 100% right.
After 9-11, there was a big movement to make sure that no other terrorist attack would ever happen on American soil again, which on its face is obviously a very noble goal.
But that sort of noble goal metastasized And to a Patriot Act, which allowed the federal government to spy on American citizens and basically gave them virtually unlimited power, all in the name of stopping terrorism.
At the time, we thought that this was only going to be used against foreigners who were here, Al-Qaeda terrorists, people who we don't tend to have a whole lot of sympathy for, frankly.
And it was. It was for a little while in It sort of served its purpose, but as the threat of terrorism started to wane, the bureaucracy that was created under the Patriot Act remained.
And what happened was these bureaucracies and these powers that were given to the FBI and the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security and all these other government organizations were It stayed and then it started becoming directed towards or against the people who were opponents of the people who were in power at the time, which of course was Obama.
My point in saying all of this is that I think that it's useful to take a step back and think about how all of this came about.
So that we can understand how we can start to fight back against the weaponized deep state.
And that's what it is. It is the deep state.
These are organizations that exist now primarily for their own sake, not for any other purpose.
And we're going to have two guests here on the show today, which I think you're going to I think?
And victims of an FBI who's willing and ready to bust down American citizens' doors, guns blazing, pointed at children and this man's wife, all to promote a political agenda.
So I think you're going to enjoy today.
It's going to be eye-opening and fascinating.
So excited you're here.
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Welcome back to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I'm Brandon Gill, sitting in for Dinesh for a little bit while he is on a very busy media schedule promoting Police State, a movie you guys should definitely be watching.
And that's something we're talking a lot about this week, the weaponization of the federal government under Biden, his DOJ, his CIA, his FBI, and really the entire Democrat Party.
And we've got another guest with us today.
Her name is Joellen Messeros.
She's a homeschooled mom.
She's the founder of freespeechdefender.com, and she's being directly persecuted by the Biden Department of Justice.
Joellen, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me, Brandon.
I'm so glad to be back and very, very eager to share updates with you guys on what's going on.
Great. First of all, tell us a little bit about who you are and your political involvement.
I know it's relatively recent, so tell us a bit about yourself.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
It is, in my opinion, brand spanking new, considering the fact that I didn't even understand the difference between the Democrat and Republican Party.
In 2020, or rather, you know, coming up towards the 2020 election.
That's when I started getting involved in politics.
I wanted to figure out who I should vote for.
And I started doing some digging because I was hearing from my friend group that Trump was a white supremacist and not to vote for Trump.
But I knew that as a Christian somewhere deep down that I knew he didn't stand for abortion, right?
And I knew that that was important to me.
That was about the extent of it.
And so when I started doing research, talking to friends about it, I was then becoming labeled a white supremacist in that friend group.
I was asked to sit there in silence or be apologizing for saying that I wanted to vote for Trump or apologizing for being white.
I was so surprised at this first interaction with Probably the progressive left.
I didn't even realize my friend group was such.
So when I came home and shared this with my husband, I was talking to him and my son overheard me and said, Mom, you need new friends.
And so we started looking for where we could meet other like-minded people.
And we found the local Trump train in our town.
And we... I've enjoyed parading around with Trump flags, meeting other like-minded people, registering people to vote, and really just for the first time ever understanding that values were important to people for a reason.
And I needed to identify what my values were and to get on board with that for where our future was headed in this country.
I didn't even understand. I should have been paying attention to that.
And it has been a fast ride.
Since then, I pulled my son out of public school, started homeschooling him, we started studying the Constitution together, really understanding what our freedoms are, how those are connected to our God-given freedoms in the Bible and the heart of our founding fathers for our country, and wanting to preserve that and really conserve that and understanding that that's what it means to be a Christian conservative.
Absolutely. So you're pretty new to politics.
You got involved, I guess, in 2020, you're saying.
And there was a Biden motorcade in your town in New Braunfels, Texas.
And you and some of your friends and other political sort of allies in the area decided to drive beside them.
Tell us about what happened. Yes, it was pretty last minute.
My husband was home because he just had his tonsils removed and he was on his last day of recovering, feeling a little bit better.
I saw a Facebook post and I thought, how fun would that be?
We've been making the news for the sheer size of our Trump trains with drone footage or video from a helicopter.
I bet we could make the news and Trump would see us if we went to that.
That would be so much fun.
You know like it just sounded like a fun thing to do and we were both home.
And so we already had the flags on the truck because we kept them up since we paraded a couple times a week during that time.
And we lined up on the side of the access road waiting to see the bus come through.
And lots of people were honking.
They were very excited just to see us parked there.
They didn't know probably that the bus was coming.
But 18-wheelers were honking.
People were waving their red Make America Great Again hats out of the window.
Everybody was just so excited at that time.
So for us, it was just fun.
And then I guess a Biden bus showed up, and that's when things went sort of downhill, at least whenever they started coming after you.
They're claiming that, I guess you guys were racially motivated, that you were trying to stop or harass this Biden bus.
You were a bunch of white supremacist Trump supporters.
What exactly happened and what are they saying happened?
Yes, Brandon. It got crazy after that.
That is true.
So I didn't realize it was going to get crazy.
Again, being new to politics, not understanding how the media works or spin things, I didn't understand that if we were on the news, that could be a bad thing.
I thought it would only be a great thing.
And so... Even that—so we didn't learn about the lawsuit until eight months later, so it even took a minute for that to really hit.
But what did happen immediately from that evening through the next two weeks was that the progressive media was saying that we tried to run the bus off the road, which is completely insane because we drove— The Biden campaign bus.
This was a bus with—was Biden on it, or was it more Biden— It was campaign staffers.
I believe in San Antonio where like five people showed up and we're standing in the circles that are like painted on the ground for social distancing.
I remember those. Yeah, so nobody showed up.
Then they're headed, they're passing our town and headed to Austin, right?
Because one of the people on the bus, it was Wendy Davis who had run for governor in Texas and had been state senator previously and she's notorious for far left, you know, pro-female She was on the bus.
Just a campaign tour to promote Biden-Harris' campaign.
And so they're driving through New Braunfels.
We thought it would be awesome to have a Trump train, which is just a caravan of vehicles with flags, behind the bus.
We thought that would make a neat show of support for President Trump.
But then Biden himself gets up on a press release and says, we tried to run the bus off the road and it was the most dangerous thing that could happen.
And how could anybody vote for Trump The View picked it up and said we were emboldened racist bigots crawling out from under our rocks and said that first we'd be flying Trump flags next to a Biden bus, but later we'd be burning crosses in people's front yards.
And I was just like, what is happening?
How could you take that from this, right?
And this is from you driving behind a Biden campaign bus with waving Trump flags and supporting Trump.
Yes, on a road we pay taxes to drive on, a public road.
And they didn't have any kind of a police caravan or, you know, the sheer nature of the exercise of political free speech is that it by nature creates opposition.
And that's normal to exist in that space.
That's why you see presidents with opposition.
I mean, political free speech just creates opposition and you should be able to have two opposing points if you exist in the same space without silencing or intimidating another.
And so they're claiming that we were trying to do that with them while we were just trying to coexist.
They are actually effectively doing that by suing us under the Ku Klux Klan law saying that we were racially motivated to suppress minorities from voting with our turnout.
So they're suing you under, it's the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
It's a statute that's over 100 years old.
And I guess I suppose that there are two claims that they're making.
One is that there's some racial motivation here.
And two, that there's some act of violence that you engaged in.
What's your response to that?
In order to meet the requirements of using this law, they would have to be able to prove those things.
They have not even met the requirements of using that law in their claims, nor have they been able to prove it because it doesn't exist, which is why we've been trying to get this lawsuit dismissed.
However, our judge is Obama-appointed and very biased towards the plaintiffs that are suing us, and he's denied not one but two motions to dismiss the lawsuit, even though they haven't met the requirements of using the law.
So they're claiming we premeditated a plan.
To run the bus off the road, even though that never happened.
They're assuming that that's what we did.
And they're saying it was to intimidate minorities from voting.
But you may know, Brandon, with the Ku Klux Klan law, that it was put in place by Republicans to protect people of color and Republicans helping people of color work, vote, and go to school.
And the point of it was to protect we the people from state actors.
But what's happening here is state actors are attacking we the people with that very law, which again does not meet the requirements of the law itself.
Right, right.
And I imagine they know they don't even remotely have a case.
There's no evidence at all that there's any racial motivations because there wasn't.
And there was obviously no violence here.
But what they do know is that by dragging you through this process, that in itself is the punishment.
It's going to be really expensive for you.
It's going to be really invasive for you.
Tell us about what it's been like.
I mean, from the outside, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners think the same way, it seems to me like you have a justice department that has unlimited funds.
They can hire as many lawyers and litigators as they want.
They can hire as many investigators as they want to go into this process.
And they're going after a private citizen who has...
Food that they need to put on the table and a house that they need to pay for.
I mean, it's so unequal.
I mean, you can't rationally look at this and say this is a fair process just on its face, just from that alone.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head, Brandon, and I think a lot of people fail to grasp that, and I really appreciate your perspective on that, because it has been especially torturous in this process.
Because we have the passion and the desire to fight back and defend our rights and our basic freedoms, not just for our family, but for all Americans.
Whether we agree or disagree, free speech is a basic right.
It's a God-given right, and if we give it up, it'll be impossible to get it back.
Whatever outcome comes from this lawsuit would set a federal precedent that determines how weaponized the law can be against what should be a protected First Amendment right.
And so it's important for us to get a win here.
And so with very little understanding, just a lot of passion.
We started learning as quickly as we could and we determined we were going to fight back, that we were not going to roll over and take it and we weren't going to apologize for doing nothing wrong.
And so we cashed out our 401k and we put it up to retain an attorney.
And at that point, we dipped into our savings account.
And that, at the time, was meant for my husband to start his own company.
He's a plumber. We had just bought a home.
We were about to start his business.
Everything was like we were working towards our vision of the American dream, and it just completely halted.
And we took all the nest egg we had set aside for everything we had planned, and we put it towards this.
And we started fundraising because we learned quickly.
We were going to need a lot more than we had.
We were quoted somewhere between $500,000 and $600,000 in legal defense fees alone.
And we didn't have anywhere near that.
And so I had previously been a fundraiser.
For a nonprofit for years past, and I just felt like God prepared me for this moment to be able to tell people about what was going on, speak up, speak out, and raise funds so that we could continue to fight back.
I was not prepared for how little support we were going to get.
I initially thought those First Amendment rights nonprofits were going to step up, our elected officials were going to be heated in talking about it, the news was going to be covering it, and boy was I wrong.
Wow. So you're telling me you cashed out your 401k, your husband, who's been saving money to start his own business.
He's a plumber, I believe, to start his own practice, I guess, is having to put that aside so that you can defend yourself against obviously frivolous charges from a corrupt administration.
Tell me, what has the process been?
I mean, financially, that's devastating, and I'm Yes, so... There's no rest.
I mean, we are weary beyond all reason.
We are so exhausted.
I would say that God has been faithful to give us joy in this process and to strengthen us where we're weak.
That's a constant. We are determined, right?
It's this balance where we're like, man, we are taking a beating, but we get up and we keep going, you know?
And God is faithful and it's rewarding us in this process that our faith is there because We're like, I don't know how we're going to pay this next round of legal fees.
And then God blesses us.
But beyond that, it's like my son wakes up afraid that the FBI is going to break into the house and drag his family out.
And it's me and my husband.
And so he's like, what happens if they take both of you?
What happens to me? And so there aren't criminal charges.
It's civil. But what he's seeing happen to families and people, he's not able to make these differentiations.
Of what could or couldn't happen reasonably.
He's afraid about worst case scenario and I worry about the same things too.
And it's this black cloud that follows us around when you have this knot in your stomach or your throat that hasn't let up for three years.
It's not going anywhere and it weighs on everything and you carry it around with you with everything that you do and you try not to think about it and you try to enjoy those small moments like when a child opens his birthday presents or on Christmas morning but it's just always there.
Right, right. One of the astounding things about this is how long this takes as well.
It sounds like they didn't even bring charges against you for eight months after this happened.
And then I guess you were slapped sort of out of nowhere at that point.
And you're three years into this.
Where do you go from here?
I mean, what are the next steps and when is this going to be over?
Yeah, I had to learn about it.
I was at the pool with my son.
We were having a picnic and a friend called and said, I'm assuming you don't know this because I feel like I would have already heard it from you, but you're all over the news and you're getting sued for flying Trump flags.
So I'm sorry I'm crying.
It's just, it's a lot.
So I thought to myself, what does that mean?
I don't even understand.
And this beautiful sunny day just felt like There was that dark cloud that just hasn't gone away since then.
But God has been faithful.
So when we learned about it from a friend who saw it on CNN, I called my husband and he's like, don't worry, this cannot be real.
This has to be political theater.
We would know if we were getting sued.
We would know first.
And it wasn't until four weeks after that.
So we were tortured for four weeks of not understanding what was in the news or going on before we were actually served.
And then we were able to see that it was a civil complaint.
Where multiple non-profits were funding this lawsuit.
Non-profits that received George Soros funding.
The same non-profits that are also suing President Trump under the same Ku Klux Klan law for January 6th.
They're also suing Dinesh D'Souza under the Ku Klux Klan law for 2000 Mules documentary.
They're the same non-profits using the same law against the same conservative people trying to silence these people.
And I'm like...
Holy smokes, right?
And so it has been a whirlwind of learning about things through the media and then catching up with it through the legal process because they constantly have press release after press release.
And then we reach out to the nonprofits that I think will help fund our lawsuit and all of the common, most popular First Amendment rights nonprofits.
Say that they don't specialize in political free speech.
They specialize in religious freedom and we fall outside their scope.
So while they're flying 20 Washington, D.C. attorneys in every time we have some sort of meeting or deposition, then it's me, my husband, and the one attorney we were able to find while we fundraise with We the People support.
Wow. Wow. And how long do you think this is going to last?
Are you nearing? Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
Sure. Yeah, we're hoping so.
So like I mentioned earlier, we have filed not one but two motions to dismiss this lawsuit, made no progress even though we know that it should be dismissed.
So we filed an exceptionally rare writ of mandamus with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
We weren't expecting them to pick it up at all.
And they did. By God's grace, they picked it up.
They assigned a panel of three judges, two of which were Trump appointees.
And they replied to us saying, not only are you correct with the two instances that you cited, we'd like to add four more indicating how this should not be standing in federal court.
And we'd like to redirect you back to your judge to file another motion to dismiss.
And we're confident that he will dismiss this lawsuit.
If he does not, we will hear your case at the Fifth Circuit.
So we're expecting this process, you know, while that's an encouraging word of good news, it still feels like get to the back of the line and try again, take another number, another eight months maybe.
I would think we'll probably be in this five or six years or more before it's all over.
So I'm hoping we're maybe halfway through.
But this is why it's important for me to be able to learn how to enjoy the moments with my child while he could be completely grown up and aged out by the time this is over.
And if I put all my time and energy into this, I'm going to miss that with him.
Wow. It's amazing that you're not backing down for this.
It's so important. And it's so important for people to realize that, again, it doesn't matter how frivolous this stuff is.
It's the process that is intended to destroy you and to make an example out of you.
It's amazing whenever you look at this.
Every time there's a Black Lives Matter riot, all we hear about is how it's so important while they're burning buildings down and beating up innocent people in the streets, it's so important that we make sure that these people have their First Amendment rights.
They need to be able to vent. Nothing happens.
You see the same thing on college campuses like every other week, whenever a conservative speaker comes in and says something that we believed for 2,000 years up until five minutes ago.
And the students are pushing and shoving each other.
They're trying to harass the speaker.
They're violent.
And again, all we're told is that this is a First Amendment right, and we have to let them do what they want.
And yet, whenever you guys are driving on a public highway, that's considered harassment, and the legal system comes after you with the intent to destroy you.
So it's so amazing that you guys aren't backing down from that.
Thank you so much. I think that is just a testament of God's goodness and God's grace.
It's also amazing because when He picked us for this, I believe God picked us, not them.
They think they're picking on us.
God picked us. When God picked us for this, we were brand spanking new.
We weren't educated, qualified, equipped.
We put a flag on our truck and we showed up.
And God said, I'm going to use those people, right?
And so what an honor that We get to be a part of something that could possibly defend free speech rights for everybody, for future generations to come.
And I believe anything God sets His mind to, He's victorious in.
So we just have to walk through it and get through to the other side of it.
God will accomplish what He wants to accomplish.
And in this process, He has given us so much passion and so much of a voice that we never had before.
So like I was mentioning to you off camera, a recent A conservative town.
Yes, a very conservative town.
And they're bringing these values through the education and the library systems.
And so we're pushing back against that face-to-face with the mayor, face-to-face with city council.
This is not a voice I would have had before this.
And I can't help but thank the people that are suing us and God for just helping us figure out what's important to us and how to get engaged.
And so when good things happen to bad people, great things can come from it.
And I would just encourage people who are watching Not to be intimidated and not to back down and to remember now is the time to speak up while we still can, especially for future generations.
Absolutely. What can we do to help?
Yeah, thank you so much.
We need help.
We need help telling our story because not enough people know this is going on.
We need financial support so we can continue to stay in this fight, and we need prayerful support.
So we created a website called freespeechdefender.com.
And at freespeechdefender.com, you can learn about our story.
There's a 90 second video you can share on social media or with friends and family.
We post updates on our legal updates tab.
There's a give tab where people can access our fundraiser and other ways to support us, as well as purchase merchandise that goes towards our fight to defend free speech.
And our fundraiser is through Give Send Go, which is a Christian based platform that has embraced our cause.
And we're so grateful for that.
And so our fundraiser is listed at freespeechdefender.com, but can also be accessed at givesendgo.com forward slash Masaros, which is our last name.
Got it. givesendgo.com forward slash Masaros.
Joy Lynn, thanks for joining us.
We really appreciate it. You're doing phenomenal work, so thanks for coming.
Thank you, Brandon. God bless you guys for covering our story, and thank you all for everything you're doing for Americans, too.
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Welcome back to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I'm Brandon Gill. Filling in for Dinesh today while he's out on the road discussing police state, which again, if you haven't seen, you definitely need to watch it.
It's streaming on Rumble. And one of the people who is in police state is also with us right here.
Mark Hook is a pro-life activist.
He's now a congressional candidate, and he's somebody who's been directly targeted by the FBI. He had his house raided, FBI agents flooding into his home, guns drawn, pointed at his wife and kids at, I think, 6.30 in the morning.
So he's going to tell us his story.
But Mark, thanks for joining us.
Oh, great, Brandon. Thanks for having me.
Mark, we know a bit about your story, but why don't we take a step back and help us understand who you are.
You have a pro-life ministry that's in Philadelphia or works in the Philadelphia area.
Tell us a little bit about that and tell us about the day that you had a bit of a sort of sidewalk scuffle and what happened outside of an abortion facility there.
Sure. So about 20 years ago, I started a men's ministry called The King's Men.
And as part of our work, we do activism.
We work with men all around the country and the world.
But some of our work involves taking our faith to action.
It's a Catholic Christian men's apostolate.
So we'll go into the city of Philadelphia.
I will personally, and I have been for the last 20 years, going down and doing sidewalk counseling in the city of Philadelphia.
And we're part of 40 Days for Life.
We'll do that too.
So on October 13th, the date you alluded to, 2021, I was there with my son, and there was a bit of an altercation that was out of the ordinary.
I mean, normally there's a lot of, you know...
Bad language and vulgarity.
But on this day, my son, my 12-year-old boy was with me, and he had been coming with me all year.
So he was used to some of the stuff I previously mentioned.
But on this particular day, he became a target.
He became a target of...
Of a volunteer within the Planned Parenthood that was the facility I was at.
And it basically just violated his personal space and continued to badger him and bully him and verbally abuse him.
And as a dad, I had to take control of that situation.
And I did. And we defused the situation.
Unfortunately, it put me into a private criminal complaint, which was totally dismissed in the Philadelphia state court system.
But apparently the FBI and the DOJ wanted to make more of an issue of it.
Right. So you were outside of a Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia.
What were you guys doing there?
Is this a protest?
Or what exactly were you doing?
Yeah, a peaceful prayer vigil where we're there weekly to do some prayer vigil.
That's right. Okay. We're good to go.
Got it. And one of the staff members at this Planned Parenthood obviously had a problem with you guys praying near them.
And he started harassing.
What did he do to your son exactly?
And what did you do?
Yeah, he's not a staff member.
He's a volunteer. So he doesn't work for Planned Parenthood.
He's just a volunteer. And what they do, they're escorts.
They're outside the building.
I was indicted under the FACE Act, which we'll get into.
That applies to people in the building, people who actually are staff.
It doesn't apply to the people outside the building.
Nonetheless, on this particular day, to your question, he was harassing.
When I say harassing, badgering my son, talking to my son, which my son has no interest in talking to him.
Saying lewd things, saying things to his dad, about his dad rather.
He can talk to me all he wants, but talking to my son, getting into his personal space and informing my son about how evil his father is and just badgering him incessantly on that level, which I eventually said, look, you got to stop.
And he wouldn't stop. I said, look, this is my last warning.
You have to stop.
Leave the boy alone. I escorted him back to where he normally is, and then he turned around to come right back at my son.
At that point, I pushed the man.
He did fall to the ground, and that was all it was at that point.
Got it. So this is something that happens all the time in Philadelphia.
In fact, it's a pretty mild version of the kind of violence that happens in Philadelphia all the time, if you even want to call this violence, really.
Right, right. But I guess the way it works, if I understand the FACE Act correctly, is their claim was that you're impeding somebody's access to an abortion.
Now, to your point, this doesn't even apply to the FACE Act because you weren't in the facility itself.
So it's not even remotely applicable.
Yeah, I mean, I wasn't in the facility, nor was I even at the front of the entrance, which is even more applicable, right, if you're going to apply it.
I was 50 feet away from the entrance, and there were no women seeking an abortion or exiting at that point.
It was just me, my son, and this guy.
So it really had nothing to do in the normal application of it.
Got it. But even to the extent that it did, what's amazing to me as a bit of an aside with the FACE Act is that you can do the exact same thing in two different scenarios.
And if in scenario one, your intention is just to bully some random person on the sidewalk and you harass them, in Philadelphia, it's probably going to get completely ignored.
Nobody really cares. But if you do that with the intention of impeding the operations of an infanticide mill, then you could face up to ten years in prison.
That seems unbelievably evil to me, like an unbelievably wicked statute.
statute.
Yeah, it's bad law and it was established in 1993, 1994 with Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton signed it into law and it was really designed to just stop what was the rescue movement at that time where people would literally barricade themselves in front of the doorways and it did effectively do that but now it's being applied to people just standing on the sidewalk praying.
It's really, again, bad law and it's And by design, it's supposed to actually protect churches and pregnancy resources, but they're not even applying it.
The DOJ is not even applying it to all the bad things that are happening to those facilities and those churches.
So again, it's just an abuse altogether.
Right, exactly. And then what happened after that?
So were police involved?
Eventually the FBI raided your house.
How long was it between that event and your house being raided?
Almost a full year.
A full year?
Yeah, it was September 23rd, 2022, which was pretty much last week prior to this interview.
So essentially it was dismissed in April of 2022, that little incident.
And then the feds picked it up five days later with a target letter saying I was a target of a federal grand jury investigation.
That didn't go anywhere.
And then, of course, Dobbs is leaked and it's overturned and then Mar-a-Lago happens and then people are getting arrested.
But by September, I didn't think anything was going to happen to me.
So on that Friday morning at 6.30 in the morning when I was getting up, my family were going to go to our homeschool co-op.
I was not expecting, because we had told the FBI, hey, if you're going to indict him, just tell us.
We'll bring him into you. He's a peaceful man.
No need to alarm his family.
This is what my attorney said.
So we told the DOJ, look, don't waste the taxpayer dollars.
This guy's going to cooperate.
He's not a threat to the community.
He's a good man. He's a peaceful man.
We'll bring him to you. They didn't want to have any of it.
They wanted to punish, humiliate, intimidate, and really just come and terrorize our family and my children and everyone else in the pro-life movement for that matter.
And mission accomplished.
They did do that. So tell us about it.
How did the raid come about?
When was it? It sounds like it kind of came out of nowhere, from your perspective at least.
You weren't expecting it. So sort of walk us through what happened.
Yeah, so again, it was a Friday morning.
It was 6.30 in the morning.
It was dark. You know, it's not sunlight at that point.
And so it's a nighttime raid, a pre-dawn raid.
My children are all asleep.
I have seven children, ages at the time, two, all the way up to 13.
So, you know, they're all asleep.
They're in a slumber.
My wife is barely awake, and I'm downstairs, thankfully, awake and preparing the home for the day.
So they came to my door, and I'm going to only tell you that it's a minimum 20-plus law enforcement on my property.
We had 10-plus marked and unmarked units on my property.
There was a heavy bang at my door, not even a simple knock or Can you come to the door?
FBI, we have something we need to share with you.
It was a heavy bang as if to say there's a sense of urgency here.
Something bad is happening outside.
You need to get to this door right away or we're coming in.
So I didn't even know when they banged on the door.
They just said, open up.
And of course, who's going to do that if they don't want something bad to happen?
You're not going to do that. So I go to the door and I ask them to announce themselves, and of course they did, and they did it in the same manner, banged on the door, riding my doorbell.
All my children are awake at this point, screaming, scared, and I open the door and there's five federal agents on my porch with all these other PA state troopers and SWAT people behind my door, in the back door rather, and With M16 long guns pointed at me.
And so that's how they came at me.
You know, two battering rams, ballistic helmets, ballistic shields, heavily armored vests.
You know, I'm a peaceful guy.
I'm a ministry guy. Like, this was not necessary.
So it was as if I was a violent offender.
That's how they came at me.
I was a flight risk and someone who was a threat to the community.
So that's exactly how they prepared that high risk raid.
And it was unnecessary and certainly uncalled for.
And you know what, Brandon?
It's a miracle that one of my children weren't shot or I personally wasn't shot.
Right. I mean, you have a family waking up from still in a bit of a slumbered state, including two-year-olds with guns pointed at them.
I mean, anybody who knows anything about gun safety knows you don't point a gun at somebody unless you have at least an intention of potentially shooting them.
So you have all these people probably, I'm sure your younger kids were scared out of their minds seeing this.
I mean, that would be terrifying to any two or three-year-old.
Well, I have a four and a five-year-old as well.
They can't process that.
Exactly. Go ahead. Right.
So... So they come to your house and they're busting down your door practically and what do they do next?
Are they wanting to take you away?
Are they wanting to question you?
And what do you think is the purpose of this kind of just overwhelming force?
Well, they really didn't seem – they seemed to be in shock that they didn't bust down the door.
I think when they bring a high-risk rate, their goal within seconds of banging on the door is to open the door themselves, secure the property, and secure the suspect.
I think that's what they're used to doing.
I happened to be there right at the door, so I came out at them.
I think it kind of surprised them.
And my hands were up.
I totally was submitting to everything.
And they really didn't have a lot to say.
In fact, I had to ask them, what are you doing here?
Because they really didn't tell me.
They didn't say, we have a warrant for your arrest.
You're being indicted under the FACE Act.
They didn't say any of that. They patted me down a little bit.
But that was it. And I just said, you know, you wouldn't be here if the Trump administration was in the White House.
And they really didn't know what to say to that.
My wife comes down and says, who are you here for?
She totally takes control of the situation.
The feds are on their heels.
And they say, well, we're here for him.
I mean, again, where's the professionalism?
Your husband's being indicted.
None of that. And she said, what's his name?
And they told him my name.
And then she said, do you have a warrant for his arrest?
And they said, we're taking him with or without a warrant.
So this was the mindset of the federal government.
It's like, look, we don't care whether you're guilty.
We're taking you.
We're taking you because, as you said prior to the show, the process is the punishment.
We want to punish you first, then we'll find the crime later.
And I think this plays out beautifully in the police state, the way Dinesh set it all up.
Right. And a dark beauty, I guess we should say.
Well, from a production movie standpoint.
So they take you away, and what do they want?
Are they trying to throw you in jail at that point, or what's the purpose of doing any of this?
I wouldn't think somebody who violated the FACE Act would be somebody who needs to sit in jail for days and weeks on end prior to trial.
Right. Yeah, so look, I don't even know at this point.
I just, I comply with them because my children are screaming.
They're downrange. They're in the line of fire.
My wife's in the line of fire.
You know, they yell, please don't take him.
He's my best friend. My youngest boy yells that.
And look, they just take me.
I can't say goodbye. They don't even let me put clothes on.
I have a t-shirt and shorts.
It's cold out. You know, normally an FBI would just say, sir, finish your coffee.
We're taking you downtown. No, not at all.
So I'm cuffed in front of my children.
I'm taking downtown, which is an hour plus, hour and a half drive.
I'm at the federal building in Philadelphia, which is 100 yards from Independence Hall.
And they fingerprint me and they put me in a white room.
Now, prior to putting me in a white room, they belly shackle me and shackle my ankles.
And then they chain me to a table for six hours.
Now, I'm in their custody.
Why does that need to even happen?
Mm-hmm. If but to just punish, humiliate, and put me into a rage.
And I think that's what they wanted.
But I was at peace. I had perfect peace.
Six hours. Hey, man, you can left me here for another four hours.
Now, I don't even know if I'm going to be returned to my family.
They didn't tell me this.
The January 6th people are already still in prison and have been in there for two years now.
So I don't know when I'm coming back.
But you know what? We're just trusting God with that.
But they did release me about seven hours later, and I was returning to my family after 10 hours of that ordeal.
It seems like, as you're describing it, the purpose was to get a rise out of you.
I mean, if you're in at least semi-rural Pennsylvania, if you show up to somebody's house in Pennsylvania and in the most rural places in the country...
Banging on their door at 6.30 in the morning, there's a really good chance they're going to show up with a shotgun on the other side of the door.
For sure. I think they were counting on it, Brandon, because I don't own a gun, but everybody in my community does.
I mean, it's deer country here.
So I got 2,000 acres of state game lands.
There's deer everywhere. So we all have guns, except me, because I don't want the armory in my house with my little ones.
But I love guns. I can shoot guns.
I think they were expecting that, and I think they had every intention of shooting me.
I think that was a secondary hope.
The guy that came to his door in Utah, Mr.
Roberson, I think his name was, he came to the door with his cane in his hand, and they shot him right there because it was a threat.
So thanks be to God I didn't have anything, and if they did their homework, they would have known I wouldn't have had anything.
Right, right, exactly.
And then it was to humiliate you and just upset you.
I mean, I would be kind of annoyed if I was sat in a room for six hours.
And all while they're talking to you and they know that if you say anything to them and then contradict yourself later, you're liable for making false statements to law enforcement.
The entire thing is to set you up for failure.
Sure. What was the process like after that?
I mean, you had a pretty lengthy legal battle with these guys.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, sure. Well, I was immediately arraigned five days later, you know, before the judge, the magistrate, the judge that would take the case, Judge Gerald Papert, who would be assigned to the trial.
The trial was set pretty quickly, actually.
You know, Paul Vaughn, some of the guys, they're still waiting their trial.
My trial was scheduled very quickly, January 24th.
So I knew on September 27th, That I had trial in four and a half months.
So I didn't have a lot of wait time, even though it was agonizing.
I was facing 11 years in prison, $350,000 in fines, three years supervised probation.
And I had an assault charge on me.
So I'm looking at max security time.
I'm looking at hard time.
So this is the reality.
When the government comes after you, Brandon, they have a 98% conviction rate.
So you're going to lose.
So we were all preparing our heart for that, even though we knew we were innocent.
We still have to prepare for it.
So it was pretty daunting to kind of travel that way, knowing that likely you're not going to get a fair trial, knowing that a jury of your peers is not going to be impartial, and you're going to face what you need to face.
So we prepared our hearts for that.
It was dark at times.
We had a lot of support.
People from all over the country and the world were Sending support, love, messages, encouragement, financial support for the legal fight.
We had the Thomas More Society, who I call the cavalry.
They come and they rescue those that need the help.
I had a great attorney in Philadelphia.
Jesse Barrett, Amy Coney Barrett's husband, recommended this attorney.
He's the best attorney in Philadelphia.
That's who you need, and we got him.
Thanks to Thomas Moore Society, we got him.
And he was great.
Brian McMonigle did a fantastic job.
But even up to the 11th hour, he said, Mark, I think you're going to lose.
This is after the trial. I think you're going to lose.
But it was miraculous what happened.
It was a unanimous verdict.
I mean, what happened with the jury was purely miraculous if you want to get into it.
Yeah. But the government really couldn't run away from the truth.
My son testified on the stand, and that's daunting for a 14-year-old.
His dad's been 11 years, and if he says something wrong, his dad's going away.
So can you imagine the stress on that boy?
It's incredible, but you won, and now you're turning the tables on the federal government.
You filed a lawsuit against them now.
Yeah, that's going to actually happen within the next week or so.
But yes, we're in the process and it's almost finalized.
But yes, we're suing the government because they need to be held accountable and they need to be punished as well for what they're doing because they'll keep doing it.
And the United States versus Mark Halky, I don't know if your audience know or Dinesh knew this, but they offered me a plea.
Now, the federal government never offers a plea deal because they always win.
But they offered me a plea on January 6th, two weeks before my trial, of all days, January 6th.
It was no time, no fine, no probation.
Just plead guilty through the assault charge.
And that would have been a misdemeanor felony, but nonetheless, they wanted their conviction.
And what does this tell you?
We said no. They were flabbergasted that we said no.
This tells you that this is the game they're playing.
Like, look... I'm scared of this guy.
He'll take the deal. But, you know, we said, no, we ain't taking the deal.
We want to risk everything.
And so United States versus half now protects a lot of people on the sidewalk.
And I don't think the government was expecting it, nor were they expecting me to run for Congress at this point.
Right. I mean, it's incredible.
So now you're a free man.
You're running for Congress.
Tell us about that.
How's your campaign going and where do you go from here?
Yeah, so we're, you know, we're grassroots, right?
Because that's who we are as people.
And we have an incumbent that I'm challenging here in the First District of Pennsylvania, who's been in for five terms now.
This will be his fifth term, rather. And he's the only former FBI agent in Congress right now.
His name is Brian Fitzpatrick.
And As God would have it, that narrative is very interesting.
He did not support me.
He did not condemn what happened.
He didn't say this was wrong.
I'm his constituent.
I knew his brother, who was a congressman before him.
It's just a shame.
It's a shame to see the lack of integrity.
And so that's what we're doing.
We're bringing in common sense.
The campaign's off to a good start.
We've got a lot of work to do.
People can support us at howpforcongress.com if they want to.
Got it. HalkforCongress.com.
Mark, thanks for joining us.
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That wraps things up for today.
Thanks for joining us. Again, this is Brandon Gill filling in for Dinesh D'Souza today while Dinesh is promoting police state.
Again, Police State is a movie that you absolutely need to watch.
Get your friends. Get your family.
You can stream it on Rumble.
It's doing phenomenally.
Everybody's talking about it, so don't miss out.
And again, you can find me.
I'm Brandon Gill on social media at RealBrandonGill.
I'm on Truth Social at JustBrandonGill.
And I'm also on Twitter, excuse me, on Facebook and Instagram as well.
Check out my website, DC Inquirer.
That's DC Inquirer with an E. And again, make sure you find Police State on Rumble.
Thanks for joining us. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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