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July 29, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:47
THE REMAKING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep884
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Coming up, I'm going to tell you how Biden got the boot and how the media is now trying to remake Kamala Harris into something other than, well, Kamala Harris.
I want to talk about the Olympics and the opening ceremony and also the Venezuela election results and pro-life activist Bevelyn Beattie Williams joins me.
We're going to talk about her outrageous 41-month sentence for protesting at a New York abortion clinic.
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this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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This past week was the big week in which Joe Biden got the boot and Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee for president.
Now, I was out of commission, at least for the latter part of the week.
And the reason is that we were filming at Mar-a-Lago.
This is for the new film coming out in September.
It's going to be awesome.
And then we had the funeral and burial services for Debbie's mother, Mitzi.
A very beautiful and moving ceremony.
And I'll be talking with Debbie about it later in the week when we do our joint session on Friday.
Now, The Biden departure, so to speak.
Now, he's not quitting as president, and that alone raises the question, why not?
This guy is obviously, if he's not a vegetable, he's, well, let's just say he's a partial vegetable.
His own staff says he's, like, good for about six hours, 10 to 4 p.m., and so he's clearly not fit to be president.
I mean, he never was, and he wasn't leaving aside the question of his illegitimate election.
The simple truth is that he's clearly disabled now from being able to do the job.
And so we just have to face the fact, and it's a very disturbing fact, but it doesn't seem to be much we can do about it.
You've got this guy, non-compost mentis, in effect representing our country to the world and in the face of threats that are Very real from more than one place, from China, from Iran, threats in the Middle East, and you've got Biden at the helm.
Now, true, I think for some time he hasn't really been at the helm.
He's been kind of a ventriloquist puppet, but that raises its own problems, as you know.
Now, I don't go along for a minute with all the mindless hosannas about what a massively noble and self-sacrificial gesture this is on Biden's part to step aside.
Oh, he put the country first.
Contrast him with Trump, who's all about himself.
This is the kind of rhetoric that we're getting.
Classic example of this is the Yale political scientist Tim Snyder, who basically went into just rhapsodies over Biden and said, history will record this as one of the, not just Biden's finest hours, but the finest hour of any president.
I'm thinking to myself, are you on drugs?
I mean, are you this stupid?
Or is it the case that you're just saying this stuff because you're, you know, angling for a political appointment of some sort?
And I say this because it's quite obvious that Biden didn't want to go.
There's nothing magnanimous about what he did.
He was essentially, well, I mean, he was essentially taken into the back room and subjected to a kind of chokehold.
Now, who administered the chokehold is up for some debate, but evidently it was a combination.
Of Obama and Pelosi with the consent, with the full consent of Kamala Harris.
And this is the key.
Apparently what they did is they went to Biden, at least this is what reports are.
And they said to Biden, we have Kamala Harris's consent to invoke the 25th amendment on you.
And that will be a huge disgrace.
Your own party will be in effect.
Leading the effort to get you thrown out.
And remember, invoking the 25th amendment is not about preventing Biden from running.
It's throwing Biden out of the presidency now.
So the compromise was, okay, you get to stay on through January, but you agree.
That you will voluntarily, quote, voluntarily get a step down or step out of the race.
And I guess Biden, under pressure, under duress, through no great credit of his own, agreed to do that.
Now, right away, and there's some conservatives are like, oh, Dinesh, what a pity.
We were trying to keep Biden in to be so easy for Trump to beat Biden.
Now, first of all, think about it.
If you had to pick between Biden And Kamala Harris to run against.
Who would you pick?
I take a sip while you think about that.
And the simple answer is it's hard to say, because they're both horrible.
And they're both horrible as candidates.
I mean, I don't know who I would choose.
I mean, I think I would actually prefer Kamala Harris to Biden, because with Biden, you know, you've got a guy who has a brain, but it's just sort of gone past its sort of battery life.
With Kamala Harris, you have a dingbat.
You have a cackling idiot.
As Trump says, you have a very low IQ individual.
I think that's understating the matter.
I mean, here's someone who went to a third-rate college, went to a fourth-rate law school, I think Hastings Law School it's called.
Here's somebody who has no credentials at all, no accomplishments.
Unless you call courting Willie Brown an accomplishment, but I don't really consider these sort of levitational accomplishments to be real accomplishments at all.
So, some people go, well, she was a prosecutor.
And in fact, the first person who said she's a prosecutor actually misspoke and said she's a prostitute-er.
And I was like, actually, that's a Freudian slip.
But anyway, so you have Kamala Harris.
I do not think she is going to be a formidable candidate, nor am I in any way impressed at all these efforts on the part of the media to enlarge her Her stature make us seem like an amazing intellect, a statesman or stateswoman if you want to put it that way.
And all of this involves an attempt to systematically whitewash her record, her past, and really who she is.
And so I'm going to be really dwelling, focusing on the podcast and in my social media posting and elsewhere over the next several weeks.
On the full and real Kamala Harris, the kind of untouched up Harris, the Harris without the costume, without the kind of fake aura that is going to be put on her by the media in an effort again to really Pull a fast one on the American people.
The American people have had a pretty good look at Kamala Harris and they're like, she sucks.
And the media is like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we, you don't know the real Kamala Harris.
Look at our version of Kamala Harris.
And we need to see the real Kamala Harris.
And so you're going to see the real Kamala Harris in the movie, but you're also going to see and hear about it right here on the podcast.
But let me highlight two attempts to kind of edit Kamala Harris for public consumption.
The first one, of course, is the big kind of black woman descended from slaves theory.
Now, I have actually debunked this completely.
But I did it in 2020 when Kamala Harris was first elected by Joe Biden, and it's kind of gone into the memory hole.
So I need to pull all that right back up.
But I'll simply give you the sort of punchline or the conclusion, and that is that Kamala Harris, far from being descended from slaves, which is basically the propagandistic version of her biography or of her story, the reality is she is descended directly from one of the largest, if not the largest slave owner in Jamaica.
We're talking about a white guy.
And this is the part of her past that I think there's going to be a tremendous effort to hide.
Why?
Just because it Look, again, we don't pick our ancestors.
I'm not blaming her for being descended from a slave owner any more than I'm blaming anybody else for being there.
Oh, your great-great-great-grandfather was, you know, a colonialist.
He was a rapist.
He was who?
What do I have to do with any of that?
So I'm not claiming that she does.
I'm simply saying I don't like fake biography.
I don't like made-up facts about your past.
I don't like you trying to cash in on something that's not even legitimate.
So the victimology that Kamala is trying to tap into is fake.
And the other thing, and again there's a lot more detail that needs to go into this, so at this point I'm merely Giving you the headline, the title, if you will, is Kamala Harris was not the border czar.
She was not Joe Biden's point person for the border, and hence she's not responsible for the chaos at the border.
This is the media effort to take the border problems, which they know are not only real but politically damaging, And somehow exempt or immunize Kamala from responsibility for those.
But how can you?
When Kamala Harris goes, well, it's not about the border.
We need to deal with the root problems.
Well, the root problem is the Biden policies that have the poorest border in the first place.
And Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are jointly responsible for that.
And just as Joe Biden was Obama's point man in Ukraine, that's what he used as a way to cash in on Ukraine.
Kamala was Biden's... I'm sorry, Joe Biden was Obama's point man on Ukraine.
And in the same vein, Kamala is Joe Biden's point woman, I guess I'd have to say, on the border.
She cannot duck responsibility for that.
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I want to talk in this segment about international news, and I want to focus on two things.
One is the opening ceremony of the Olympics and the other is the results just in from the Venezuelan election.
I'll talk more with Debbie about the Venezuelan election also on Friday.
But let me start with the Olympics and just express some of the absolute disgust and outrage that I feel and many others feel about this grossly sexualized and blasphemous aspect of the opening ceremony.
It wasn't the entire opening ceremony, but they apparently had this kind of, you know, LGBTQ activist who wanted to send a message, as he puts it, of inclusion.
But this is not a message of inclusion.
In fact, it's a message of exclusion.
It's a message of derision.
It was a kind of a mockery based upon the famous painting I guess it's a Da Vinci painting, I believe.
Is it Da Vinci of The Last Supper?
I think it's Da Vinci.
And so they created these LGBTQ characters.
Absolutely one person had blue skin.
It was essentially a gross parody of that scene.
And now, subsequently, I've seen some efforts on the part of apologists for the Olympics to say, No, no, no, no, no, you're misreading it.
This was not that.
This was actually based upon the pagan god Dionysus.
It was an evocation of ancient Greece.
Well, first of all, the evocation of ancient paganism, with all its extreme sexualization, obviously the homosexuality, all of this is in fact an attempt to elevate those values over Christianity.
So that's the first point to be made.
But the second point is that this wasn't, you know, Dionysus with a cup of wine and some grapes and the kind of ancient pagan ritual.
Not at all!
Because you could see, you could put the Da Vinci painting side by side with the tableau of what happened at the Olympics and you can see that that is exactly what they were going for.
And in a particularly gross aspect of this, if you notice, and many people on social media, particularly on X, have highlighted this, one guy literally has his genitals hanging out.
You can actually see it.
And I don't believe it was on accident.
I don't believe his genitals popped out.
This was part of the, let's push the envelope, let's go one step lower, let's degrade the scene even further.
And it's the kind of artistic uproars, I think, that they were going for here.
And so, needless to say, there's been kind of worldwide outrage at this.
The French bishops have condemned it.
It's been condemned in other parts of the world.
The Olympic Committee's gotten nervous, recognizing that a lot of people are saying...
Let's boycott the Olympics.
To heck with it.
We're just not interested.
And for me, this is kind of a hard thing to do.
I like the Olympics.
I particularly like the track and field.
It doesn't happen very often.
It's every four years.
But I'm having serious doubts about whether to watch.
Look, I'm not going to go to France to protest.
Some people have actually done that.
And I saw this Tate fellow.
Was it Andrew Tate?
Is that the guy?
Yeah, the kickboxer, he's out there protesting in person.
And he goes, where are the Christians?
He goes, I'm doing it as a Muslim.
I'm protesting the treatment of Jesus as a Muslim.
And he goes, and he goes, and if they want to jail me, I'm here to be jailed.
So, I mean, I got to give the guy a little bit of credit for doing that in such a bold way.
But honestly, if you don't want to encourage this kind of stuff, you have to send a message.
And it doesn't matter.
And I take the same view.
It doesn't matter if I like to watch the Olympics.
It's my little way of saying, the little influence I can have on these guys, and they're not even here in America, they're in France, but they want the Olympics to succeed.
It's a big deal for them.
And so we're like, let's just turn it off.
You know what?
Let's go watch Chariots of Fire.
It's a better movie, it's got better values, and nobody's genitals fall out, I'll tell you that.
So, that's my take on the Olympics and the grotesque opening ceremony, and the so-called apologies that have come out of the Olympic Committee are basically fake, because what they're saying is, well, we didn't mean it, we were going for harmony and exclusion, if we offended anyone, so they haven't taken it back in any way.
They haven't said what we did was wrong.
They're basically saying, we're sorry that you were offended, even though we think we did just an excellent job.
No.
Now, Venezuela.
The election, David tells me, has just been certified.
This is a completely bogus election.
In fact, we know this because there were a number of polls taken right up to the election, and they all showed that Maduro was going to lose.
He was going to lose despite the fact that the leading candidate against him, Maria Corina Machado, had been Prohibited by Maduro's goons, and by this I mean the goons on the Supreme Court.
He's packed the court, it's hand-picked goons, and they are like, she can't run.
So she appointed another guy to run in her stead, a kind of proxy.
And that's hard enough to do.
We are basically telling people, the people who you want to vote for me, vote for this other guy.
And yet, the proxy, that guy, was leading in the polls.
And then, magically, the election results come in.
Oh, Madora's won.
He's won again.
And this is what the definition of a rigged system.
Now there are all kinds of election improprieties that people have been highlighting.
Deployment of the military to scare people from voting, intimidate people into not voting, and I've seen some videos to that effect.
There were also all kinds of... we also know that there have been all Very cunning ways that the Venezuelan government knows how to control the counting of the ballots.
And so there is a kind of intermediate phase, this echoes by the way of 2020, here in America, where you cast the ballots and then someone takes control of that whole system.
And then they declare the result.
We won.
The regime won.
And so, pretty much all over the world, there's a recognition that this was a, this is a rigged election.
Rigged and stolen, to use the phrase that Donald Trump likes to use.
Except here, it seems like even the Democrats in this country have to agree.
I saw Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, put out a statement today.
Basically, it was his usual Anthony Blinken beta-mail statement.
We have serious concerns, blah blah blah.
We wish to express our reservations, blah blah blah.
Democracy itself requires blah blah blah.
So I'm not saying this has any value.
This certainly wasn't talking about doing anything.
It was all about just the international community expresses its concerns, its reservations, its, well, blah, blah, blah.
But it's another way of saying that this is a country that is already, you may say, tipped over.
And what are the hallmarks of a country that's tipped over?
You have elections, but they aren't real elections.
And you have a rule of law, but the Supreme Court is in the back pocket of the dictatorial regime.
So all the law and all the democracy that they talk about is trappings.
It's the outer shell, but there's nothing inside.
It's like the facade of a building, but there's no real building behind it.
Intended for show.
It doesn't even really fool anybody.
Because most people can kind of go, there's nothing behind that building.
Or that's just a facade.
Or that's just a show.
But nevertheless, the regime controls the power.
They control the military.
They control the police.
They've got gangs that they control on the street.
And they're like, we dare you.
We're in charge.
We do run our little dog and pony show every few years.
We then declare ourselves the winner.
This way we can claim that we are the promoters of Bolivarian democracy.
And even though everybody knows that's not really the case, There's not much that anyone seems willing to do about it, or certainly able to do about it.
In Venezuela, Debbie thinks, and I agree, that no one is strong enough to take on the regime.
If the regime is displaced, it will have to be done somehow from the outside.
And in fact, this is kind of our hope, Debbie's and mine, for A second Trump term.
It's probably not at the top of Trump's list, but it needs to be on Trump's list that, hey, we could use some regime change.
We could use some real democracy in Venezuela, just as we can use some real democracy right here in the United States.
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Guys, I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast.
I say pleased because we are about to talk about a solemn topic, but nevertheless, it's our friend Bevelyn Beattie Williams.
She's a pro-life activist.
She's co-founder of Atwell Ministries.
By the way, that website, atwellministries.org, You probably saw her in the movie Police State, where she told her story about her activism.
And this is a very brave and wonderful woman that Debbie and I support completely.
She has been sentenced to 41 months.
I repeat, 41 months in federal prison for violating the FACE Act.
This is a complete outrage, and I wanted to have Bevelyn on.
I'm going to have her attorney come on right after her to talk about some of the legal issues, but I want to talk to Bevelyn just on the personal side.
Bevelyn, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I know it's not an easy time.
And this, to me, is a scandalous verdict.
You're not the only one who's been charged under the Space Act.
But I want to just ask you to describe the sentencing, the judge.
Describe how this all went down just a few days ago.
Um, you know, I'll be honest.
I wasn't expecting the judge to rule on the time that prosecution was requesting.
I just didn't expect, um, you know, do expect the judge to just want to do what's right.
What they, you know, they see criminals daily lawyers and judges see criminals.
They know a criminal when they see one.
I wanted the judge to do the right thing.
And I just walked out of there just heartbroken.
I was heartbroken and devastated.
I mean, you know this, I caught your wife crying.
I just, I was so hurt.
Um, and it just, it's, it was so surreal.
Like I was hot and cold at the same time.
I just couldn't believe 41 months plus two years of supervised release.
It just was like, oh my, this is overwhelming.
But, you know, they made it very clear.
You know, a lot of people, thousands of people watched you stand in front of that abortion clinic and make the stance that you made.
And, you know, before they get inspired by what you did, we're going to give you a serious sentence.
We're going to make a statement.
And they were not secretive about it.
They made that very clear in court.
And so it was devastating.
It was devastating.
I mean, let's talk about what these kinds of things imply, right?
In other words, when are you supposed to be actually incarcerated and what effect does that have on your family?
Let's lay that out.
So my turn in day is October 16th, and my daughter is two.
My husband works from home, and I'm a stay-at-home mother, aside from whatever I do for the Lord.
My daughter does not know what it's like to be without her mom.
I was away from her for maybe two days while headed to this sentencing.
My daughter was depressed.
My daughter misses her mommy.
You know, she loves Edmay, and she loves her nana, but I'm her mommy, you know.
She crawls into our bed in the middle of the night, find her in the middle.
Eleanor just does not understand this.
And it's going to be hard for her.
And my husband, he is really trying, but I find him sitting by himself sometimes crying or sitting alone and just in deep thought.
And he's devastated about the injustice of it.
And he just feels like the leadership That we've put in, they betrayed us and it feels like tyranny all over again.
So right now, I'll be honest with you, it's really hard for my family emotionally.
It's really hard.
And is this the case?
I mean, it seems to be the case that not only is this a form of, I don't know, vengeance is the right word, but like you say, particularly in New York, where you've got this southern district of New York, and what they want to do, it's almost like they want to take out their rage
for the overturning of Roe versus Wade on mothers and grandmothers, and they're finding episodes where here you're at the clinic and you're hollering and screaming and you're trying to send a message to people, hey, don't do this, you don't have to do this to your child, and they're like, okay, we gotcha, because we found this episode in which one of the clinic employees open a door and gets her hand stuck in a door, Now, can you tell us very clearly what happened in that incident?
I mean, you didn't grab her hand and slam the door on it, did you?
So, you gotta understand, in New York, at the Margaret Sanger Square Planned Parenthood, there's a giant sidewalk.
They don't have a private parking lot because it's New York City.
So, there's a giant sidewalk that is open to the public.
And so, this particular day, they bring pro-abort protesters to come, To counter protest us.
These are not volunteers.
These are not employees.
They're just as much equal to me as far as their stance against abortion as my stance for abortion as much as my stance against abortion.
So in front of this door, there was free range for everybody to just, hey, listen, if I could stand here, they can stand here.
And that's why there were no arrests.
The police didn't pull anybody away because it was a fair game.
Now, the woman who said her hand was caught in the door is not even an escort.
She is an executive marketing director who, for whatever reason, during my publicized Jesus Matters rally, decided to open doors.
Now, mind you, she also had agitated Ed May the day before.
So then the next day, you know, she had put a camera in Edmae's face and Edmae told her to move.
Edmae was kind of your buddy, right?
She was with you.
Right.
They have a no engagement law, but yet the woman takes her phone and she's like this close to your face, five inches off of your face.
They say they're not supposed to engage and agitate, but they actually do.
It's a lot of like elbows to ribs and weird things that they do that you just have to deal with while you're there.
So I'm standing in front of the door.
She opens the door.
She opens the door and she hits me with the door.
I lose balance and fall behind the door.
Now she's saying, oh my hand, my hand, my hand.
Mind you, I can't hear her hand.
I have no idea about anything going on.
All I know is that I was whacked with the door.
Okay.
And so now she's claiming, oh, my hand, I have a hand injury.
She, she, she, she hurt my hand, but she waited five days to go to an urgent care where they were, they did an x-ray and they said she had no kind of broken ligaments, nothing.
She was self-prescribed ibuprofen.
So, 41 months?
This is extreme.
This is literally revenge.
And then I'll tell you something else.
The prosecution said this, but I've never been the type, Dinesh, when I go in front of an abortion clinic and I'm preaching, I'm not the type to count babies.
I'm like, listen, I can't count how many babies are saved.
I'm here to preach the gospel.
That's just what it is.
The prosecution said on one day alone in this two-day rally, they had 150 women scheduled.
None of them came.
So you tell me, the cake is 150 women saved, a baby saved on a day, and the icing is Dotson.
Wow.
Well, Bevelyn, you are truly a heroine, and I don't know how sorry I am that this has happened to you.
I want to help you any which way I can.
We've contributed to your Give, Send, Go.
And look, people listening to the podcast, people watching it, Do what you can, and the way to do that is to help Bevelyn.
She's going to need some resources to provide for her family, and more importantly also to mount an effective appeal against this injustice.
We've just got to fight it at every stage.
So here's her GiveSendGo.
It's GiveSendGo.com.
GiveSendGo.com slash Bevelyn Beatty Williams.
GiveSendGo.com Bevelyn slash Bevelyn Beatty Williams.
Please find it in your heart to help.
Bevelyn, what an outrage.
I'm so sorry.
We're with you and our prayers are with you all the way.
And thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you.
Love you guys.
Guys, having just talked to Bevelyn Beattie Williams, I wanted to talk to her attorney.
And so I'm delighted to welcome Erin Mishleviak to the podcast.
His website, fmamlaw.com, fmamlaw.com.
He is a civil attorney, but he's also a criminal attorney.
He's represented a number of high-profile clients around the country, Fortune 500 companies.
He has a lot of experience, and importantly for our purpose, he's representing Bevelyn in this, to my view, miscarriage of justice.
Aaron, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
I mean, what a complete outrage this is.
And I want people to understand how it can come to this.
You've got a woman of faith, a woman of conviction.
She is out there protesting for a cause that she believes in.
From what I understand, she really didn't do anything, or anything in which you could say that the penalty bears any resemblance to the offense.
It is a complete dislocation, a disproportion, if you will, of sentence to the so-called crime.
And so let me start by asking you, to describe the law under which she was charged, and what does that law actually say?
Well, first of all, Dinesh, it's great to be here.
Thanks for having me on the show.
She was charged, and by the way, I think you set out perfectly a lot of the big themes here in terms of The punishment, the lack of evidence about a real criminal, a crime being committed.
But the act that she was prosecuted under is referred to as the FACE Act, and it's the Freedom of Access to Clinical Entrances Act.
It was passed during the Clinton presidency and spearheaded, I think, in a lot of ways by then acting Attorney General Janet Reno.
And it was a response to On the left, some violent acts at abortion clinics, I think mostly in the south, there were some, there were some bombings and shootings relating to abortion clinics.
And so the act was brought to Congress.
and passed, I think, in a pretty bipartisan way because it ended up including some language about protecting places of worship as well from acts of violence.
And so, the law sets out that a person cannot attempt to intimidate, interfere, or injure People, be they employees or patients, who are seeking reproductive health services at a reproductive health service clinic.
And it also sets out that people cannot attempt to intimidate, interfere, or injure people attempting to enter a house of worship.
And so I think by, you know, putting both of those provisions in, President Clinton and Janet Reno were able to get congressional support for the act, and that's around the time when it was passed.
Now, if I'm standing outside an abortion clinic and I am, let's just say, shouting out gospel verses or I'm saying to women who want to go in, don't do this, you're killing your child, this is horrible, you should not do this.
Am I allowed to do that or am I violating the FACE Act?
Right.
You've nailed the issue, Dinesh.
Spot on.
Certainly the defense at Bev's trial, Ms.
Williams' trial, and Ms.
Chavon's trial, and I was representing Ms.
Chavon at the trial stage, and she was fortunately found not guilty of the FACE Act conspiracy and FACE Act violation.
Ms.
Williams was found not guilty of the conspiracy charge, but found guilty of attempting to injure, intimidate, or interfere with, I think, one specific employee on one specific date in June of 2020.
But to your question, I certainly argued that protesting, proclaiming one's views, and attempting to persuade other people of those views, in this case, not to have an abortion, falls squarely within the First Amendment.
And the FACE Act actually includes a carve-out provision that says it should not be interpreted to impede or infringe on someone's First Amendment rights.
And of course, those rights include freedom of speech, the freedom to practice religion, the freedom to associate with other people.
And I think what you've identified, that question, is clearly First Amendment-protected activity and should not be deemed a violation of the FACE Act.
I think in a trial, go ahead, in a criminal trial, you get into a question of what's intended and what's being done.
Yeah, yeah, I understand.
Now, am I fair in saying that there was no individual woman, or even women, who were trying to get into the facility that Bevelyn somehow prevented from entry?
Isn't that a fact?
That's a fact, and the government tried to argue that Bevelyn made entrances impassable.
But there was no point at which Bevelyn chained herself to an entrance, blocked an entrance in any kind of long-term way.
She was in front of a door at times, but the counter-protesters, people who were protesting for the abortion movement, were actually behind her and blocking the door.
Beveline was in front of them and not blocking the door.
She was in front of them to make the point, listen to my views, don't listen to their views.
So the government tried to argue that by saying things like, we don't want anyone to go in here today, that Bev was obstructing the entrances or intending to interfere with people going in.
So the government showed some video clips of Bev saying those things in her case.
And we had to fight to get into evidence the dozens and dozens of other video clips, which thankfully the judge eventually let in, that showed that every time someone came up to the door to either enter or attempted to exit, every time Bev stepped aside.
There was apparently an employee, you made reference to this, who said that she got her finger or her thumb caught in a door.
Is it fair to say that, I'm just looking at the factual evidence that was established at the trial, that at no point did Bevelyn grab somebody's arm and slam the door on it, right?
In other words, sometimes in the jostling and shoving, something like that can happen, but it's completely different from someone trying to inflict injury on a on an employee of the clinic.
What can you tell us about the facts of that particular situation, the so-called, you know, finger or hand caught in the door?
Well, again, you've got it exactly right.
There was no evidence that they have grabbed somebody's arm, stuck it in a door and slammed the door on it, as one might guess based on some of the media coverage or the U.S.
Attorney's Office's press statements about it.
There was evidence that one of the employees got her hand caught in the door.
This was at a time where Bev had her back to the door.
The employee actually opened the door onto Bev's back, so she was the one who initiated the physical contact, and then that employee's hand got stuck in the door as the door bounced off Bev's backside.
But, you know, I think this raises a couple of issues that are really important for the defense here.
The government made all these arguments about this was a serious case.
It was a serious case that had to be prosecuted, in part because of the alleged injury that this woman supposedly suffered.
And she went and got medical attention.
There were some photographs of a bruise.
But I think it's important to point out That this incident happened in June of 2020.
Nothing happened from the government for over two years.
NYPD was on the scene.
They saw this incident.
They made no arrests.
The New York State Attorney General's Office heard about this incident and filed for a civil injunction in the Eastern District of New York to say, if Bev's out there protesting again, she should be a certain distance from the doors of Planned Parenthood clinics.
The U.S.
Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York didn't do anything.
They waited over two years.
And you might guess what in fact triggered their decision to do something.
Let me ask you this.
Yeah, exactly. It was the Dobbs decision and wasn't it the case that Biden even gave an inflammatory speech right after Dobbs and then boom, boom, boom, the Space Act prosecution started coming down one by one. Let me ask you this. I mean, I frankly think this is all so absurd, even if the facts are that this woman accidentally got her hand caught in the door, she got a bruise. I mean, big deal.
Do you actually sentence somebody to 41 months in prison because they backed into you and you got a bruise on your arm?
I mean, where's the proportionality of it?
And so the sort of, the way that the FACE Act is being used seems to me so abusive.
Let me just ask you about the prospects here for appeal.
I mean, you've got this terrific woman and she's got a little kid and she's looking at three plus years in federal prison.
What's the chance of being able to get this overturned on appeal?
Well, I'll make two points.
First, just to your point about this is out of whack, so to speak.
There's some data to back you up on this.
In New York State, this would normally be prosecuted as a misdemeanor assault case.
And then, it would probably be reduced to a non-criminal case where someone does no jail time at all.
And even if they were continued to be prosecuted for the misdemeanor, the most likely result here Worst case would be a sentence of probation and a misdemeanor conviction.
Here, the federal government took this case that was two years old, after Dobbs, and decided to make it a federal felony charge.
Right?
And even on that federal felony charge, there are other people in the country, like in Tennessee, who have gotten sentences of six months or probation.
In the District of Columbia and New York, we're seeing sentences like this of 41 months, maybe even 57 months to the point.
So, I mean, it's completely.
I don't know that it's completely arbitrary.
I think it's intentional.
It's intentional to send a message.
And as I mentioned, this case is really about the DOJ's decision to backlash against the Dobbs decision.
And so these sentences in D.C.
and New York can be viewed from that same perspective.
This is about sending a message that's a political message.
Rather than I would submit a criminal prosecution message.
With respect to the appeal, you know, we argued for a number of things, both myself and the lawyer who was representing Bev at the trial.
Now we're denied by the judge.
As I mentioned, the statute itself carves out a First Amendment defense.
And in the absence of getting an instruction from the judge, just like a jury gets an instruction on the burden of proof, the presumption of innocence, we don't assume that jurors know what those things mean.
They're given instructions, legal instructions to explain them.
And just like that, Activity that's protected by the First Amendment and the First Amendment itself and what it means is something that we asked the judge to instruct the jury about so that when it's when the jurors are looking at videos of loud angry protests And by the way, fire and brimstone passages from the Bible, which sound incredibly violent, right?
Brandishing the sword, taking down your enemies, those kinds of phrases, and the absence of an instruction that that can be First Amendment-protected activity.
And the question is, was there an intent to injure, intimidate, or interfere?
Jurors might just assume what other possible intent could there be when people are out there saying words like terrorize and this is a war.
Well, this was a battleground for a war of ideas.
This was a battleground in the culture clash, the culture war that exists in the United States and other places.
And so I think one of the key appellate issues is We should have gotten that instruction and the judge denied the ability to get a First Amendment instruction.
The judge denied us the ability to even say the words First Amendment during the trial.
Wow.
So I think that's one key appellate issue.
I think there are certainly issues about the severity of the sentence and whether it's a reasonable sentence.
I don't know how into the weeds you want to get on those things, but I think from a common sense standpoint, you've already identified the nature of the argument at the appellate level.
Well, let me just close by saying that I think that you should appeal, and you should appeal on all these fronts.
And I mentioned this in my conversation with Bevelyn, but I want to emphasize it again.
Guys, I want you to support Bevelyn in this endeavor.
Support her as a person because these things are costly and difficult, but also support her in being able to mount an effective legal appeal.
This is her GiveSendGo.
It's GiveSendGo.com slash Bevelyn, B-E-V-E-L-Y-N, Beatty, B-E-A-T-T-Y, Williams.
So GiveSendGo.com slash Bevelyn Beatty Williams.
That's where you can support her, Debbie, and I certainly have already, and we urge you to do it as well.
Hey, Aaron, thank you very much for joining me and illuminating some of these legal issues.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh.
It was a pleasure to be on.
Thank you so much.
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