Courtroom drama fans must count as required viewing the movie “Double Jeopardy,” in which a husband frames his wife for his murder without actually dying. Spoiler alert: She exonerates herself by outing him as alive and well at the time of the “murder.”
Sometimes, the mere existence of a live human can be the best evidence that a widely held belief is based on a lie. Consider this list of convicted murderers whose victims weren’t dead.
We live in an era in which the left’s control of popular narrative has led Americans to receive as true things that aren’t: Abortions never result in live births, women don’t really use guns to protect themselves, and American minorities uniformly owe allegiance to the left.
But like the murder “victim” who is still alive, we have among us women whose very existence disproves the leftist narrative. Consider these three examples, although there are many more.
1. The Abortion Survivor
After the prosecution of abortionist Hermit Gosnell, the abortion industry went into public relations overdrive. This article is one example of many: “Disproven: The Myth of Infants ‘Born Alive’ After abortions.” The author wrote, “Gosnell was, in fact, a rogue provider, and that there is no evidence of a pattern of infants being ‘born alive’ after an abortion.”
A few months ago, I had the pleasure of coming face-to-face with Melissa Ohden. Although she’s petite, her presence fills a room. I found it difficult to maintain eye contact with her blazing eyes. Ohdon survived an attempted abortion. Using a saline infusion method, an abortionist attempted to end her life before she drew her first breath.
But she survived for a few precious moments outside of her mother while her grandmother and the abortion provider decided how to deal with the problem of a baby surviving an intended abortion. Before any decision could be reached, a nurse acted on instinct to scoop up young Melissa.
The nurse outran her pursuers to reach the natal intensive care unit, instantly reversing the medical intervention to save Melissa’s life. She should not exist. Melissa, now in her 40s, also now has a daughter of her own. She is living proof of the preciousness of lives snuffed out by the assembly line of death in our abortion industry.
2. The Woman Who Saved Herself With a Gun
“[W]omen never use guns to protect themselves against sexual assault,” writes David Hemenway in his Harvard University research article “debunking” the role of guns in self-defense. Hemenway wrote this as part of a larger justification for stripping women of the right to bear arms in defense of their bodies.
I recently wrote of a woman whose very existence proved Hemenway wrong: “I can reasonably assume Ronnie Preyer’s opinion: He’s against women being armed. Or he would be if this serial rapist wasn’t shot to death by a Cape Girardeau woman fighting to protect her body from his attack. After Preyer raped her the first time, she dutifully called the police. A few days later, he returned to attack her a second time. This time, instead of a phone, she used a gun to protect herself.”
There are actually hundreds of these cases. As noted by the Heritage Foundation, “Studies routinely indicate that every year, Americans use their firearms in defense of themselves or others between 500,000 and 2 million times. Very few of these defensive gun uses receive national publicity—if they receive publicity at all.”
3. Conservative Minority Women
“I’m right here,” a voice said from the front of a crowd during a raucous discussion in the Pizza Shoppe in a Kansas City suburb. Conservatives gathered to meet their elected leaders and party officials on a Monday night in early December 2019. The voice was responding to a man in camouflage who stood to address the speaker to ask what could be done about the permanent majority Democrats are building through a refusal to enforce U.S. immigration laws.
“We’ll recruit them,” responded another man, referring to the immigrants and their children. “Our values of freedom and family are for everyone.”
The camouflage man dismissed as absurd the idea that immigrants from Latin American countries and their descendants might vote Republican. The owner of the voice from the front of the room stood to respond: “I’m right here. And I’m running for Congress.”
The owner of the voice, Adrienne Vallejo Foster, stood with a beaming smile. The mood of the room changed palpably. Her contagious smile rippled across the room and even landed on the face of the camouflage man as he sat down, satisfied by her living answer to his question.
Foster agreed to meet with me a few weeks later. She told me how her grandparents legally emigrated from Mexico to the United States to work on a Kansas City-based railroad. She exhibited a command of political issues, tying her positions to her mantra: faith, family, and freedom.
On the last value, she described how Hispanic political activists attempted to silence her after she made positive statements about candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Democratic Rep. Louis Ruiz from Kansas City, among many others, demanded she be fired for failing to join the get-Trump mob.
Ruiz justified demanding the termination of his fellow Hispanic, saying, “Look, she can support whomever she wants, but she’s appointed by the governor [Republican Sam Brownback] as a liaison to the Hispanic community, and these comments don’t represent the people.”
Foster said to me, “It’s about freedom of speech,” referring to the effort to have her fired. She spoke with pride of her father’s work ethic and compliance with U.S. immigration law. She referred to the grey market labor force of illegal workers as near-“slavery,” calling out the motives of wealthy advocates for open borders.
According to the identity politics business model, Foster should not exist. But she does, and that’s kryptonite to the tribal politics with which the left seeks permanent power.
