Well, it’s business as usual in the mediocrity that we know as Mainstream media for failing to give us what we need to know, what is not a distraction, and what should be in the news. Unless our last name is Biden, Harris, Trump, Pense, or anyone else in government, you and I aren’t important enough to mention. We are neck deep in a political election year and it’s so bad that we are choking on the back-and-forth between the two parties that there isn’t any talk about the other political candidates running for office. There’s an old saying that whoever controls the media, controls the narrative. So if you control the narrative, you control how people think, react, what they do or feel. Needless to say, it seems the Democratic party is in control of about 70% of all the media, including newspaper, digital, broadcasting TV and radio. Within the first three minutes of any news source, you will be able to determine what side they are on, what agenda their pushing, and you will be damned if your opinion is different that theirs.
However, in my social circles, limited as it may be, we are able to make sense and avoid the Bravo Sierra of their agenda / spin on the days current event. Over all, the media does a great job at beating down it’s viewers / listeners with revolving versions over the same topic. It’s just as bad if not worse on social media. Twitter and Facebook, both, will call you out, claim you are promoting fake news, and remove your post, if they don’t block you for a period of time, or eliminate you completely. Recently I tested the response time of Facebook by posting a fake tweet from President Trump. I found a Tweet generator online (https://faketrumptweet.com/). It wasn’t anything that contained profanity (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3776351555715167). Just over two hours after it was posted, I got one of those dark screens covering the post and a link to a story about President Trump saying something that had NOTHING to do with what I posted. It wasn’t a news story at all. It was just a screenshot I took of this fake tweet I created on a website. I didn’t list the website, it was just a picture with no text. Facebook couldn’t handle it and lost their minds. I contacted Facebook and told them what we going on. I didn’t hear anything back from them. However, later on that night, they removed the story that was linked to the “fact check” but left the gray cover over the picture.
Speaking about checking facts, where is the outrage for little 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant (https://www.wral.com/father-of-slain-5-year-old-everybody-loved-cannon-he-lit-up-the-room/19233827/)? Black Lives Matter will burn down a section of town for George Floyd, but what about when a black man goes and needlessly ends the life of a little boy for no reason? Violent Protesters / Rioters will set blockade a part of a city, claim it as their own, and the mayor, not to forget the governor, will stop the federal police from removing them to restore order in the name of racial injustice, but what about when a black male shoots a white 5-year-old child point blank in the head for no reason? Have you heard about this story in the news yet? You probably haven’t and it’s a damn shame too! I guess if the colors were reversed, the media would be all over it like white on rice on a paper plate in the middle of a snow storm on a glacier. For the record, EVERYBODY’s life matters! Mainstream media needs to get off their fourth-point-of-contact and pop their head out of the sand in a hurry.
On Sunday, August 8th, 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant was riding a bike along with his his 8- and 7-year-old sisters outside his father’s home when their 25-year-old next door neighbor walked up to him and shot him in the head, before running back to his own yard, witnesses told police. The boys father said he heard a gunshot as his fiancée walked into the house. He said “The first thing that went through my mind was maybe he just fell off his bike. The closer I got to him, the more I realized it was something far more serious.” The family has lived next door to shooter and his parents for eight years and even had him over for dinner on the Saturday before the shooting, noting that he and Sessoms sat on his porch and drank beer. He said he had never had any confrontations with Sessoms. After Cannon was shot, the father said, he scooped the wounded boy into his arms and like any father or mother would, he screamed “Somebody, please help me save my son! Help me save my son, please!” Another neighbor came over with an EMT bag, adding that he then fell to his knees and prayed aloud. Meanwhile, the neighbor who shot his son was pacing nearby, gun in hand, before driving off. Cannon was taken to Wilson Medical Center, where he died. The following night, about 24 hours after police said he shot and killed a 5-year-old boy, the 25-year-old shooter was apprehended in Goldsbor, North Carolina, by members of the U.S. Marshals Service Carolinas Regional Fugitive Task Force, Goldsboro police, and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office. He was charged with first-degree murder and was being held without bond in the Wilson County jail.
Speaking of North Carolina, get ready to laugh over this story. A North Carolina woman claiming to be visiting her brothers house was shot with a BB gun over a misunderstanding, and the BB is still lodged in her arm (https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/woman-shot-with-bb-gun-removing-trump-sign-she-thought-was-wrong-yard/4IEHLEQNEJEOZCRLTWT2IOYG64/). The woman said she saw a political sign in what she thought was her brother’s front yard. When she went to remove it, his 76-year-old neighbor shot her with an air gun, striking her near the elbow. She thought the sign was placed in the yard by a prankster, as her brother never talks about politics. What’s more, the sign was placed closer to her brother’s front door than the neighbor’s house, and the exact property lines were unclear to her. The neighbor said he yelled at the woman to stop before he opened fire, although she said she didn’t hear him say anything. When she confronted the man, he encouraged her to call the police. The police showed up and somehow, so did one of the local tv station news crews. During a TV interview on the scene, she said “You can’t shoot people on your property,” she said. “He actually believed he could shoot me if I was on his property, and to me, that’s terrifying.” Now, for a little side-bar, it is very legal to shoot someone / use of deadly force on your own property in the state of North Carolina under the “Castle Law” (https://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/state-gun-laws/north-carolina/), however it does clarify if anyone can use a BB gun to get someone’s attention to stop stealing political signs or personal property. Now the man, who said he purchased the BB gun to scare away stray cats on his property, faces a misdemeanor assault charge. “You defend your property and you end up getting charged,” he said in response to the charges. The woman said she had no problem with the sign itself, she just didn’t want it on her brother’s property if it wasn’t his. She said she would have put it back if the man had just explained to her that it was his property. The man said he meant to hit the woman in the rear end. He’s also considering filing charges against the woman for attempted theft but has to wait until his assault charge is handled. His court date is set for November.
Now, what I couldn’t figure out was how the local TV news media got there so fast with the police. Doing a little digging around for research, I found the answer I was looking for when I looked on youtube. Turns out the woman was a “former reporter” at WUSA channel 9 out of Washington D.C. and after seeing her video / another news report on youtube, apparently there’s an agenda (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miiExxp1Cfk). If you look up the phrase “Woman shot with BB gun for removing Trump sign from wrong yard” , you can find the video from WUSA that she made. Otherwise, you can visit WSOC TV and look up their videos. It’s obviously politically bias against President Trump and the 2nd Amendment to the Bill of Rights (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment) all while trying to insult any law abiding God-fearing, red-blooded American by playing dumb. Look, I know she is a blond, but come on? Being in the media, she had to know how to milk the media and get a response from the masses. That’s it, plain and simple. If she honestly felt that way, then I don’t think she would want all that attention.
Another thing that gets my agent orange all riled up is the fact that when, both, local and national news media talk about COVID-19, they usually throw in a variation of the phrase, “according to the CDC…” and then plaster a picture of Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci across the page or screen. For the record, Dr. Fauci works with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/), not the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (https://www.cdc.gov/). He has worked there since 1984 (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/director). The CDC and NIAID are two separate government agencies, each with different leadership and missions but both a part of the Health and Human Services umbrella. While NIAID is concerned with research only, the CDC is intended to be both a research institution and an active reporter and authority on public health and public safety. Therefore, Dr. Fauci doesn’t make these decisions nor should he be looked at as any figure of authority. Anytime he is shown when you reference the CDC, you make the argument null in void.
Now, on the flip side of this whole argument about the media not doing its job, I do have to give credit where credit is due. This past Saturday, August 15th, President Trump was giving his press conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. I was watching it live streaming online as he was asked the normal, average-type of questions the press ask during these events. I was thrown off when a member of the press ask a question that I considered “out of the blue”: Would President Trump “consider giving a pardon to Edward Snowden?” What was even more of a surprise is the reply President Trump said after admitting he didn’t know much about the case, but that he would consider pardoning Edward Snowden. For those of you who don’t know or understand the gravity of this possible situation, it’s a real game-changer on so many important levels. This would not only affect our national security, but the way the government monitors internet traffic, in which it already has since the news of the situation broke The Guardian and The Washington Post in June 2013 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance?CMP=twt_gu). Call me a conspiracy nut if you want, but the fact is that Edward Snowden opened up the eyes of a lot of American citizens and those in special committees in congress too, in which got a lot of people doing wrong in trouble. Therefore, if you think President Trump has pissed off “a lot of rich people” in the Pharmaceutical industries recently (https://popculture.com/trending/news/donald-trump-says-may-be-last-time-americans-see-him-amid-enemies-out-there/), wait until you see who comes after him if or when Edward Snowden gets his pardon.
Recently, President Trump expressed that a lot of people thought Snowden was not being treated fairly by federal law enforcement and was going to look into a pardon for Edward Snowden (https://nypost.com/2020/08/13/trump-a-lot-of-people-think-edward-snowden-not-being-treated-fairly/). For those who don’t know the background of Edward Snowden, it’s a quite intriguing story, to say the least. In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, leaked thousands of top-secret documents, showing the agency’s vast domestic and international surveillance operations. The government agencies weren’t watching just the officials of other countries it deemed threats, but also many of our country’s allies as well as many citizens of our own county. Because he revealed all this information (and then some), he has been labeled as a “Government Whistleblower” and “Traitor” by many. Since the first leak, journalists around the world have released more than 7,000 top-secret documents, but some United States Government Officials think that’s only a fraction of the entire archive, thus making it unclear exactly how many he downloaded, but intelligence officials testified in 2014 that he accessed 1.7 million files (https://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-leaks-timeline-2016-9).
As a result of what many would call a massive leak, then-current President Obama assigned two five-person teams to investigate the nation’s surveillance policy. At the end of the assessment, the issue of transparency was brought forth with several new laws and regulations were enacted to limit issues such as how long U.S. citizens’ data could be held, how data accidentally collected on Americans through the surveillance of foreigners could be used, but many experts still believe the improved surveillance practices did not address the question of invasion of privacy.
In the same month as the leak, Edward Snowden was charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-charges-snowden-with-espionage/2013/06/21/507497d8-dab1-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html). Facing up to 30 years in prison, he left the country, originally traveling to Hong Kong and then to Russia, to avoid being extradited to the United States. In July 2013, a petition was started to have Snowden pardoned, but the government rejected it in 2015. Lisa Monaco, then-President Obama’s Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, said Snowden should return home to be “judged by a jury of his peers—not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime,” and stop “running away from the consequences of his actions” (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/no-pardon-for-nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-says-us-government-10427525.html) In 2017, a Moscow, Russia official announced in a Facebook post that extended his right to asylum until the end of this year while criticizing former CIA acting director Michael Morell for an opinion piece he wrote suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should consider returning Snowden to the United States as “the perfect inauguration gift” to then President-elect Donald Trump (https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/18/europe/russia-snowden-asylum-extension/index.html). He released a memoir, “Permanent Record”, in 2019 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250237231).
However, some congress members, including United States Senators from Kentucky, Rand Paul and Thomas Massie (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/14/thomas-massie-urges-trump-to-pardon-nsa-leaker-edw/), have encouraged President Trump to pardon Snowden. In a tweet, Senator Paul said that documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed “[James] Clapper and [James] Comey…were illegally spying on Americans.” In a 2013 tweet, before President Trump even considered running for the Presidency, he tweeted: “Snowden is a spy who should be executed-but if it and he could reveal Obama’s records, I might become a major fan” (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/395683702757662721). If that should still be the case, then maybe Edward Snowden has that information already and President Trump might grant him that pardon after all. Edward Snowden is currently living in Russia, where he was granted temporary asylum. Edward Snowden said he would return to the U.S. if he could be granted a fair trial-by-jury.
On the news of hearing of President Trump possibly pardoning him, Edward Snowden tweeted out “The last time we heard a White House considering a pardon was 2016, when the very same Attorney General who once charged me conceded that, on balance, my work in exposing the NSA’s unconstitutional system of mass surveillance had been ‘a public service’“ (https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1294226668412899328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1294226668412899328%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gizmodo.com.au%2F2020%2F08%2Ftrump-hints-hes-open-to-pardoning-edward-snowden%2F). Many people following and supporting him are taking this a new hope for justice finally about to be served. Even if President Trump doesn’t officially pardon him, but at least gives him what he originally asked for: A fair trial by jury of his peers. That’s all Edward Snowden wanted before he would be willing to return to the United States. The guarantee of all United States citizens to have a fair trial.
Now, there’s another name I want to bring up that the mainstream news seems to have buried because he’s been doing much better job than they have when it comes to keeping transparency: Julian Assange. You remember him? He’s the WikiLeaks founder who has also for some time had to hide in asylum for his life in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 to avoid onward extradition to the US from Sweden for sexual offence allegations dating back to 2010, which he has always denied. In November 2019, Swedish authorities dropped the rape allegations, but he was jailed for 50 weeks last April after breaching his bail conditions when the asylum period granted to him expired. He has released into a maximum security jail since April 2019 and has missed several recent hearings because of “respiratory problems”.
Julian Assange is wanted in the US for allegedly conspiring with army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chelsea-Manning) to expose military secrets between January and May 2010. A US grand jury has indicted him on 18 charges (17 of which fall under the Espionage Act) including conspiracy to receive, obtain and disclose classified diplomatic and military documents. This past Friday, August 14th, a day before President Trump confessed the idea of looking into Edward Snowden’s case, the United States government to lodge new charges against him with allegations that he conspired with others to obtain US government information by encouraging computer hacking (https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487666/US-decision-to-file-new-charges-against-Julian-Assange-astonishing-and-potentially-abusive-court). Basically, he was charged by the United States government for leaking more “secrets” that they didn’t want you to know about and is currently going through a legal process to get him extradited to the United States to face charges.
Julian Assange’s lawyer told the court that the WikiLeaks founder had not seen new material submitted by the US, including a 33-page affidavit and said the new material added a “considerable amount” of narrative background and collateral conduct to the earlier indictment against him. She said the US had served evidence far too late, after the defence had already served its entire case. The US government started assembling its case before December 2017 and was able to deliver an opening note in July 2019 and opened its full case in detail on February 24th of this year. A psychiatric report received by the defense showed that Julian Assange’s condition may have declined over the last few weeks. The judge said that, in principle, the extradition hearing could use live-streaming video for specific individuals outside the jurisdiction who cannot come to court because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Assange’s defense team have until August 21st to decide whether to apply to postpone his extradition hearing that is set for September 7th.
You maybe asking yourself why should all this matter right now? Why should anyone care about what is going on with these two “Traitors” who broke the federal law multiple times? The answer to the first question is because it’s an election year: Anything, and I do mean ANYTHING, can and will happen. The answer to the second question is because these cases have serious consequences if they go either way. In other words, if Eric Snowden does get his pardon or at least a guarantee of a fair trial by jury (that is important here), it will lead to possibly more exposure to what is going on against the American citizens and allies around the world. I’m talking real security concerns and if the people behind the curtains don’t want that exposed, what do you think they will do to prevent it? A very similar situation can be said about Julian Assange’s case as well. However, if the United States are still bringing up charges against him, I don’t see the President doing much to stop it or interfere in the process. However, WikiLeaks is still a very powerful tool against those who don’t want you to know what is going on behind the walls of government. So if the United States government can shut down the founder of WikiLeaks, it too would have very strong consequences to everyone, be it good or bad.
Again, I remind you, who controls the media, controls the narrative. So if whoever controls the narrative, they control how people think, react, what they do or feel. Sit back and ponder for a moment, who do you think controls the media? Just as important, why? Finally ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?
