Freeing Yourself From Fake News

“Don’t believe anything you read on this web page or, for that matter, anything you hear on The Neal Boortz Show unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your own satisfaction.” – a cautionary piece of advice that Neal Boortz regularly made on his live radio program & posted on his blog as he expressed his opinion on every controversial topic under the sun.  It is this same common sense lesson I learned from Neal that I regularly encourage readers of RTE to use in reading this blog – questioning & commenting are how we all learn & I thank everyone who makes the time to participate & contribute - or as John Adams said “We have been afraid to think . . . Let us dare to read, think, speak, & write.”

In my daily figurative travels through cyberspace over the past several years I have seen the above photo, & ones like it, many times – always with an accompanying warning that the photo was taken moments before disaster struck.  All I had to do was click on the photo to find out what happened.  And of course I never took the bait.  My sixth sense of writing these blog messages for over fifteen years told me that nothing disastrous had happened.

 

So my reaction was suspicious when I learned that an activist actress, whom I had never heard of, tweeted out the pictures below ungrammatically saying that “Trump administration is forcing children 2 sleep on cement floor with an aluminum blanket & lights on all night.”  The idea was to show the inhumane, overcrowded, & unsanitary conditions with which Trump was holding people who had violated our sovereignty by illegally entering America.

My suspicion that the actresses’ claim was false was based on remembering the release of the photos below about a year ago that decried similar alleged abuses of the Trump administration – one showing children in cages & two others showing the horrible conditions under which illegal immigrants were being held.  The problem for Democrats is that the photo of the children in cages was taken in 2014 in Nogales Arizona & the other two photos were taken in 2014 in Texas – all three under BO’s administration.  Accordingly the matter was soon forgotten by the hostile anti American media who then moved on to find another supposed outrageous abuse perpetrated by Trump.

Further, Thomas Homan, the former executive associate director of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) under BO, says that he was present when the cages were built.  The cages are actually chain link dividers that keep children separate & safe from unrelated adults. 

So with the above background in mind it did not take much digging to realize that the timestamp on the photo presented by the activist actress was cropped out & that her photo too was taken under BO’s policies in 2015.  See below. 

Now there are episodes or accounts that are easy to unmask like when Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel intentionally misreported that a December 2017 Trump rally in Florida was sparsely attended by tweeting a photo of a half empty arena – a photo that had been taken hours before the event even started.  Of course the event was actually “packed to the rafters” as Weigel later apologized saying he had been told he had “gotten it wrong.”  Why would anyone who saw the false photo & then the overflow rally with people waiting outside ever want to hear from Weigel again? 

Other episodes or accounts take a little more intuition & questioning to learn the truth.  An example is the account I received from a blog I subscribe to that showed photos of AOC under distress @ the El Paso border about a year ago supposedly seeing suffering migrant children in cages.  Since AOC is standing next to a chain link fence the implication is that the children are caged on the other side of the fence.  See photo below.

But other photos below from another angle show AOC could have actually been staging the entire scene.  AOC was looking most immediately @ an empty parking lot or a tree & a car as seen below.  But this hypocrisy almost seems too easy to expose & understand.

 

A little more digging showed that an air conditioned tent city could be seen in the distance – housing about 2,800 migrant teenagers some of whom ABC showed on video playing soccer.  The seeming empty parking lot included a roadway leading towards the Tornillo Border Patrol station in this remote area.  So I leave it up to you to decide if AOC staged this event looking for publicity showing concern for children she really could not see or whether she was so overwhelmed @ the thought of these children’s sadness that she broke down emotionally as shown above.

One other point to consider – FNC quoted a social media critic of AOC writing “Excuse me while I take the time to put on bright red lipstick, a pristine white outfit, & a Movado watch before I go see little kids locked up in the desert.”  There is something to this criticism when you consider a majority of Movado watches cost over $750 & are targeted for the wealthy businessman or business woman.  At the time of the photos AOC was complaining that she could not afford a Washington DC apartment if she won her House race in the fall.

But getting back to the girl hanging from the rock above the water smiling while in apparent danger – thanks to a frequent contributor for letting me know that this one is a hoax too.  See photo below.

Fake news is all around us, but if you listen closely, follow up with a few questions & a little research, you can free yourself from it & even more important - those who present it to you.