Blog Post 5

Our country prides itself on being one that allows its citizens to have freedom of speech, religion, press, etc. yet the government still censors what many people try to say or do. According to whitehouse.gov, The First Amendment quite literally states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise." If this is the case then why are our freedoms not being exercised to a lot of time protect/spread corruption within the United States Government. Prior to this post, I had never even heard of antiwar.com nor theamericanconservative.com so seeing something outside of mainstream news is quite shocking to me. I think the very reason that these sites are not "mainstream" and require extra effort to discover is due to the fact that the government only wants us to know what they want us to. If there are sources putting out anything that ignores that then they will not support it. I was shocked when I started going through antiwar.com because there are different sections on the website utilized to highlight news in other countries, continents, and regions such as Iraq, Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, etc. Something that stood out to me was the fact that just from observing the front page of theamericanconservative.com, one of the top stories was centered around the topic of abortion and stated, "If one human life is disposable, then every human life is disposable." I actually audibly laughed when I firstly read that only because I could picture the debates and conversations arising from this.

I stated before that I feel the reason these types of sites are hard to find due to the fact that the government does not want to support or advocate for any kind of media that shines a light on things they do not want us to see which I still feel is the case, but I also feel that there is a sense of fear that the government has on how they could potentially be perceived and what the blowback could be like. All people deserve to know the truth about what is really going on behind the scenes and there are people sticking their necks out just for that very reason. 

I cannot help but gravitate towards social media when it comes to this topic due to the fact that everyday people use social media to try and express their opinions in a public space. I read this article from rferl.org which spoke about the anti-war movement in Russia. The article stated, "On March 6, Russian police detained more than 5,000 people in 69 cities across the country for protesting Moscow's unprovoked invasion of neighboring Ukraine just two weeks earlier. In all, about 13,500 anti-war activists were detained in Russia, sometimes brutally, in the first couple of weeks after the invasion, according to OVD-Info, which monitors repression in Russia." When I firstly read this I was shocked because I didn't realize how blind I was to situations going on outside of my own country and in the world in general. A lot of people also tend to turn to social media for a lot of alternative news and that can be a gamble within itself due to anyone having the chance to post whatever they want with the push of a button. We should not have to feel the need to turn to sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. for a lot of primary news!