An NBC WNYT13 reporter and film crew headed up Mount McGregor to do a story at the Ulysses S. Grant Cottage State Historic Site. The day before this visit was the 129th anniversary marking the death of the Civil War hero, and former Chief Executive of the nation, at his Adirondack retreat.
This was clearly a legitimate human-interest news story, by a legitimate and well-respected mainstream news source. So why were they suddenly ordered to stop filming by a uniformed prison official, who rushed down the mountain at them in a private vehicle? The officer told them that they could not film at the ostensibly public historic site, and ordered them off the mountain entirely. When they did finally try to leave, after being blocked by another prison guard, they were detained by the New York State Police and threatened with arrest unless they handed over their film.
Well let's have a look here at what took place.
This brazen assault on liberty, free-speech, freedom of the press, and our core values as Americans stands as a testament to the actual state of oppression we live under today. This is not freedom, this is tyranny which even 20 years ago we would have thought only happened in third-world dictatorships. Who are these officers, these so-called public servants, actually working for here?
Despite the fact that New York state taxpayers were still paying the salaries for nearly 80 prison guards there, the prison has actually been vacant for almost a year. Not a single prisoner at the prison, but all of those officials still there, guarding what? Between the seemingly pointless cadre of guards and their aggression toward innocent civilians, some have gone so far as to speculate that the news crew may have accidentally stumbled across a so-called secret FEMA camp.
Jesse Ventura's Banned FEMA Camps Episode
Two days after the incident, New York State Department of Corrections pulled their officers off of the site, and private security firm Securitas took over. Securitas is a Swedish-based company which swallowed up the notorious Pinkerton agency here in the U.S., and is now the largest private security company in the world. They operate everything from home security systems, to armored cars once owned by Loomis Fargo & Company, another famed outfit which they absorbed.
Whatever is actually going on up at the old prison may be speculative. What is not speculative however, is what we saw happen to that news crew on that day. A grotesque display of police-state oppression and tyranny right here in our own country, on hallowed ground where an American President and champion of liberty died. Is there a war now, against free speech and the people, where agents can detain you for simply going about your day? What crime is it to capture a public building on film? While there should be outrage across the country at what we saw, there is only complacency and deaf ears. Where is the accountability? Where are the measures to ensure that such trampling of our rights never happens again in this so-called land of the free? Sadly enough, something like this is no longer shocking, just business as usual, as liberty goes quietly into the night.
