Say you're on national TV and you're asked the question, "They shut down ISIS' (Twitter) accounts. Why do you think (Edward) Snowden is any different?"
There is a standard response to this: ISIS rapes children! They throw gay people off of roofs! Edward Snowden does not rape children or throw gay people off of roofs!
But, of course, that doesn't work. If it worked, we wouldn't have the cable news we have now, where a guy in a suit or a lady in a dress list off a string of false cause fallacies about something that fundamentally misses the point on a station that exists to play as background noise and drown out the crying in the waiting rooms of America's Jiffy Lubes.
That's why you should do what Jon Hendren did: Just talk about Edward Scissorhands.
"Saying that he couldn't harm somebody with what he did—he could. Absolutely, he could," Hendren said on HLN's viral news show The Daily Share.
Then, the magic:
"But I think to cast him out to make him invalid in society simply because he has scissors for hands? I mean, that's strange. Because people didn't get scared until he started sculpting scrubs into dinosaur shapes and whatnot."
The show goes on like nothing happened. Hendren answers a few more questions that really only make sense if Edward Snowden has since grown garden shears where his fingers should be.
"We're treating him like an animal, like somebody who should be quarantined and put away just because he was created on top of a mountain… with scissors for hands and no heart," he says. "Edward Scissorhands is a complete hero to me."
"But what about the choice he made to live in a country like Russia?" anchor Yasmin Vossoughian asks, undeterred, breaking news about the whereabouts of an abandoned Johnny Depp character.
It's all over with now, and Hendren still isn't sure about why or how this whole thing happened.
"I have absolutely no idea how they picked me or why," Hendren told The Daily Beast. "I just got an email last night asking me to Skype into HLN and I agreed to it immediately."
Hendren is—although he'll likely publicly mock and disown this title upon the completion of this article—a semi-professional funny person on Twitter under the username @fart. This is probably how he was selected for the show. But he really doesn't know.
"They never told me what the format would be and never prepped me with the questions beforehand, I just knew I wanted to talk about a much-maligned hero," he said.
He still hasn't watched his quick hit, but Hendren's appearance has since gone viral. And why not? Nothing really highlights how inane the news has become like someone actively trying to fuck up an entire TV show only to have his point proven by talking points hamfistedly steamrolling over his responses.
Now, Hendren said he'd welcome an invite back from any TV station that will allow him to talk about Ed, a hero to all and terrorist to none—except maybe shrubs and permeable things, like cloth or thin jugs.
"He was very, very good at what he did and completely innocent," said Hendren, about somebody.