France
On Saturday's PoliticsNation show, MSNBC host Al Sharpton devoted a segment to fretting that the rebuilding of three black churches struck by arson in Louisiana have not received as much attention as the destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in France. Sharpton went along with his guest's blatantly incorrect claim that the national media ignored the black churches even though nearly every network covered the story even before MSNBC or Sharpton himself got around to it.
Mark Hemingway in the New York Post reported The New York Times is not in touch with Catholic lingo -- which became very obvious in a story on the Notre Dame fire. They reported a chaplain for the Paris Fire Department rushed to save a "statue of Jesus," but there was no statue. The priest was referring to the consecrated Body of Christ in the Eucharist. Ooopsy. They posted a correction.
Shortly after the tragic sight of Notre Dame Cathedral going up in flames in Paris, as crowds watched and sang “Ave Maria,” historian Victor Davis Hanson put our modern times in perspective. “It’s going to be very hard in our society to ever build a cathedral again, much less to repair them, because we don't believe in what they represented. And it's ironic, because we don't like the past. We are at war with the past. We tear down monuments. We don't build cathedrals. We erase names.”
Although the progressives at Rolling Stone offered their condolences to the French in the wake of Notre Dame’s Monday fire, they pondered whether the devastation of the 900-year-old Cathedral opens up the possibility of reincarnating the structure as a monument to the secular “modern France;” because heaven forbid a progressive society rebuild a symbol to “non-secular, white European France.”
On MSNBC Tuesday afternoon, anchor Stephanie Ruhle and reporter Ben Collins falsely accused Fox News of promoting fake online claims that Islamic terrorism was responsible for the massive fire that consumed France’s Notre Dame cathedral on Monday.
On Monday as the world watched in horror as the famous Notre Dame Cathedral burned, a deeply concerned President Trump put out a tweet urging for water-tanker helicopters to be used to put out the blaze. We later learned that French authorities didn’t use them because the weight of the water could cause further destruction. Despite many other people thinking the same thing, members of liberal media used it as an opportunity to score cheap points against Trump. But not all did.
Last week, the little birdies in Twitter's legal department notified me that one of my tweets from 2015 is “in violation of Pakistan law.” It seems like ancient history, but Islamic supremacists never forget — or forgive. My innocuous tweet featured a compilation image of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. It also linked to my Jan. 8, 2015, syndicated column on the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre in Paris.
France’s increasingly violent “yellow vest” protests began as grassroots, working-class opposition to a fuel tax hike that was promoted by the government as climate change action. But network stories about the protests ignored the environmental motivations most of the time.
As Americans begun celebrating the holiday season, almost 300,000 French people took to the streets to protest a massive fuel tax hike proposed by President Emmanuel Macron to fight climate change. The protests turned violent Saturday as the now-rioters began digging up the streets of Paris and trying to construct barricades as police fought back with tear gas and water cannons. Despite this ongoing battle, ABC News had not reported one word about it on air. Not even on Saturday’s World News Tonight.
Facebook will permit countries in European unprecedented level of access to how it controls content. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that in 2019, French regulators will be given access to Facebook’s content moderation process and allowed to study its attempts to control “hate speech.”
The French government and U.S. tech giants are pushing for a worldwide initiative to regulate the internet — including the issue of hate speech. The new declaration from the French government titled the “Paris Call For Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” is part of an international effort to crack down on cyber attacks, foreign interference, and hate speech, according to the organization that drafted the document.
Yes, Chris Matthews said that on Tuesday’s Hardball. And, no, it didn’t appear that Matthews realized how what he said about President Trump came across as quite the case of irony. In the A-block of his MSNBC program, Matthews wondered if the world is “about to see collusion in plain sight” by “eight-year-old” President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin even though, in Matthews’s world, Trump’s “brain soup” is “psychobabble.”