Fine People On Both Sides*

President Macron of France has expressed his displeasure with the coverage of the recent Islamist beheadings and knife murders in the American press, specifically the New York Times and Washington Post, whose coverage has amounted to declaring "there are fine people on both sides" of these atrocities.

Both outlets have run multiple pieces with this perspective.  For example, the Post ran an article, "Instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to 'reform Islam'", and numerous articles explaining away the incidents as results of France's secular policies.

After seeing the media coverage President Macron declared:

"Alignment with American multiculturalism is a form of defeatist thought"

I think he's on to something there.  As we've discussed in previous posts, the current Woke theory of multiculturalism is very different from that of twenty years ago.  That ancient relic multiculturalism was about mutual tolerance, acceptance and, in many instances, enjoyment of differences with the idea that we shared a common American culture.  Today's multiculturism focuses on fostering differences, power, intolerance, suspicion and the destruction of common values.  France is right to reject it.

Actually, as I look at the American media coverage it probably is an overstatement to call it a "good people on both sides" approach.  Rather it skews things so those really responsible for the incidents are the beheaded teacher who mocked Mohammed and the three killed in Nice, who were all (gasp!) practicing Roman Catholics, so probably bigots who deserved it, while the true victims were the killers driven to these unfortunate acts by French social policy hostile to Muslims.

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You probably know the title of this post is taken from President Trump's 2017 remarks at a press conference after the Charlottesville protests over the removal of a statue of Robert E Lee and the presence of white nationalists and neo-nazis at the protest.

I did not see or hear the President's remarks at the time but certainly heard about them.  Based on my personal dislike for the man and his penchant for appalling rhetoric and generating random, unintelligible word salads when not reading a speech, I assumed, given the small but still residual respect I then had for the media, that both his words and the context were being accurately reported.

Over a year later, I read the actual transcript of that press conference and was surprised.  It came via Ann Althouse, the retired U of Wisconsin law professor, whose blog I read daily.  Althouse, who voted for Hillary in 2016, came across the transcript while looking for something else, and felt it important to bring it to her readers attention.  It turns out that while Trump did say "there were fine people on both sides" of the protests, he was referring to the argument over whether the statue should be removed, and at two different points explicitly stated he was not including white nationalists and neo-nazis in that group, specifically saying he "them I totally condemn" and denouncing them as "bad people"!

Yet the myth persists and candidate Biden has repeatedly used it during his campaign and I suspect most regular readers of the NY Times, Washington Post, watchers of CNN or MSNBC, or listeners to NPR do not know about the President's full remarks. 

This is why I no longer believe anything from these sources unless I can independently verify it.