In 2017 Moz persuaded his bandmate Mando Lopez to post a Facebook comment for him on the French Leadership debate between Marine Le Pen & Emmanuel Macron.
He was immediately called a racist & tried again:
& got denounced as a racist again:
It’s moot whether Marine or Macron ‘won’ – but it’s true that news outlets, esp ones not covered by any kind of regulatory obligation to provide balance use loaded language to signal whether something is acceptable or not.
CNN can be openly partisan in favour of corporate liberalism, but vicious wars are being waged over perceived bias in the BBC. When a debate is extremely polarised it’s difficult to find a balance that will please either side.
https://www.theweek.co.uk/100501/is-the-bbc-biased
So why was Morrissey bothered by commentary about a politician he couldn’t & wouldn’t vote for (Marine’s pro-hunting apart from anything else)?
Probably because he was thinking of his political mission to ban abattoirs.
Animal rights activists are routinely dismissed in the press as either violent extremists or irrelevant loons & he’s up against the world’s meat industry.
Rob: Have people evolved in any way during your lifetime?
Morrissey: Meaning the human race, generally? Well, because of food enlightenment, yes – it’s clear to everyone how the dairy industry is a bigger threat to the planet that the nuclear arms race. People are sick of animal slaughter. My final aim is to abolish the abattoir, and although I haven’t ever once voted in a general election, my vote awaits any party intelligent enough to ban the slaughterhouse. Only at that point would the world begin to grow up.” (Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 8 December, 2017)
Since taking over The National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen has rebranded them as The National Rally & has shifted most of their policies to the left, hoping to become a more respectable nationalist party along the lines of the Scottish Nationalist Party whose fascist links are almost completely forgotten.
During the debate her most controversial statement was a baseless jibe about Macron having an offshore bank account. And the French hard left saw both candidates as equally undesirable.
With very little to go on the press & therefore the public fell back on labels; Le Pen was far right & aggressive (she doesn’t come across as aggressive when compared to Anglophone politicians), Macron was a rational centrist…
As Morrissey is a militant animal liberationist with an extreme abolitionist stance – this was a very bad sign.
Folk Devil 