Media watch: ‘60 Minutes’ Is Still Gaslighting

Sunday’s “60 Minutes” segment on “a family man deported to Ghana in July” badly “misinformed” viewers, rails Breitbart’s John Nolte. “Moussa Diawara was deported after overstaying his tourist visa and then dodging deportation for over a decade after his final removal order was granted by a judge in 2012.” The show sought to “make us feel terrible for Diawara, who was separated from his wife and two kids.” But it “withheld from its report” the fact he got his “refugee status by claiming he’s a homosexual who fears being persecuted in his home country” — then chose not to live as a gay here, but instead “got married” and “fathered two children.” Such lies are blatant “immigration fraud, and if you commit immigration fraud, you get deported.”

Culture critic: What Does France Believe in?

President Trump was right to say France is “burning” because it opened its borders to people who hate it, argues The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn, except that’s “only half the problem.” The other half: “The French themselves don’t appear to believe in anything,” particularly regarding religion. “In the secularist mind, religion is a premodern relic of a less enlightened time.” But then, why is America, “the most modern and advanced country in the world, also one of the most religious?” And now “France is undergoing a crisis of modernity in which its hostility to religion no longer looks enlightened but passé.” Even if “unassimilated Muslims are a problem, the bigger problem is that post-Enlightenment France (and to a larger degree Europe) is built on sand.”

Climate beat: Activists’ Back-Door Legal Gambit

A “well-funded network of climate activists” have turned to “targeting key judges” through “climate education seminars,” seeking to achieve via the “courthouse back door” what they’ve failed to win via “legislative or executive action,” notes Josh Hammer at FoxNews. Crucially, “no climate plaintiff has a good causation argument” connecting a particular defendant to a specific “drought” or other harm, so the network aims to “educate” judges into “lowering” the standards of evidence so climate suits become “more amenable to traditional tort law adjudication.” This would allow “municipalities to make national energy policy through jury awards” — but also allow them to sue “retailers” or the “animal agriculture industry” for supposed climate harms. With a case now before it, “the Supreme Court should shut the courthouse door for good.”

Foreign desk: Paris’ Debt Dilemma

France “cannot generate enough tax revenue to finance its existing commitments without enormous deficits, let alone cover the protesters’ wish lists,” warns The Washington Post Editorial Board. Rather than “attack the debt-to-GDP ratio,” now approaching 120%, politicians like presidential candidates Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon support “allowing some workers to retire at 60” and freeing “up more cash for public spending.” They’d “do well to consider how Denmark has managed its expansive welfare state,” moving “to gradually raise the retirement age” after realizing its “aging population threatened the sustainability of its pension system.” If France can’t follow Denmark’s lead, investors will “demand higher returns for lending” — “money that could otherwise cover what the unhappy people in the streets of Paris say they want.”

Eye on NYC: Aiming at Predators, Aiding Sharks

Mayor Mamdani thunders against predatory business practices, yet “his proposed POWER Act could make suing ordinary businesses just as rewarding,” notes Eric Fruits at the Washington Examiner. It “promises relief for seniors who lose savings to scams and tenants fighting to recover security deposits,” but its broad rules, easy filing and $2,500 fines “could turn consumer protection into a settlement business” since it “would hand enforcement to private plaintiffs” — so sleazy lawyers could exploit the bill’s “large penalties” and “vague prohibitions” to file endless “claims that businesses can’t afford to contest.” “New Yorkers deserve protection from predatory businesses,” but a law that doesn’t distinguish between a predator from a competitor fails to provide it.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board