The World Is In Crisis and the French President Runs to Africa 79%
By Richard Pollock0%
5/14/2026, 12:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 61.6% saturation with 535 hits. Analysis detected 2,665 faulty-reasoning hits from 869 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 69.9% and a BS Rank of 79% (4,778 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 78.20% of the article peer group.
OAN Commentary by: Richard Pollock
Thursday, May 14, 2026
In August of last year, I posted a Substack column about French President Emmanuel Macron’s dirty little secret — how in his nine years in office, he has continued France’s exploitative policies upon France’s former African colonies.
Now, as the world is watching President Trump in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as well as the standoff in the Straits of Hormuz, Macron has decided to run to Africa to hold a summit he calls the “Africa Forward Summit.”
Macron regards himself as a world human rights advocate and of course he has deplored Israel and recognized a Palestinian state.
But his real problems reside in his former French African colonies as well as throughout the African continent.
He hopes his new summit will compensate for his abusive post-colonial relationship with Africa, especially in Africa’s Sahel where his former French colonies reside.
Macron wants to paper over the fact that the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger have expelled French troops and terminated French defense agreements.
Last year Senegal and the Ivory Coast ordered the closure of French military bases within their borders as well.
This week the British Telegraph confirmed the Sahel’s disgust for Macron, observing that “Paris has been kicked out of the Sahel countries (and) anti-French sentiment is rife elsewhere.”
The liberal Carnegie Endowment for International Peace captured Africa’s disgust for Macron, stating in 2022 that he’s been continually mocked for his phony “human rights rhetoric.”
As the foreign policy think tank then reported, “Paris has continued to give support for authoritarian regimes like those in Central Africa, has at times provoked mockery and fueled popular disappointment regarding Paris’s human rights rhetoric.”
So, this week the French leader decided to travel to Kenya to try to woo the African nations with his summit.
He proposed $16 billion worth of French investment while Africans would have to put up $10.5 billion, mainly in energy, agriculture and Artificial Intelligence.
Africans, to say the least, were skeptical.
Le Monde reported this week that for Macron, “this nearly decade-long period has been tumultuous for the French president.
Macron came to power promising to overhaul the relationship between France and its former colonies.
But he has rarely been able to act as he intended, constantly pulled back by a reality of crises, misunderstandings, frustrations and setbacks.“
He has faced scorn from people like Cameroon archaeologist and historian Augustin Holl who told Le Monde this week that relations between France and Francophone Africa have been “catastrophic.”
Mr.
Holl, who led the committee behind the United Nations’ general history of Africa project, condemned the French leader, saying, “This is largely due to a haughty attitude and arrogance.”
Yesterday, Macron additionally faced ridicule at the summit when he stormed a stage to rebuke an African audience which he regarded as unruly, according to Associated Press.
“Just imagine what would happen if an African leader did the same thing in America or Europe,” said Thierno Mbaye, a history student at a university in Senegal’s capital, Dakar.
“He acted like a schoolteacher scolding children,” Mbaye told AP.
The intervention also drew criticism from the Left in France.
“It’s stronger than him: as soon as he sets foot on the African continent, he can’t help but behave like a colonizer,” Danièle Obono, a lawmaker for the hard-left party France Unbowed, said in a post on X.
Like many other European leaders, Macron loves to scold Israel for its pursuit of war against Islamic Jihadi terrorists.
But the world forgets that Macron himself waged a brutal eight-year counterinsurgency war against Islamic terrorists called Operation Barkhane.
Under his efforts his troops displaced a 2.1 million people by late 2021, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
His efforts failed and he faced humiliation when he withdrew his troops from fighting the Jihadis.
Many African nations ridiculed his indecisive military operations.
Macron nevertheless still tries to claim the human rights banner.
One last footnote: for those who are concerned about democracy, Macron continues to stay in power despite numerous, overwhelming “no confidence” votes from his own Parliament.
He insists he will remain in power without a working parliamentary majority.
This has led to governmental paralysis.
No, he will not leave.
And he insists he will stay in power until his term ends in 2027.
This is Macron’s idea democracy.
But in the United States, we only know about Macron’s public posturing as a guardian of peace and human rights.
Sadly, it’s just another European sham.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Richard Pollock is a former New Left activist and was a roommate with Chicago 7 defendant Rennie Davis.
He understands New Left strategy and tactics.
For four decades, Richard was an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C.
Among his positions, he served as the senior investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller News Foundation, and at OAN.
While at OAN he served in the Washington, D.C. bureau and hosted its investigative reporting specials.
He is semi-retired and his posts from D.C. can be read on Substack.com
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