Rob Bluey is vice president for communications at The Heritage Foundation and Founding Editor of Daily Signal. I mentioned in the interview an article that Rob wrote during the Obama administration criticizing the removal of a website about earmark reform, and contrasted it to the Trump cull of the EPA’s website.

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Last month, a mob of more than 70

men, armed with baseball bats, knives, and rocks launched a series of vigilante

attacks around the towns of  Clichy-sous-Bois

and Bobigny, about an hour east of Paris. French police arrested at least

20 of them.

The mob launched attacks against Roma, also

known as Gypsies, living in the area, and the trigger for violence was a series

of rumors spread online, along with photos or video of the incident, that the

Roma had kidnapped a young French girl using a white van, intending to sell her

into sex slavery. Or perhaps it was a red van. Or maybe yellow, and maybe it

was a boy that was kidnapped, or maybe several children, and the intention was

maybe to harvest their organs. Sometimes Roma are the culprits, sometimes

Bulgarians, sometimes other types of outsiders.

The wandering details should tell you the

same as it should have told the members of the mob. All the rumors were

nonsense. French police confirmed that they had no reports of any abductions,

and no reason to think that any of the rumors were true. In addition, reverse

image searches of the supposed photographic evidence showed that it was from

unrelated incidents, often years old, taken in distant locations, and showing

incidents that are completely different to what the accompanying text claims.

French police were so frustrated with the persistence

of these rumors that they issued a

formal notice that they are false and instructed people to stop sharing them.

One spokesman said of the people who believed and acted on the rumo...