By Douglas V. Gibbs
The “student uprisings” across France have evolved into full-on violent riots with buildings in flames, including historic landmarks and government structures. The smoking husks of vehicles line streets as rioters fill the roadways in a violent battle against law enforcement, and Western Civilization, about six months before the country’s next major election. News outlets indicate that inside the chaos is a “franchise of communist groups, labor unions, and global activists.” They conveniently left out the primary igniters: Muslim Migrants.
“It’s not about having more crayons in the classroom,” said Dana Perino this morning on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
Saturday was the most violent of the days of recent civil unrest, and will likely rank high as a day of mayhem in modern French history. More than half a million people poured into the streets in what the Interior Ministry pegged at roughly 550,000 demonstrators, while the hard-left CGT union bragged of “over 800,000.”
As night fell, the mobs increased their savagery. By the time the tear gas cleared, more than 2,000 had been arrested nationwide, a figure Interior Minister Laurent Nunez later revised upward, with the Guardian reporting 2,400 across the country, including 855 in Paris alone. More than 600 police officers and firefighters were injured. At least two people were killed. In Saint-Étienne a 17-year-old boy lost his hand to a crowd-control grenade; in Mulhouse a 17-year-old girl lost an eye.
The 143-year-old town hall of Limoges, a landmark dating to 1873, was torched, its spire collapsing in flames and reviving memories of the Notre-Dame fire. In Marseille, hundreds stormed City Hall. In Lyon, the tourism office was set ablaze. Rioters pushed toward the Élysée Palace itself. The Louvre was forced to close as protesters blocked its entrance. A Rolex store was looted; Louis Vuitton was cleaned out in Bordeaux. French newspapers screamed “LE CHAOS” and “SCENES D’INSURRECTION.”
Chaos and insurrection. The very things the hard-left has been accusing their opponents of being capable of; projection, to say the least.
The mainstream press has settled on a tidy explanation: a Gen-Z “polycrisis” over the cost of living, fuel prices, and crumbling schools. “It’s the second group that has dominated the headlines,” the Guardian admitted, describing masked rioters torching cars and looting shops. Macron himself performed the ritual dance, telling the nation Sunday night that “tonight, we all feel anger and shame,” while conceding some protesters had “legitimate demands,” and then blaming “insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups, joined by numerous criminals.”
His interior minister offered his resignation over the failure to anticipate the scale of the chaos. Macron refused it. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who described the country as at a “point of no return,” asked cities to impose “partial curfews.” Marseille banned gatherings from midday to 8 p.m.
But if you only read the legacy outlets, you’d miss the machines behind the mayhem.
A Fox News Digital investigation identified 54 organizations and movements inside France’s October protest ecosystem, and found that only 16, roughly one in three, were actually student or youth groups. The remaining 38 were adult-led communist parties, revolutionary socialist outfits, labor unions, political parties, environmental radicals, and international propaganda outlets. Among them: the CGT and other national unions, the French Communist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Trotskyist NPA and Révolution Permanente, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, the revived Gilets jaunes, Extinction Rebellion, and Palestinian-solidarity groups.
The international scaffolding is real. Communist academic Vijay Prashad, executive director of Tricontinental, funded by Shanghai-based Marxist (but American citizen) tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham, celebrated the unrest with a three-continent message: “Paris–New Delhi–Buenos Aires.” Singham’s network, including CodePink and BreakThrough News, is amplifying it. And Fox reports a coalition of 28 communist and socialist youth groups is already organizing a coordinated strike across 12 countries on November 20 under the slogan “Fight for Our Future, Not Their Wars!”
This is not a spontaneous temper tantrum. It is a franchise.
Which brings us to what Jim Simpson and Trevor Loudon call the Red/Green Axis (Which I wrote about recently, and I’ve asked Loudon to come on the air with me, with a tentative date set for Tuesday, October 20), which is a functional alliance between Marxists (“Red”) and the forces of Islamic jihad (“Green”). Simpson, a former White House Office of Management and Budget economist under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, documented the collusion in his Red/Green Axis books: two camps with almost nothing in common ideologically, but sharing common enemies which they have aligned with each other to erase. Mass migration and refugee resettlement are their chosen tools. Loudon later expanded the framework into a “Red-Green-Blue” axis, folding in the globalists.
The French riots are a textbook case. Demonstrators marched under the hammer-and-sickle and the Palestinian flag simultaneously. In Marseille, per a report by French journalist Paul Amar on CNews (via JFeed), rioters burned and vandalized Jewish-owned businesses while leaving Muslim-owned shops on the same street untouched. And, they did it over the Sabbath. As Emily Schrader put it: “Rioters in Marseille torched all the Jewish owned shops, while intentionally not attacking the Muslim owned shops. Tell me again how this is about ‘students’?” (PJ Media).
PJ Media’s Catherine Salgado didn’t mince words: “The riots in France are not about the cost of living or education… We are watching the neo-Nazi sharia takeover of France in real time.”
President Trump did not hedge. “France is burning!” he wrote on Truth Social, before urging Paris to “Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!” Days earlier he had been blunter still: “this isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country.” Vice President JD Vance echoed it, warning Americans that Western liberals “imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion” and “ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”
All of this is unfolding roughly six months before France’s presidential election to succeed Macron. The polling has Marine Le Pen’s National Rally leading the first round at 37–38 percent, with Mélenchon’s hard-leftwing LFI surging into second at 18–18.5 percent. Le Pen called the riots a “threat to democracy” and blamed a government “running on fumes, exhausted and disoriented.” Mélenchon, unsurprisingly, defended the students and warned of “events that will eventually become uncontrollable.”
Either way, the street is going to have a say.
France is not alone. Students marched in Belgium. Tens of thousands protested housing and living costs in Lisbon. Milan saw two nights of unrest and 32 arrests. Spain, Portugal, and Albania all saw flare-ups. The axis is mobile, and the November 20 European youth strike is already on the calendar.
The violence bred by the socialist-left and a rapidly growing Muslim migrant population is not an isolated French phenomenon. It is a pre-shock. It is one of the regular tremors that Simpson and Loudon told us were coming. France is simply further down the road than everyone else. And, if this continues, not only will the violence spread across Europe, but it will begin springing up in America, as well.
As the smoke rises over Limoges, the question every American should be asking is a simple one: how far behind are we? And, have we also placed kindling in the furnace with open borders and the rise of socialism?
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
