For the past nearly 10 days, France has seen nearly nonstop protests/slash/riots starting with students taking to the streets. Over the past few days, the street clashes have grown in intensity, no longer confined to students. Citizens of all ilk have joined in, protesting high prices and general living conditions.
Over the weekend, 1500 retail operations were vandalized, 2400 protestors arrested, and 1000 police injured, according to rounded-off numbers supplied by France 24 on English TV.
I imagine there was some TV reporter on a local or national channel witnessing scenes like the one pictured above and commenting, in tried-and-true CNN fashion, that the protests were “mostly peaceful.”
No doubt unreported is that this mayhem, totaling hundreds of millions of Euros in damages, is that the destruction is the cost of trying to buy social cohesion through government handouts. According to France 24, students were protesting “shabby conditions” in their schools, with no details forthcoming. More likely, they were protesting being treated like pieces of garbage, or social drek.
Recall how, in the first months of Trump 47, Vice President JD Vance gave a much-maligned speech in Munich, in which he called out the European nations for suppressing free speech and for maintaining an open-borders policy, both of which he predicted would lead to social unrest.
Well, his prediction has now come true, fewer than 24 months later. Meanwhile, outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron managed to blame both rioters and police for the upheaval, without offering any solutions.
Shoulda listened to JD.
