CBS created a brilliant meme yesterday, characterizing what’s going on in France as “scuffles” on top of a photo of a car blazing like the wreck of the Hindenburg:
Of course, the original was quietly deleted by the Ministry of Truth and is no longer available, but some Deplorables at X archived the above as an image. It’s too bad that CBS wouldn’t own it, because it could have been as iconic as CNN’s “mostly peaceful” description of the U.S. summer of 2020:
France has a $25 billion/year national police budget, an additional multi-$billion/year local police budget, and a $57 billion/year military budget. INSEE says that 44% of the French are net taxpayers (not receiving more from the government than they pay in), i.e., about 30 million people. Each French taxpayer, therefore, is being charged about $3,000 per year for security, which is a lot of money in a country that is poorer per-capita than any U.S. state.
Nobody seems to be asking why France can’t be secured with this level of funding or, in other words, what do taxpayers get in exchange for the longer hours that they work to support the state?
Separately, who is behind these riots? It’s tempting to blame the fact that France, just like the U.S., chose to assemble a collection of humans from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies. But that ignores who might benefit from unrest in France. The Swiss are an obvious suspect. The wealthy French presumably already have their assets in the custody of Swiss banks so that they can escape in the event of a massive wealth confiscation or total societal collapse event (tough to leave immediately because, just like the U.S., France has a massive exit tax, but in an emergency Switzerland is a great option, especially because they won’t extradite someone over a demand by another country’s tax authority (this drove the U.S. IRS crazy, of course, in the Marc Rich case, which was finally resolved when Rich paid off Bill and Hillary Clinton in exchange for a pardon from Bill)). Then there are industrial competitors, to the extent that the French are still an industrial country. Someone who watches a video of the scuffles could decide to spend money on a factory in Poland, Hungary, Germany, or Switzerland rather than to invest more in France. (I still suspect the Florida Realtors of being the main backers of Ayatollah Mamdani’s campaign to take over NYC. If my suspicion is correct, the ROI has been stunning.)
Israel is also a good all-purpose villain (just ask Harvard, Columbia, and anyone who voted for Zohran Mamdani!). French Jews are much better educated than the typical immigrants to Israel (recall that the largest subpopulation within Israel is made of Jews who were driven out, after having their assets confiscated, from Arab-Muslim countries). To the extent that recent riots turn into a pogrom (see below for an X post about how Jewish shops in Marseille were burned; there have also been reports of synagogues damaged (example)), Israel could benefit from an influx of people with a world-class education. On the third hand, however, the median age of a French Jew is 53. The smartest, best-educated, and most energetic French Jews might already have emigrated out of what is now a Jew-hating pro-Hamas society with a moribund economy. American progressives say that the U.S. benefits when a disabled 80-year-old arrives on our shores, but I don’t think too many Israelis share this point of view.
Temporary Israeli Greta Thunberg is on the scene (Guardian):
A slightly newer Guardian story notes “Protesters hold the French and Palestinian flags as they stand on the statue of the Place de la République in Paris”:
Finally, let’s have a look at some documentary footage of the overall effects on Paris:
“Student protests” – how bad are the French textbooks?
Meanwhile …
> The Paris Zoo is missing about 100 chimps from its enclosure. Police are on the lookout for the missing chimps but are expressing great difficulty in finding them due to the “Nature of the current riots in Paris.”
https://x.com/Schizopost69/status/2111863865474699368
“French teen” protestors: https://media.scored.co/post/LovqqMh57VgR.jpeg
There is a lot of gloating from Anglos and Israelis today, but not from the Swiss. As our Italian neighbors say, “Insultare sequitur,” or “Follow the gloating.”
WT: By “Anglos” do you mean legacy white people in the Islamic Republic of the UK (fortunately, in the process of being replaced) or legacy white people in the U.S.? If you mean the non-Pakistani Brits then I think it could make sense that they’re gloating because they’ve always hated the French. If you mean white Americans then it could be because the Islamic Republic of France has been allied with the Islamic Republic of Iran during our recent battles with the peaceful “Death to America” Iranians.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-france-closing-airspace-11761983
I have seen the gloating by Israelis about how France recognized “Palestine” a year ago and proposing a two-state solution for France. These aren’t from Israeli elites, though, so I don’t think it is evidence of an Israeli government plan.
“Anglos” could be defined as people whose ancestors lived within the British Isles 1,000 years ago. They apparently spent most of those 1,000 years conspiring against La Belle France.
An Israeli elite government minister is wishing France victory over barbarism. France and victory, this is clearly gloating.
https://x.com/AmichaiChikli/status/2111572672207528151
WT: I agree that the “Israel Minister of Diaspora and Combating Antisemitism” is gloating, though on the other hand I didn’t realize that an “Israel Minister of Diaspora and Combating Antisemitism” existed! It doesn’t sound like a very important ministry compared to the one that operates the submarines armed with nuclear missiles (the only real security against antisemitism).
Phil, I am a long-time reader of your blog, and as I read today’s post on France I was overcome with a terrible sense of fear and the simultaneous realization that something terrible must have happened to you. Hoping you haven’t suffered a serious health event like an aneurysm, which would impair your heretofore decent judgment?
In particular, your seemingly nonsensical question: “Nobody seems to be asking why France can’t be secured with this level of funding or, in other words, what do taxpayers get in exchange for the longer hours that they work to support the state?”
Respectfully, have you lost your mind? Why would any rational person ask this question? The French long ago decided that an Invasion of Peaceful Islamic Terrorists and the associated murder, arson and other mayhem was their preferred Society. They voted for this and their wishes have been delivered.
I realize your recent Citizenship in the Wonderful country of Portugal (and hence Love for the EU generally), may be clouding your previously good judgment.
Most importantly, are you okay?
@AYOkay, Conquering a country used to require a stronger army and superior weapons. These days, it is achieved by outnumbering the native population through faster and higher birth rates and with the help of woke ideologues with misplaced compassion for low IQ’s.
Will someone please tell this young lady to move on and find another shithole country to live in? The people of France have spoken loud and clear, and she should listen. Allahu Akbar!
https://x.com/ThaisEscufon/status/2112005539974545662
Did this young lady have a lobotomy in recent years? Go find another shithole country to live in, missy. Allahu Akbar!
https://x.com/rosewdc/status/2111966620834803903
Phil, just to let you know that everything is going swimmingly in France. I enjoyed a Celine Dion concert with Brigitte just the other night! Watch Brigitte Rock!
https://x.com/Osint613/status/2111788621896331417
Thank you, AYO, for the welfare check and thank you, President Macron, for highlighting the greatest musical talent of our age. I’m glad that Brigitte is keeping fit by dancing because who knows when she’ll need core strength to maintain stability while throwing a punch?
good one Phil! 😀 that’s a Triumph the Insult Comic Dog level joke! loved it! 😀
France is known for its protests, but this one is very different from those of the past. Previous, protests are organized and led by labor unions and adults. This time, however, the movement not organized, driven by young, woke students demanding better classrooms and school conditions. Yet they are unwilling to call out immigration and integration.
Rather than simply demanding better facilities and more resources, students need to question why their classrooms have such a high proportion of foreign students (20-25% are foreigners) and why their government has allowed such a large influx of immigrants without stronger integration requirements.
George: What possible “integration requirement” could be applied to millions of low-skill immigrants from cultures that are completely incompatible with the legacy culture, religion, and value system of France?
Imagine that the French were once innovative enough to produce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CATIA ! Now their resources go into expanding their welfare state to accommodate millions of randomly selected humans. They really can’t get any credit for being humanitarians, I don’t think, because while they provide a taxpayer-funded lifestyle for millions of migrants they ignore billions of poor people who were left behind in the countries that are the source of the enrichers of France. Same deal in the U.S. I don’t think that we should be able to get credit for keeping 80% of Somali households on welfare because we’re doing essentially nothing for 20 million Somalis in Somalia.
French events analysis from Ferguson, the former black sheep of Harvard:
https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/why-europe-is-burning?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3072903&post_id=221118626&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=298lz2&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Ferguson gets it all wrong. He blames France’s problems on its aging population, declining birth rate, (a trend shared across the West) and the burden of pensions.
> The real problem is the cost of elderly healthcare.
If that were the main problem, Japan and South Korea, two countries he specifically cites, should be experiencing similar riots. Yet they aren’t. Japan spends roughly 10% of its GDP on healthcare, South Korea around 9%, and France about 11%. These figures are not dramatically different.
The real issue, is uncontrolled immigration and the failure to integrate immigrant into French culture and society. It is that simple.
“The right lays the blame on immigrants, whom they will deport as if that will help matters.” says Ferguson, simply dismissing the idea that low-skill immigrants from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies could be a liability. That’s called “begging the questions” by philosophers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
I think the best summary of France is that they were worried about having a large number of old white Catholic French people dependent on the welfare state and, to address this concern, they imported a large number of young Brown and Black Muslim non-French people who are dependent on the welfare state.
So the handful of young white Catholic high-skill French people who are left must work to pay staggeringly high taxes to support old white Catholic French people AND young Brown and Black Muslims. Immigration has moved the amount of tax that must be extracted from a productive worker from “world-beating” to “staggering” and, soon, “insane”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-diversity.1.6986248.html is a report on a Harvard study that somehow slipped through NYT editorial review in 2007. It says that in a diverse society people aren’t willing to volunteer for their neighbors, help their community, etc. Paying more than 50% of your income in taxes, as financially successful Americans do and perhaps all French people with jobs do, is a kind of forced volunteering (back up by police and prisons if you don’t volunteer). So the Harvard researchers covered by the NYT would have predicted the eventual meltdown of France.
——————– excerpts
IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.
George A, your summary is spot-on!
Niall Ferguson’s credentials are primarily as a historian, but he did teach at the London School of Economics. So it would be fun to ask him why, if low-skill migrants are an asset to France rather than a liability, Germany won’t pay France to send low-skill migrants to Germany. If no country anywhere in the world is willing to pay to receive France’s low-skill migrants, why would deportation be obviously unhelpful to French society and the French economy?
George,
I am not disputing the idea that influx of substantial number of immigrants du Maghreb may be a significant factor in the mostly un-pieceful current protests, but you have to account for the 1968 riots where the only important immigrant force was represented by Danny Cohn-Bendit who was eventually deported to his native Germany.
The French do have a grand tradition of rioting, ChatGPT says that there wasn’t a lot of property damage in 1968 compared to these recent riots. The June–July 2023 riots and this month’s riots were much more destructive. Adjusted for inflation, the riots this month so far might be fairly comparable to 2023 (in the range of $1 billion). Also compare to recent events in the Florida panhandle: “Verisk Sets $1B to $2B Loss Estimate as AM Best Calls Hurricane Isaias Potential Earnings Event” https://news.ambest.com/newscontent.aspx?refnum=278013&altsrc=175
————– our AI overlord on the 2023 destruction
The June–July 2023 riots in France were triggered by the police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent, during a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, on June 27, 2023.
The shooting led to six nights of widespread rioting, particularly in poorer urban neighborhoods with large immigrant-origin populations.
…
The unrest escalated beyond demonstrations about the shooting to include widespread arson, looting, attacks on public buildings, and destruction of vehicles. Many targets, including schools, libraries, businesses, and municipal facilities, had no direct connection to the shooting.
So, actually, the rioting may not be that bad from a purely financial perspective. Florida’s economy thrives despite periodic hurricanes that do $1 billion and sometimes vastly more in damage. France doesn’t have extreme weather events, other than heat that becomes lethal because they can’t afford A/C. France has roughly 1.9X the GDP vs. Florida (much lower per-capita, of course).
(On the fourth hand, a lot of Florida hurricane “destruction” is an insured loss of a building that was obsolete and needed renovation. Absent an epic Andrew-type storm, the roofs that are damaged tend to be ones that are more than 20 years old and that were due for replacement.)
George A.,
French pensions are much more generous than Japanese or South Korean pensions: $2,000 per month, compared with $1,000 and $500, respectively. Also, many Japanese and South Koreans continue working after turning 65.
Ivan,
There were 30,000 rioting Algerians in 1961. Were they entirely well-behaved in 1968?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Paris_massacre
@Ivan, Since you bring up the 1968 riots, which were also started by student protests, there is one major difference that stands out: the looting and property destruction. The May 1968 protests were marked primarily by street battles, barricades, and clashes with police — but they rarely looted shops — followed by massive nationwide strikes. The 2026 protest, has seen widespread looting of shops and businesses, arson, and damage to public buildings.
According to Le Monde’s October 18, 2026 [1], reporting, the October 17 protests involved groups that smashed shop windows, ransacked luxury boutiques, and looted businesses across Paris and other French cities.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/10/18/october-17-french-protests-crowds-marched-through-the-streets-before-violence-looting-and-chaos-broke-out_6758725_7.html
It is also interesting to note that the percentage of foreign born+2nd gen population in the US and France is about the same: ~24%, mas o menos.
Does it mean that we are merely lagging behind in time, or that overall population density is higher in France, thereby presenting more opportunity to burn historical Hôtels de Ville ?
Ivan, god willing we here in Amerika are only “lagging behind.” As Hunter Biden likes to say: Comprende? Allahu Akbar!
@Ivan:
> Does it mean that we are merely lagging behind in time, or that overall population density is higher in France, thereby presenting more opportunity to burn historical Hôtels de Ville ?
The answer to this question boils down to one thing: who are the migrants, and where are they coming from?
In the US, many migrant come from Mexico and Central and South America, where Christianity is the main religion. In France, migrant are from North and sub-Saharan Africa, including Muslim-majority countries. Not only that, the age and circumstances of those arriving also matters in a big way. In the US migration involves entire families, that’s not the case for France where migrants are teenagers.
Lucky for us, the US, under Bidden accepted more migrants from Muslim-majority countries. If that trend has continued, who knows, in 30 years, we may find ourselves facing our own version of the “France riots.”
Phil, your comment that “the rioting may not be that bad” is so refreshing to hear! You are a man of infinite wisdom. Allahu Akbar!
Phil, as a staunch supporter of the Peaceful Islamic Terrorists in France and Amerika (“rioting may not be that bad”), can I request that you visit the city of Hamtramck, Michigan (yes, it’s here in the Islamic Republic of Amerika!) and file a trip report for your Wonderful readers?
This is a real Amerikan story of Success and Winning that I think hasn’t been well explained. I’ve attached a brief primer for you as you plan your trip.
I feel you are the Man for this Mission! So looking forward to your comments. Allauhu Akbar!
https://x.com/AmyMek/status/2112301387346501702
And just now, I came across this [1]. The protesters’ rallying cry is “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres.” They are invoking Arabic in the name of their cause. That tells you something about how thoroughly these students have been brainwashed: they refuse to see the failure to integrate migrants as part of the problem. It is sad, but France has lost its cultural identity. This generation and the next, will grow up in a country that is French in name but increasingly unrecognizable in character.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/21/why-are-french-protesters-chanting-bismillah-cest-les