France on fire: The riots are a dangerous inflection point for the West

When they see immigrant thugs looting and trashing cities, social media commentators sometimes mock the rioters as young professionals, doctors, architects, etc. It is intended as an irony-laden riposte to the fatuous left-wing argument that diversity makes the West stronger, and that mass immigration from alien cultures brings talent that grows the economy.A similar barb, specifically about the young men rioting in France, asks in a tone of mock perplexity why students protesting school funding are waving Palestinian flags, invoking Allah, calling for murder, ransacking luxury stores, and burning historic buildings to ashes.These questions skewer the political class for a long self-deception. The ruling and media establishment refuses to recognize that Western civilization is facing a massive racial and moral crisis. But ordinary decent people are not fooled, and they are now willing to voice opinions they were taught were racist and so previously concealed. The riots pulling apart France — the rest of Europe and America aren’t far behind — have a sufficient number of disparate elements to allow continued self-deception by those who refuse to let the facts interrupt the multicultural fairy tale they tell themselves.Rioters watch a car burn in Paris’s Republic Square. (Thibault Camus/AP) Yes, it is true that there have been protests over school conditions by students who don’t know or don’t care that France is broke. It is broke because the state already consumes 55% of the economy, and the resulting sclerosis means it doesn’t have a spare franc to spend. But the simple fact that there have been student protests does not mean that that is what the violence is about. It merely allows the ruling class from President Emmanuel Macron downward to pretend that, despite the vast scale and nature of the unrest, it is really all about the discrete matter of education. The president laments that rival parties try to turn the mayhem to their electoral advantage, as though street riots involving half a million people are not inherently the stuff of politics and government.The mayhem we’re seeing is, of course, not simply about schools. Those protests offered agitators an opportunity to foment extreme unrest. More than 50 Marxist, communist, and other revolutionary socialist organizations hijacked demonstrations and turned them into a revolt against economic freedom and the traditional way of French life and government.As night follows day, a third, dark, and uniquely evil presence is clear in the worst of the turmoil. Palestinian flags were waved wherever there was violence, accompanied by calls for the death of Israel and genocide of Jews. Islamofascist activists stirred up disaffected Muslim immigrant youth who live in the outskirts of French cities and who have grown to young manhood in a culture of rejectionist nihilism. These feral malcontents are ever ready to maraud and pillage the civilization in which they and their parents make their homes. Jihadis helpfully direct them to attack Jewish stores while sparing Muslim ones.Left to right, flames engulf the 19-century city hall in Limoges in central France; a rioter in Paris waves a skull-and-crossbones flag. (Lucas Destrem/AP; Firas Abdullah/Anadolu/Getty) Most of the rioters are not ideologues or jihadis; they are hardly thoughtful enough to be that. They were simply raised in a culture of modern amorality — they love violence and like free stuff, and they don’t care where they get it or whose livelihoods they wreck in doing so. They know they can get away with it because they can see the feckless political class incapable of responding. Thus they can enjoy a sort of barbarous glory with no adverse consequences for most thievery, attacks on police, and intimidation of citizens. Riot offers fun and profit.There are too many members of the mob for the state to suppress them without resort to a level of violence that the government, political class, and perhaps the general public could not stomach. The police rush to protect the Èlysée Palace, residence of the president, with the result that Paris’s most luxurious department stores are left defenseless.The crisis has reached this scale because the establishment has done nothing serious for decades to prevent it. Happy-clappy multiculturalism long ago metastasized into a sort of cultural gangrene that has been allowed to rot untreated. A pop-up rabble of uneducated, uncivilized, and unassimilable young men has been nurtured in the bosom of civilization, keen for mayhem whenever favorable circumstances occur.One commentator posted a wry comment on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Apparently freeing Palestine means destroying Paris.” The irony of this hit home but, in a wider sense, the substance of the observation was straightforward and true rather than a joke. The “Free Palestine” cause is inextricably involved in a project to wreck the West and its ancient and glorious culture.Left to right, the front of a looted ‘Free’ store in the southern France city of Marseille; Rioters pause for a photographer in central Paris, Oct. 17, 2026. (Denis Thaust/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images; Firas Abdullah Anadolu/Getty) An inflection point has been reached with the French riots. Usually, jihadis and leftists of the Green-Red alliance are to be seen in activism focused on Jews — for example, in hideous celebrations marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres by Hamas in Israel.But the latest protests are not primarily about Israel and Jews, much though jihadis are prominently involved. The main thrust of the latest mayhem, instead, is a repudiation of Western society and civilization and an intent to smash it. The mob focuses its attacks on institutions, burns architectural treasures, expropriates property, spits in the face of orderly society, and lays bare the fact that the “authorities” have lost control.Usually, when a pro-Palestinian mob is doing its work, it seems necessary to remind onlookers that Israel and the Jews are not the only target. Israel is the little Satan, but the West, especially America, is the great Satan, the ultimate target for destruction.But the French riots last weekend were not primarily antisemitic, with ancillary property damage and socialist sloganeering thrown in. They were, rather, an assault on Western civilization and all the things we hold dear, with opportunistic antisemitism thrown in.The thugs of Paris and every other major city in France are slouching but willing foot soldiers of leftist revolution. They were stirred to action by cynical incendiaries. One could think of them as cannon fodder if there seemed any chance of the authorities using decisive force against them. But there isn’t. With their actions and the lack of an effective response, the West took another step downward on a road to doom. We don’t have to reach the end of that road. But we will if we don’t change direction.There is a grim fittingness to the fact that France is leading the capitulation of the West, for the ideas on which this revolution is based are French in origin. The revolutionaries who smashed Paris and other major European cities last weekend, and promise to do so again, are the progeny of philosophies formulated in France at the time of the Paris student riots of 1968.Michel Foucault taught back then that there was no such thing as truth, and that reason, law and justice, science, and even beauty were essentially con tricks or weapons fashioned so the few could dominate the many. Jacques Derrida took this further by positing that the meaning of any statement or relationship is never stable. He developed deconstructionism, the nihilistic intellectual discipline that methodically questions and fractures all the inherited wisdom and culture of the West, and every verity of our civilization.The interplay of these theories undergirds every malevolent force by which the West is currently assailed — intersectionality designating every white person an oppressor and every dark person oppressed and legitimately violent; the idea that property is theft and theft is retributive justice; the notion that Israel is a settler colonial state in its own ancient land; the idea that America is irredeemably evil and has no right to its borders; the contention that citizenship and sovereignty per se are bogus; the theory that the law and the U.S. Constitution do not mean today what they meant yesterday and, because they are “living,” can be interpreted in wholly new ways by unelected judges. The list of malignant ideas is almost endless.THE GOP’S NOT SO GREAT COMMUNICATORSThe Paris mob is an unthinking monster, and so, of course, none of these theories are contemplated by its members. But they are nevertheless animated by the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, and others in their bluntest, reductive, and most troglodytic sublimations — that everyone is lying, truth and reality are whatever you want them to be, and all that matters is power.The West is an elegant structure composed of ideas, values, mores, assumptions, arts, architecture, laws and customs built up over centuries of history. Massed nihilists roam the great cities not to achieve narrow and specific ends — not, certainly, to increase funding for schools — but to tear the whole edifice down.Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner.