The France riots aren’t a student revolt — they’re funded by CCP-tied dark money

Riots in France have not only taken a turn for the worse, but they’ve also spread to other countries. But the violence on European streets isn’t organic. Rather, it’s the latest example of the Marxist Left exporting chaos abroad.Some in the press have attempted to portray the rioters as merely aggrieved students demanding better education.As reporter Asra Nomani recently documented, no fewer than 54 organizations and movements have participated in the riots in France. Yet, a mere 16 of these groups are student or youth organizations, and even these include communist youth groups and Muslim student associations. The rest of the rioters are adult-led communist groups, labor unions, and revolutionary leftist movements. These groups “used grievances over school conditions as a pretext to mobilize a broader political against capitalism, government austerity, policing, and military spending,” Nomani noted.The efforts of what Nomani called “Chaos Inc.” were amplified by the so-called Singham network, a constellation of groups supported by Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based tech tycoon.Singham is the subject of multiple U.S. federal and congressional investigations into his alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party.As the House Ways and Means Committee noted, Singham “spent $100 million to establish a multi-pronged, non-profit network that aims to cause chaos in pursuit of its anti-American ideology.”Elements of the Singham network, such as BreakThrough News, have been heavily promoting the riots in France. Singham also supports CodePink, which bills itself as anti-war, but has a long history of propagandizing for Russia, Iran, China, and Hamas, among other autocracies and terrorist groups.Nomani noted that an international coalition of 28 communist and socialist youth organizations is preparing for a coordinated strike across 12 countries in Europe under the slogan “Fight for Our Future, Not Their Wars!” These groups call for walkouts, occupations, demonstrations, assemblies, even blockades.Activists are calling for supporters to return to the streets on Oct. 24 for “Acte II” and have planned no fewer than 212 mobilizations, along with a coordinated European youth strike that is set for Nov. 20.Clearly, the intent is to spread the chaos and havoc in France to the rest of Europe and beyond. Riots have already erupted in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Albania.And in a recent interview on BreakThrough News, Jodie Evans, Singham’s wife and the co-founder of CodePink, touted a planned November campaign in Washington to protest military spending.To state the obvious: This isn’t about education in France anymore. Indeed, at scale it never was.Many of the rioters aren’t school-age, as some French officials have conceded. Many have been filmed carrying Algerian and Palestinian flags. They’re looting stores, threatening residential neighborhoods, attacking emergency service workers, and assaulting any who dare stand in their way.This is how governments fall and how elections are swayed. Indeed: that’s the point.Mass riots don’t spread like wildfire across countries without fuel. This isn’t organic. It’s a contagion. And it’s not without precedent. In fact, exploiting divisions is a long-standing tactic of the Marxist Left.The KGB, the Soviet Union’s chief security agency, used what are known as “active measures” to sow discord and chaos in both the hearts and homes of its opponents. Active measures are covert political operations and subversion to shape foreign opinion, influence policy, and weaken an adversary.The Soviet Union, like its communist heirs in China and Cuba, excelled at them. And as KGB archives smuggled to the West by a man named Vasily Mitrokhin make clear, the free and democratic West often makes for an easy victim.Throughout the West, the Soviets used international front groups to sway unions, student organizations, and others in a bid to chip away at the Cold War consensus. Soviet propaganda stoked civil unrest and racial tensions inside America.During the Cold War, the Soviets also used active measures to discredit rival power centers and weaken reform movements within the Communist bloc. The examples are numerous.To weaken reformers in Czechoslovakia during the so-called “Prague Spring” of 1968, KGB operatives planted and “found” what Soviet propaganda labeled an “imperialist arms dump.” Soviet agents posed as foreigners to garner trust and information, fabricate evidence of Western involvement, and engage in sabotage.The Soviets employed active measures to weaken independent labor movements in Poland during the 1980s, to thwart Hungary’s brief-but-bloody bid for sovereignty in 1956, and to orchestrate a mob to attack then-Vice President Richard Nixon during a 1958 visit to Venezuela, among many other instances.The Soviet Union is dead and gone, but its heirs have continued to perfect its tactics.THE TWIN CRISES BURNING THROUGH FRANCE RIGHT NOWA July 2026 report by the State Department, drawing heavily on research from the Capital Research Center, documented how Cuba has waged a “sustained campaign” of subversion against the United States which has spanned seven decades, from the skyjackings and terrorism of the 1970s to the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 and beyond.The rise of social media has made it easier for these groups to coordinate, agitate, and spread propaganda. The devastating effect can be seen on European streets and soon, perhaps, our own.Sean Durns is a director for the Counter Extremism Research Center at Capital Research Center.