JEFF CHILDERS HAS A DIFFERENT TAKE ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 2.0
I have held off reporting this “summer of protest” story because it stinks like burning astroturf. But they keep raising the stakes, and so I had to weigh in. Yesterday, the New York Times dramatically reported, “France in Shock After Protests Devolve Into Riots.” The subheadline added, “Centrist and leftist leaders blamed each other after anti-government protests devolved into chaos.” Is this just typical French protest season stuff —essentially a national pastime there— or something more? In any event, widespread protests of uncertain origin and ambiguous meaning spread across the country.
PAYWALLED… MORE IN THE COMMENT SECTION
Nearly every corporate media platform is now covering “mostly peaceful” protests across France that have been escalating for about two weeks. It is international news. The talking heads are chattering, the op-eds are populating with blame-itorials, and social media is spinning at maximum velocity. It’s the French version of our 2020 Summer of Protest, except it runs along the Champs-Élysées.
But there are two massive narrative plot holes.
The first is that the French government could crack down if it really wanted to. But it’s not doing that.
We’ve seen how the European powers handle right-wing protests. Last year in Great Britain, right-wing groups protested immigration policy, and the UK government cracked down like nobody’s business. Headline from CNN, September 2025:
The British government didn’t negotiate. It arrested the movement’s leaders. It arrested them for literally anything, up to and including intemperate social media posts. It also arrested thousands of peaceful protestors, including people who didn’t riot or burn anything, for offenses like mean signs. Detectives and prosecutors worked around the clock for months processing all the arrests. Courts opened on weekends to handle all the sentencing.
This month —a year later— UK police are still identifying hapless British citizens in social media clips using facial recognition and posting their pictures on wanted lists.
Beyond threatening words, the French government isn’t doing anything like that. That’s the first problem. It makes me suspect the Macron Administration is not entirely upset about the protests. Which brings us to the second big problem.
? Once again, we see the classic modern protest pattern: The black-clad masked protest brigades. “What emerged on Saturday seemed like a split-screen event,” the Times reported, “with marches occurring peacefully in one part of a city and groups of black-clad agitators sparring with police and causing damage in other areas.” Then a second layer of mystery appeared: “As things unraveled, opportunist rioters joined in, exploiting the chaos, government officials said.”
So the French supposedly face two different mystery groups of antagonists. Who are the “black-clad agitators?” Who are the “opportunistic rioters?” The same, or different? It stinks worse than the Seine River in August.
The homogeneous corporate media narrative is that the current slate of protests was started by some high-school students just outside Paris complaining about ‘underfunded facilities.’ (The problems are often itemized as underpaid teachers, strained school supplies, and widespread “crumbling, rat-infested buildings”— but there is a curious absence of youthful TikToks showing deplorable conditions in French high schools, which you’d otherwise guess would be easy to find. Just saying.)
Because everyone knows nothing angers high-school students more than lackluster student-teacher ratios and not having enough number two pencils.
In other words, the official narrative of the riots’ cause is a progressive funhouse mirror. Underfunded education? It sounds like the Democrats’ last ten presidential platforms. You could lift that tired complaint straight from US headlines. Here’s one from last summer’s Detroit News:
So weird! Color me skeptical about corporate media reports claiming French high school students are upset about the very same things that are tweaking US Democrats. Like a bad Hollywood script that drops plot threads and doesn’t make any sense, this causal narrative has become a kind of Rorschach test.
People are seeing shapes in the protests and finding their biases confirmed.
? Conservative influencers, for example, have noticed that many of the protesters are not only not high school students, but haven’t even lived in France long enough to have strong opinions about local politics— like educational investment levels. Many don’t even speak the language. They certainly didn’t go to school there.
This morning, President Trump weighed in, suggesting French people should consider border closures, which admittedly is excellent advice regardless of whether open borders are the direct cause of these particular protests or not.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found little support for “migrant unrest” on French platforms. But they didn’t exactly deny it, either.
Yesterday, AP (Paris) reported, “French authorities and police have not linked immigrants to the rioting and have repeatedly attributed some of the violence to ‘radical far-left groups’ and other people who joined to loot.” Ha! Word games. That was a very snakey way of putting it. “Have not linked” is not the same as saying they “denied” it or “ruled it out.” Plus, the terms “radical,” “far-left,” “looter,” and “immigrant” are not mutually exclusive. Read critically.
In any case, immigrants or no, over the last two weeks, the protests ‘spread’ across France, infecting nearly every big city there. This morning delivered social media hot takes, New York Times stories, and presidential reaction tweets, bursting with images of burning cars and masked rioters looting shops and cafes and generally making nuisances of themselves. In one dramatic clip, the historic Limoges town hall, built in 1876, which survived both World Wars and France’s Nazi occupation, collapsed in flames across social media. Burned down by mysterious black-clad protesters.
The whole story smells worse than a rotten croissant; it has the sulfurous odor of psyop. After the lack of a real crackdown, the next most suspicious narrative plot hole is that nobody knows who the mysterious rioters are or even what they want. (One French article began by noting these rioters appear “without placards or banners.”) How is this possible? Nobody talked?
It is a very strange political movement indeed that gives no voice to its demands.
? The French media, closest of all to the action, seems just as confused as US corporate media. Here’s one headline that ran yesterday on a local French platform, TF1 Info (translated to English):
https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/17-octobre-black-blocs-pilleurs-de-commerces-qui-sont-ces-casseurs-a-l-origine-des-violences-urbaines-2470585.html
Who could these vandals be? It’s so mysterious! It is a perfect Halloween whodunit. As I have taught you, there’s a universal constant that, whenever media poses a question in the headline, the story never answers that question. This article was no exception.
Instead, TF1 offered a short buffet of random, generic clues from which readers could choose:
“This is typical of the tactics employed by far-left black blocs”
“they marked their presence with … the anarchist symbol (an ‘A’ in a circle), sometimes with the anti-police acronym ACAB (‘All cops are bastards’)”
“another, more opportunistic category of individuals is also involved… criminals whose goal is to enrich themselves by looting”
And that was it. Choose your own adventure. TF1 presented no evidence, no official statements, offering only foggy concepts like “typical tactics,” as if that were a complete explanation. As if it makes perfect sense for coordinated gangs of “anarchists” (oxymoron alert) to organize countrywide protests, and for otherwise law-abiding citizens, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like, to suddenly become “opportunistic criminals” seeking to “enrich themselves” by snatching a pair of free Air Jordans for quick resale on the sneaker black market.
Somehow, amidst all the chaos, the French government has been struck helpless to take effective action, defeated by the devilish criminal device of the cotton face mask. French police have apparently lost all access to cell phone trackers, facial ID, social media posts, tips and informants, and all the other tricks and techniques they deployed to track down every single Capitol tourist from January 6th.
These mysterious French agitators have very special cloth face masks that can defeat all digital surveillance.
Let me be clear. Consider whether the violent, mysterious half of the ‘split screen’ protests may actually be undercover police, or those working for or with them. That would explain the remarkable absence of official curiosity about who’s behind the masks, beyond silly hand-waving about looters seeking to enrich themselves.
The protestors have also shown an admirable level of self-restraint and discipline. Their crimes, though chaotic and alarming in appearance, have been mostly limited to vandalism, looting, and arson— property crimes, in other words. Not rapes, muggings, batteries, or assaults. Does that seem odd to you?
This line of thought leaves us with the admittedly unlikely question of why the French government would intentionally inflict violent protests and massive economic injury on its own citizens.
What if it were just about money?
? Start with the known actors. If you boil down the identified protest groups, the ones corporate media admits are involved in the “peaceful” side of the protests, we find the usual core left-wing suspects: Unions. Named in various articles were labor unions plus “student groups” demanding better pay for teachers (in other words, useful idiots for teachers’ unions). This week, representatives from these left-wing union groups began meeting with Macron Administration ministers to “negotiate” their demands.
The Macron Administration negotiating with unions is like coyotes ‘negotiating’ with foxes about henhouse security. The unions want more taxpayer money. The ministers want to give the unions more taxpayer money. The problem is public sentiment, since the public opposes transferring its money to unions while the country’s budget is in shambles. But, as town halls keep burning, the public’s stubborn opposition is giving way to acceptance that the only way to stop the violence is to accede to some demands, however odious.
Then, after the Ministers reluctantly give in to union demands, the violence can stop as mysteriously as it began, and a grateful public can finally get some sleep.
I could be wrong. It’s possible there is a perfectly organic “split screen” of mostly peaceful union protestors on the right side (called “centrists” in France) and mysterious groups of masked “opportunistic rioters” and “black bloc anarchists” on the far-left side of the screen. (And who are definitely not undercover police.)
? Now you understand why I’ve so far held off covering the French riots. Put simply, they seem fake and gay. Why isn’t the French government cracking down on all this property violence when it could if it wanted to? And why haven’t they figured out who all these coordinated, masked protestors are? Please.
The French government has vowed to aggressively prosecute people who participate in the riots. If there is a UK-style crackdown following all this rioting, then I will have been wrong. But if not, if they just “move on,” then you might consider this whole thing was a giant scam to trick the French public into going along with more transfers of their money to left-wing interest groups.
All of this to say: you don’t need to agree with my theory that the riots are astroturf. Just be properly skeptical of the French protests story.