Greetings and welcome to this 111th Carnival of Fools. It’s been raining clowns here at the Carnival all week long, so much so that the sudden torrent of tomfoolery has threatened to wash itself away before we’ve even had a proper opportunity to grab our mops and start swabbing up the clown puddles.
As for me, I’ve learned to take a Marty Feldmanesque approach to these things: However disgraceful and manifestly discrediting the Trump administration’s recent moves have been, it could be worse! Could be France.
There’s a Riot Goin’ On
Yes, readers, as terrible as things look in America right now, there’s always our ever-more-deeply doomed European counterparts to gaze upon, in abject horror, pity, and smugness. (I’ve stopped writing about the U.K. altogether these days because it feels like abusing a quadriplegic.) On October 2, I noted in these pages that France was burning, amid student rioting.
I know, I know . . . <yawn> . . . what else is new? French students have been tearing apart their country since Philip II Augustus made the mistake of recognizing the University of Paris in 1200, and an entire generation of Americans was raised not only on “Street Fighting Man,” but the deeply internalized impression that — unlike other, more serious countries — your average Frenchman will not fight in a war of self-defense but will riot when their croissants are insufficiently buttery.
But nearly three weeks later, France is still burning. In fact, the “student” rioting is growing ever more fierce and disruptive, as rioters are beginning to turn their attentions away from schools and toward the nation’s civic monuments, historical buildings, and luxury stores. In Paris, barricades were erected in the Place de la République as Palestinian flags flew, storefronts were looted, and monuments vandalized. (Why, it almost felt like a slice of life from Chicago, ca. May 2020.) In Limoges, the historic and beautiful town hall was burned to the ground. The Louvre, France’s national heritage as contained in one museum, is currently closed for the foreseeable future due to the “student social movement.” (The Louvre, in its classically understated French way, apologized to the world’s tourists “for the inconvenience.”)
It is a national disgrace, and nobody is quite sure when or how it will end. France typically experiences student unrest before the start of the school year, but this is qualitatively different in its extent, duration, and escalatory nature. And there is reason to believe that, even while its initial origins may not have been explicitly political, the chaos is now being directed to partisan ends.
Behind all of this stands the figure of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, far-left-wing socialist and leader of the political party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed,” LFI for short). Mélenchon has twice run as a candidate for France’s presidency and will be on the ballot again in 2027. He and his party are actively encouraging the rioting, and they will tell you why, too.
Mélenchon’s political vision is explicitly built on the “creolisation” of “nouvelle France” (his words). Since your average Frenchman, as liberal as he is, will never be as left-wing as a postmodern socialist, Mélenchon actively pushes for the empowerment (and increase) of third-world migrants, through whom he believes his communist beliefs will finally be brought to power: the triumph of the vanguard of the proletariat, riding the Islamic demographic wave. (This dynamic is often referred to as the “red-green alliance.”)
Mélenchon and the LFI have been devoting their support and organizing behind the student rioting as they seek to consolidate their position as the only plausible “leftist” candidate in next year’s presidential race against right-wing bogeywoman Marine Le Pen. For those who suggest that this is sheer electoral folly and that Le Pen will steamroll the candidate of left-wing revolution, Mélenchon knows this too. These events are in fact intended as a warning: The rioting you are seeing now — driven in large part by the disaffected children of North African immigrants — is but a preview of what to expect next year should the nativist Le Pen win the election. Une France ungouvernable.
Which is what Mélenchon wants. The term “revolutionary” sounds strange in any post-1776 American context. But to Europeans, it’s merely another flavor of public politics. To put it in terms that extremely online Americans might understand, Mélenchon is an “accelerationist.” He has been constantly clear that his goal is revolution: He cannot win at the ballot box, so his hope is that once he loses to Le Pen, the mass civil unrest will topple France’s Fifth Republic altogether, clearing the way for a militantly socialist Sixth Republic — presumably led by people like him.
The stakes for France right now are far higher than many realize.
Trump Cancels Hegseth’s Public Execution
A brief note on a much-needed reprieve from barbarism: After first announcing that he supported Pete Hegseth’s impossibly soft-brained idea to publicly stream the execution via firing squad of Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan, Donald Trump has reversed course and announced that the U.S. military will not, in fact, be getting into the business of making government-branded snuff films. Thankfully, sanity has prevailed.
If nothing else, it is proof that Trump can be talked out of a bad decision — so long as it is not his own. But that leaves us with a question about the man whose enthusiastic idea it was to execute a jihadist on the internet: What is Pete Hegseth’s major malfunction? I can understand the need to purge the military of politically correct nonsense; absolutely nobody was demanding the perversion of military law, honor, and tradition.
Nobody except, perhaps, Pete Hegseth. My guess is that this was about his panicked need to appeal to Trump with a splashy “tough guy” headline. Hegseth, currently the only truly fireable face in a war of choice quickly depleting the Trump administration’s political capital and international credibility, is sitting in the hottest of seats. Ol’ Pistol Pete knows very little about defense policy but an awful lot about what the president likes to see on Fox News: His (admittedly innovatory) idea was to get attention by shooting a condemned, blindfolded terrorist in a wheelchair as he unrepentantly screamed “Allahu Akbar!,” which tells you something about how the brain trust surrounding Trump tends to think.
Sure, it may have been a grotesque betrayal of the American spirit and the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as a devastating self-inflicted setback for U.S. foreign policy had it come to pass, but no harm, no foul! That all comes out in the wash, I suppose. And besides, something has to distract voters from the Strait of Hormuz.
Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Trashiness, Depressingly, Doesn’t Even Stand Out
Did you know that Kimberly Guilfoyle was once an ambassador to Greece? I myself must have missed it amid the oncoming rush of appointments like “Matt Gaetz as attorney general” and “Pete Hegseth as secretary of thumos” in December 2024. But the Wall Street Journal did not, and credit to them for reporting so doggedly on Guilfoyle’s blatant corruption that she finally resigned — only when publicly asked to do so, mind you.
I’ve already written my share about gold-digging trash over the past few years at NR, so I have nothing new to offer about this particular human grease fire, at least not here (and not on the record). But on a human level, I can certainly understand that Guilfoyle must be feeling unfairly smothered by the Trump family, and not even for the first time: Why should her ingrate ex-fiancé Don Jr. get his destination wedding (to a different bride) bought and paid for by the Russians, while our hardscrabble queen had to work the streets (and, apparently, sheets) to maintain her standard of living, desperately cadging her position to pay her American Express bills, begging on her knees for bribes from Greek businessmen and low-rent Balkan Slavs alike?
And how dare these administration hypocrites presume to hold it against her? Guilfoyle was only doing the same thing that 85 percent of the people within Trump’s immediate orbit (most especially his family members and in-laws) have been doing gleefully since before he returned to office, only more openly: capitalizing on their proximity to power to gorge themselves with private (and hopefully generational) financial gain. If the men at the top are already cutting side deals for personal profit, where’s her slice of the pie? Why is she being tossed under the bus? Is it just because Trump needs to take the heat off his decision to switch sides in the Russo-Ukrainian war for a cheap bribe? Yes, indeed — that really is just about the long and short of it. Guilfoyle was an obvious and easily jettisoned liability, cut loose at a time when Trump needed to toss some ballast into the ocean.
I really only have one observation to make about Kimberly Guilfoyle, in her well-earned disgrace: Long before she was Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, and before she was a cable news mainstay on Fox News, she was half of the most prestigious Democratic power couple in California: From 2001 to 2006, she was Mrs. Gavin Newsom. What does that say about Gavin Newsom’s judgment? More to the point, and given what she must know about those years, what does that say about Gavin Newsom’s future liabilities?
Until next week.