‘Students’ in France are ‘protesting’ for more ‘school funding,’ the mainstream media explains to us.
“Students” in France are “protesting” for more “school funding,” the mainstream media explain to us. But if you’ve been exposed to footage on social media platforms, you’ll notice that many of the “students” are minority men who are not school-age. You’ll see that the “protests” involve torching historic buildings, throwing stones at cars, smashing windows, burning vehicles, looting designer stores, and ransacking grocery stores (but rather mysteriously, leaving refrigerators with ham untouched). You’ll see that entire streets have been destroyed, except the kebab shop. You’ll wonder, was the school funding being kept in the produce section of a corner shop? Were the extra books being hoarded in a Swarovski store? Were the better teachers locked away in a synagogue, just waiting to be recruited into a public school? Why did the demands for more money from the French government involve attacking an American embassy, a McDonalds?
The media is covering the riots in France only because a) they are gaining too much attention on social media to be ignored, and b) the “journalists” saw the opportunity to warp this into a warning about the “far right.” The New York Times published the headline, “France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country.” Nacionale explains that “Marine Le Pen, a far-right candidate, is using the situation to boost her popularity by placing the issue of fuel prices at the center of her campaign.” (Emphasis mine.) NBC News published the headline, “How France’s far right has capitalized on a weekend of riots, looting and chaos.” Beneath it, in slightly smaller print, appears the sentence “Marine Le Pen has used the unrest to cast herself as the voice of reason, order and strict controls on immigration.” In the words of Semafor, “French far right looks to capitalize on unrest.”
The first point, which I’ll make very briefly, is that “far right” and “alt right” and “extreme right” just refer to a group that is slightly to the right of whatever progressives currently think.
The second point, which is also not worth belaboring, is that the French army would have immediately started rolling through the streets with tanks if the protests of the same nature and intensity been committed by the nebulously defined “right.”
Finally, a third point that is worth explaining. In a sense, the media are reporting the truth: The right, broadly construed, has cited the chaos in France as evidence of the decline that follows from relaxed immigration policies and delicate policing practices to bolster support for right-wing candidates who support reform. The problem for the left, including its propaganda organs, is that the “right” is completely justified in doing so. The press actually wants to say, “Please just ignore the un-ignorable mass demonstrations that validate the policies that the right wants.” The commentariat wants to enforce the following rule: The right cannot, under any circumstances, point to high-profile happenings as proof of their political assessments or legitimizations for their views, especially when it would be accurate and reasonable to do so. Unfortunately for progressives, people eventually decide that they preferred living in the civilized version of their neighborhood, and the fear of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic” or “fascist” loses intensity when a sleeper cell appears before your beautiful oak front door.