(By Jarrett Stepman/Daily Signal) – If you merely paid attention to the legacy media in recent weeks, you’d think that the French riots were only a bit of a scuffle between students and police, with perhaps a few “ultra-left” agitators, and that the only negative takeaway from the whole thing is that—horror of horrors—this could help the Right.

Let’s get this out of the way. What’s happening in France has been quite remarkable. These aren’t your usual French union-led protests that seemingly break out every summer in Paris and maybe lead to a car or two being overturned.

These are large-scale violent riots taking place across the country. Historic buildings have been torched. Statues have been defaced. And the country is dealing with the existential problem of mass agitation by leftist groups supercharged by the large numbers of mostly unassimilated Muslims who have little investment in France as a French country.

When you combine cultural disintegration with a stagnant economy and buckling social welfare system, this is what you get. The globalist order peddled and propped up by EU elites is simply going up in flames as its torn apart by its own contradictions.

And that’s why the media have gone into spin mode.

President Donald Trump initially got to the heart of the matter by unabashedly noting how much of this problem was caused by the open borders mentality of French President Emmanuel Macron and the powers that be in Europe.

Oh, but the media insist—much like the French government—that mass immigration has absolutely nothing at all to do with what’s happening.

But that’s obviously nonsense as so many of the videos are of young men of very recent arrival, holding foreign flags. Some outlets, like The New York Times, even acknowledged the immigration factors driving the riots but buried deep below the fold as we say in the news business.

“If you read the paper with a magnifying glass you might occasionally get a hint of the underlying reality,” Ira Stoll wrote in the Washington Free Beacon. “Buried at the bottom of page A12 is a story about ‘a strange new slogan’ that the Times describes as a ‘somewhat mystifying rallying cry.’ The slogan, ‘bismillah c’est les ténèbres,’ is not actually ‘new’—photos of it amid the riots date back more than a week now. The Times describes it as ‘a mash-up of the Islamic blessing ‘In the name of God.’’

Imagine that: an Islamic blessing. It’s only ‘strange’ and ‘mystifying’ to anyone clinging to the belief that these are protests about education reform or ‘populism’ or driven by ‘nebulous groups’ rather than by, as President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, Muslim immigrants.”

Denying the role large-scale immigration without corresponding large-scale assimilation at play here just doesn’t pass the smell test.

And besides, whether these protests lean more into the Red or Green side of the Red-Green alliance means a lot less than the fact that they’ve collectively created a street coalition that’s capable of totally overwhelming authorities and causing uncontrolled chaos.

That much is clear to see, even if again the media have tried to obscure that too.

They’ve been using the playbook they tried to pull off during the Black Lives Matter protests turned riots in the U.S. in 2020. Initially they tried to pawn the French riots off as “mostly peaceful,” narrowly focused, and mainly driven by factors exactly in line with Democrat midterm messaging about “affordability.”

But that’s been even less believable than it having nothing to do with immigration.

Given the scale of what’s happening, given the pictures and videos of burning and destruction that are all over X, and the absurdity of thinking Louis Vuitton and Hermes are being pillaged because class sizes are a little too big, the media is having a hard time spinning this as peaceful set of gatherings with just one or two, violent outliers.

What’s happening in France has breached the narrative containment, it’s that simple.

So now the media spin phase will likely draw to a close as the cope phase takes over.

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald noted on X that the “mainstream media” are “fuming” because, like those dastardly Republicans in America, France’s right-wing party—the largest party in the country, by the way, that’s been craftily kept out of power—is seizing on this very real news story to say, “I told you so,” or whatever the phrase is in French.

The mainstream media are fuming. Marine Le Pen, head of France’s most popular party, National Rally, is exploiting the French riots for her political advantage, the media grouse. Le Pen and her right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, portray the riots as the confirmation of everything they have been warning about for years, especially regarding Third World immigration. This is a ruse, complains the press and its establishment sources, a mere rhetorical trick.

A front-page article in today’s New York Times quotes a political scientist at Paris’s Sciences Po: “The picture of France emerging this morning, in light of all the destruction, plays well into their hands.”

The Wall Street Journal sounds the same note today: “The social instability over the weekend absolutely plays into Le Pen’s campaign that the establishment has delivered chaos,” said Mujtaba Rahman, from the risk analysis firm Eurasia Group.

Even the papers’ headlines echo each other: “France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country” (New York Times); “Marine Le Pen Seizes on French Chaos to Present Herself as Leader in Waiting” (Wall Street Journal).

It is necessary to deconstruct these far-right narratives; thankfully, the press is there to help us. The violence “perfectly aligned with the image the National Rally has long painted of a France divided into two and battling for survival,” a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur told the New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal writes that the “far-right” Le Pen has “cast” France as a nation adrift, “buffeted by waves of immigration and lawlessness that have torn at the country’s social fabric.”

It is mere coincidence that that image of a divided, degraded France constructed by the National Rally and the violence on the streets seem to align. That alignment does not mean that the National Rally was right, just that its demagogy was opportune.

But the waves of hate-filled destruction crashing over France’s once great cities validate Le Pen and Bardella’s diagnosis of France’s demographic catastrophe, not as narrative but as empirical fact. The Wall Street Journal again tries to dismiss Le Pen’s prognostications as a rhetorical maneuver: “Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance…gives her another way to frame the unrest. Le Pen has cast the unrest as the work of far-left radicals allied with youths from France’s banlieues, the poor urban outskirts where much of the country’s minority Muslim population resides.” How else would the Journal “cast” the “unrest?” As the work of lavender harvesters from Provence?

The elite effort at euphemism is by now desperate: “The looting drew attention to a segment of the population—specifically young people from certain neighborhoods, some of whom are from immigrant backgrounds,” pollster Adélaïde Zulfikarpasic told the Journal. “And that hits the themes at the heart of National Rally’s rhetoric.”

A conversation on German public media station ZDF yesterday between the ever-pinched and purse-lipped anchor Marietta Slomka and a French academic in Bonn referred delicately to the “decades-long problem” of poverty, concentration, and “integration” in the Plattenbauten (the concrete slab housing projects) around Paris. The problem is not “integration,” which suggests a failing in the host country, however, it is large-scale Third World immigration, which has turned many of these projects into no-go zones. And now that local anarchy is spreading.

If naming a deliberate attack on Western civilization by those who feel only resentment and envy earns one the title of far-right extremist or racist, so be it. The mayhem in France is not rhetoric, it is reality. And the National Rally’s law enforcement and deportation proposals are precisely what France and the rest of Europe need today.

— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) October 20, 2026

Instead of acknowledging that there’s a problem and tangling with the thorny issue of how to get immigration correct in the Western world, they’ve flipped to moaning about how awful it is that right-wing and right-leaning political actors are using this opportunity to engage in a debate about the issue they’ve suppressed for decades.

Frankly, this is the bed they’ve made for themselves.

Perhaps, had they been more forthcoming from the beginning, they wouldn’t be looking at the possibility of a dramatic political counterrevolution that may eventually sweep the Right into power throughout Europe.

That’s the silver lining in all this.

Now that reality is staring the people of the West in the face, sweeping changes may come quickly. Let’s hope those changes are positive and don’t lead to an implosion or a descent into full socialism.