That’s a real photo of an elderly couple in Paris who were robbed and humiliated by rioters in balaclavas over the weekend. I added the print to help you understand how they are a condensed symbol of what’s happening in Europe, as the weak and aging continent cannot muster self-defense against the threats it has imported. The intifada there — by Muslims, African and Middle Eastern migrants and their children, and radical French leftists — cannot be understood apart from the long civil war between Civilization and Anti-Civilization. At this point, it’s hard to predict which side will prevail.
(I’m writing today, on the weekend, because, get this, even though I’ve raised subscription rate twice in past few years, turns out the software never registered it. So you have been paying the rate at which you first subscribed, all along. I wouldn’t have known this if several of you had not kindly written to let me know. I contacted Substack, which effected the raise itself; now I’m getting a wave of cancellations. Fair enough — not everybody wants to pay more for this newsletter. But I’m writing on the weekend to let you know that I really do care a lot about providing good value for your subscription! I will work extra hard to give it to you. Besides, there’s a lot to write about today.)
In Marseille, also hit by severe rioting and looting, 𝕏a journalist reports that the rioters had lists of Jewish shop owners, and hit their businesses, while leaving Muslim shops alone.
𝕏They burned the city hall of Limoges, which contained precious artwork. The city hall survived two world wars, but did not survive mass migration.
They sacked and pillaged in Paris, Lyon, and elsewhere. Here is Joan of Arc flying the Palestinian flag:
Macron went on national TV tonight in France, and gave what reports say was a piss-poor speech. He is powerless. One of the best Twitter accounts you can follow, the lawyer and prosecutor of Islamist terrorists 𝕏Thibault de Montbrial, summed it up thus:
It should be noted that it’s not like every town or every city is suffering widespread looting and rioting. It’s fairly concentrated. Nevertheless, this is still a grave problem — grave enough for the pathetic president of the Republic to go on national TV to talk about it. He was at a Celine Dion concert the other night when the streets of the heart of his country’s capital were controlled by rioters. Shameful and disgusting; he should resign.
I don’t understand why the government doesn’t deploy the army and shoot rioters until they stop. 𝕏Philippe Lemoine, a Frenchman, says it’s not that simple. Excerpt:
We have let things rot for so long that, at this point, relying primarily on force to restore order would require a degree of violence far greater than what people realize and what is politically feasible.
It's possible to contain a riot using only moderate force when the number of police officers is high relative to the number of rioters, but when riots are so widespread and involve so many people because you have allowed this kind of things to happen for so long, that's just not possible and you have to use extreme violence to make up for the lack of manpower.
I know people on the Internet will say that it doesn't matter and that we should just do it, but the reality is that most of the people in charge are not prepared to use that kind of force and neither would most ordinary people if they saw videos of 16-year-old kids having their brains blown out by cops.
But what if it comes to that, though? What if the only thing that will stop the violence is deadly force? Are the French prepared for that? This is what civil war would be, in the sense David Betz has been patiently explaining for two years or more. This is why Betz also warns people that they should not be under any illusions about what would happen if it did turn into a general civil war, à la Lebanon in the 1980s, or Yugoslavia in the 1990s. “Millions will die,” I heard him say to an audience a couple of years ago.
That we are even having to have this conversation is a damning indictment of the ruling class in France, and all across western Europe. Fifty years of feckless governments of the Left and the Right have brought France to this point. France is also on the brink of fiscal catastrophe; older Frenchmen won’t give up their generous pensions and social services, but France can’t afford them anymore, and the young are feeling dispossessed and trapped in a stagnant economy. Last month at a conference in Switzerland, before the riots started this time, a senior French journalist told me that the mood in his country felt “pre-revolutionary.”
This 2023 three-part essay by Ed West, published after the last great spasm of civil violence in France, still seems fresh. It’s about the long civil war between France and its Muslims. West goes back to France’s brutal colonization of Algeria. The French do not have clean hands here. Nevertheless, the survival of France as a nation is at stake today, in 2026. Do the French have what it takes to keep their country? What will it take, anyway? It’s easy to sit across the ocean in America and conclude that the French have to do this thing or that thing, when we don’t have to live with the consequences, moral and otherwise. It seems clear now, after all these years of failed integration, that very many of these migrants will never be integrated. (And then you have the radical French left to worry about too!) So, what then?
I would not be surprised if at some point there were a military coup. Not yet, but with the ruling class (meaning politicians and those in charge of institutions) unable or unwilling to restore order, people can only take so much. The country’s largest newspaper, the right-of-center Figaro, editorialized today:
A judiciary that is lenient toward criminals but unrelenting toward decent citizens. The incomprehensible privilege of these far-left militias, who destroy, set fires, and kill with impunity. An uncontrolled immigration, in which a portion of the immigrants rebels against the country that took them in. (…) A political class—the various strains of socialism that have governed us for fifteen years—that must be accused of frivolity, blindness, if not even a benevolent tolerance.
Emmanuel Macron's admonishments to a police force that, in his view, does not show enough ‘empathy’ toward those who attack it with screws, cobblestones, or fireworks mortars, will remain an indelible stain in memory. (…)
If the far left, criminals, and looters can turn France completely upside down within a few hours, it is above all because a self-intoxicated technocratic monarchy has systematically leveled all the moral, security-related, cultural, and economic safeguards that hold a society together. [Far Left leader] Jean-Luc Mélenchon's useful idiots do not just wear the kaffiyeh, but also the necktie.
Freya India writes about why despite everything, she left America to move home to “broken Britain”. She talks about how, when she moved to Washington a year ago, she experienced a rush of energy and excitement. A lot of her friends back in the UK congratulated her for having gotten out:
But something changed when I came back for my UK book launch in February. My publisher held a party in a bookshop near Notting Hill, and I walked into a room of people from every stage of my life: my flatmate from when I first moved to London at 17; my friend from the cafe I used to waitress in, back when I was complaining about my writing going nowhere; my former neighbor, a vicar I moved in with when I had nowhere to stay while finishing my manuscript; my grandparents, who read every page of terrible stories I wrote before I could even spell. And everyone was asking me the same question about America: Am I settling in?
And I was looking at them and thinking,
Everything I am hoping to find there is already here.Being away from home confirmed what years of writing about my generation and our unhappiness had been telling me, that what we need most is belonging, not more agency and independence. Of course, leaving is right for some, especially those who want to achieve exceptional things and have to move somewhere like America to do it. But most of us don’t want to sacrifice everything for success, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Today, the highest fliers seem to be those who can cut the most ties and care the least about it. I’ve come to see that attitude less as an achievement, and more as a consequence of the world we grew up in.
More:
By almost every measure, coming back to England is a mistake. But what if the things my generation needs most can’t be measured? I want to be where my family is. I don’t want to be free from ties, and I don’t want to be “high agency,” and I don’t want to keep my options open. More than anything, I want to be home.
I have a British friend who used to live in continental Europe. He had a great job, did good, important work. But he moved back to Britain because he saw his homeland was in trouble, and he did not want to stay out of the fight to save it. I admire the hell out of him for it.
You all know about my own sad, failed attempt to move home back in late 2011. It ended up costing me my marriage, and more. Nevertheless, that longing for home — or, Home — is still deep within me, though I have concluded that it will never be satisfied. This morning, leaving church, where I had spent some time praying for France, I thought about how longing for Home (capital H), as in a place where I felt I belonged, has been at the core of who I am for as long as I can remember. Honestly, I think it’s why I get so worked up over Europe’s self-destruction. The only Home I know, in the broadest sense, is what we call “Western civilization,” or, in former days, Christendom. Christendom ceased to exist, for all practical purposes, after the First World War. We are trying to make a Home in the ruins. But it’s something. I feel it slipping away, and I worry, I grieve, I get angry.
Sometimes on Twitter you can see photos comparing a particular scene in a South African city at the end of apartheid, with how it is now. It was nice and orderly before; now, the same spot is a dump. The message is that the black majority, which had undoubtedly been unjustly oppressed by the white minority, had been left something good, something that worked, by the whites. And they pissed it away. I feel that something similar is happening in Europe now (and, in a way, in the US too), but not in a racial sense: the older generations left us something substantial and good to build on, but every generation since the Boomers has let it decay.
I was at a dinner last night. At the table was a 21-year-old man of the Right. He said that people like him, in his generation, don’t call themselves “conservative” anymore, because they don’t see anything left to conserve. Something to think about.
Everybody at the table at dinner last night was Republican, and everyone agreed that the midterms will be a disaster for the GOP. One of the most knowledgeable guests, a lifelong party activist, predicted that the Republicans will lose the Senate too.
Here is an interesting piece from the WSJ titled “Five Charts That Show How Your Wallet Will Shape The Midterms”. Here’s one of the charts:
That’s a screenshot from 𝕏this video in which US Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) tells a Chicago audience that she wants to create the conditions under which young people are afraid to work for the Trump administration because of what it might cost them.
This is approximately what’s happening in Hungary now. The post-Orban government is exacting tremendous costs on anybody who had anything to do with the previous government, though it had been democratically elected. Friends there tell me that they and people they know who worked for any entity connected to the Orban government, no matter how low-level their jobs were, are finding it hard to get work. The new regime, and its supporters in the private sector, are Teaching A Lesson.
You all know how fed up I am with Trump and his foolishness. I watched the CBS Town Hall with VP Vance over the weekend. I thought he did pretty well, but CBS edited out what a friend in the audience told me was the most shocking moment. It came when a veteran whose soldier wife was killed on duty in the Gulf, by an Iranian drone. 𝕏Here’s part of what was aired. I wasn’t going to post this, but I saw at least one other person in the audience has already said it online, so here goes: what my friend in the audience said was that the widower was furious, and kept pushing back hard against the VP, telling him that the administration has not been honest with the American people about this war, and the administration’s failures. The friend said it went on for a while, and it totally changed the atmosphere in the room.
To be clear, I don’t think CBS edited it out for political reasons. The event lasted more than an hour, but they had to edit it down for one hour of TV time. Still, the friend told me that what we saw on TV did not convey the determined anger of that man. Knowing from having read “Regime Change” how Vance feels about the war, and how hard he fought behind the scenes to stop it, this moment must have torn him up.
The Republicans are about to face a bloodbath, and though that’s my political side, they deserve it. That said, I really do believe that we have reached the point where I fear the Democrats in power, precisely because of things like what Sen. Slotkin said, more than I fear the broken GOP staying in power after Trump goes. We thought Woke 1.0 was bad? Just wait.
I hope I’m wrong. But ours is not a healthy country. We haven’t been for some time. This didn’t start with Trump. No less than Tucker Carlson, before he went crazy, said once (during the first Trump term) that a healthy country does not elect someone like Donald Trump. It wasn’t so much a comment on Trump, as it was on what the election of such a disruptive figure says about the underlying civic health of America.
When my book “Weimar America” comes out, you’ll see the gritty details, and understand my alarm. You can pre-order it here on Amazon, but if it matters to you, we are now working on a plan for you to be able to pre-order signed copies exclusively from Eighth Day Books in Wichita. You can’t do it yet, but it’s coming.
So: here we are, midway through Trump’s second term. I don’t know about you, but as a conservative who supported Trump in 2024, I don’t expect anything good from the Republicans, at least for the next two years, and some bad things. I expect nothing but bad things from the Democrats. The 21-year-old man at the table last night said that his generation has lost faith in American institutions. I find it hard to blame him.
Also at the table was a friend who had been in the studio audience at the JD Vance town hall, taped last week and aired last night (a group of us had dinner to watch it). I wouldn’t have said this publicly, except others in the audience have already put it on Twi…
