Over the past four weeks, student demonstrations over substandard conditions at a single high school in the northern suburbs of Paris have ignited a mass protest movement that looks to be the largest student uprising in France since the legendary events of May 1968, which brought President Charles de Gaulle’s government to the brink of collapse.
There is every indication that these protests began spontaneously, as an expression of outrage from a generation of young people who feel marginalized, condescended to and ground down by endless rounds of budget-cutting. But as is nearly always the case with large-scale movements of mass discontent, their scale and scope has grown rapidly. What the protests are really “about,” and who wins or loses from the viral videos of pitched battles in the streets, has become increasingly complicated.
Left-wing political parties, labor unions, pro-Palestinian activists, militant antifascists and climate justice advocates are now involved. To some extent, the student uprising has become attached to the presidential campaign of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a 75-year-old radical sometimes described as the French equivalent to Bernie Sanders The anger behind these protests is no longer merely directed at the crumbling infrastructure and chronic staffing shortages of French education but at the larger systemic failures that caused them. As one commentator from a neoconservative think tank told Fox News this past week, French students are now seeking “a much broader confrontation with the government” of outgoing President Emmanuel Macron. She isn’t wrong.
To most Americans, currently navigating the painful cost of living and our own overheated election campaign, this is just background noise. That’s fair enough: Protests in Paris are pretty much an annual event. But the French student revolt has definitely gotten Donald Trump’s attention, and also that of his acolytes in right-wing media. Fox News has covered the protests with obsessive-compulsive fervor, and on Oct. 3 weekend host Tomi Lahren described the student uprising as a “cautionary tale” for Americans — which it certainly is, but not for the reasons she thinks.
At the vast majority of French schools, these protests have been rowdy but nonviolent. Mass rallies in support of the students across the nation on Oct. 6 were almost entirely peaceful, with an estimated 400,000 people taking to the streets in Paris and several other cities. But with almost 900 secondary schools and a handful of universities closed or blockaded at various times in recent weeks, French authorities and police — no doubt mindful of the historical parallels — have increasingly sought to break up the protests with baton charges, tear gas and water cannons. The resulting clashes, or “scuffles,” to use the journalistic term of art, have fueled dozens of viral videos and driven alarming headlines around the world.
With the midterm elections only weeks away and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in apparent psychiatric or spiritual meltdown, mainstream U.S. media has largely viewed the French student movement with bemusement: Street protests in Paris, you say? C’est incroyable! The New York Times, NPR and PBS have run obligatory feature stories from foreign correspondents. From the left, The Nation published a thoughtful if studious report on the increasingly brutal police crackdown.
On the simplest level, disturbing images from the land of baguettes may distract Fox viewers from the dire fate awaiting the Republicans in November. More ambitiously, they can be interpreted as an object lesson in the perceived dangers of diversity, socialism and wokeness.
Not so American right-wing media, especially Fox News, which has embraced the French uprising as a gift from heaven, both for obvious and less-than-obvious reasons. On the simplest level, disturbing images from the picturesque land of baguettes may distract Fox viewers from the dire fate awaiting the Republicans in November. More ambitiously, they can be interpreted as an object lesson in the perceived dangers of diversity, socialism and wokeness. If that seems like a stretch in describing a movement that, on its surface, is not about any of those things, the deeper irony here is that the Fox-flavored analysis is somewhat accurate, in its own uniquely upside-down fashion.
Fox has featured regular daily reports from Paris and endlessly replayed clips of every spicy encounter between cops and student demonstrators, preferably showing the latter with keffiyehs, facemasks, Palestinian flags and Young Communist banners. (As my Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte said in a Slack message, this was an irresistible combo of two things Fox viewers hate: young people and French people.)
Lahren’s big moment came as co-host of Fox’s “Big Weekend Show,” over an unintentionally hilarious chyron reading “BURN IT ALL DOWN.” In a bewildering monologue beginning with her pronouncement that the French unrest offered a “cautionary tale,” she tried to fit the student protests into the paranoid cinematic universe Fox News has built around its core viewership. Rather than trying to decode this dream logic or word-association football, I’ll simply quote her directly:
“This is something we’re learning from Europe, and we would be wise to learn from Europe. They decided they wanted to have open borders. They decided they wanted diversity as their strength, and of course, Joe Biden tried that for four years. We’re undoing that currently. …
“When you let so many people come into your country, leech off of your system, then the people who are from there are going to at some point get upset. … They end up lighting things on fire, which I think is stupid no matter what you’re angry with, but it’s no doubt these countries that say we’re going to be a global home for everybody, they end up paying the price, and it’s usually the native Frenchmen, or whatever they are, that end up paying the highest price.”
That would seem to pose more questions than it answers. Who is she describing as “the people who are from there”? Who’s she calling “the native Frenchmen,” since she apparently does not mean the young French people who are blockading their schools and challenging cops in the streets? (Almost none of the protesters detained or arrested in France have been non-citizens.) Oh, never mind; those are dumb questions, since we know exactly what she means.
A few days later, through the transitive property of self-reinforcing MAGA-brain idiocy, Donald Trump boiled down all that free-floating Fox paranoia into a Truth Social pronouncement that was absurd even by his standards: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”
To be clear, the French protests have almost nothing to do with immigration and literally nothing to do with Islam. Many (but not all) of the student protesters seen on TV in the early days were Black or from immigrant backgrounds, and many (but not all) of the schools involved have been in less privileged neighborhoods. That has changed considerably as the student movement has expanded to predominantly white schools in more middle-class areas, including the elite Paris university Sciences Po.
Who is Tomi Lahren describing as “the people who are from there”? Who is she talking about as “the native Frenchmen,” since she does not mean the young French people who are blockading their schools and challenging cops in the streets? Oh, never mind; those are dumb questions, since we know exactly what she means.
None of that matters to Trump’s followers, of course, who followed his Truth Social edict unleashed with an onslaught of half-baked racist commentary. Former Trump Justice Department flunky Theo Wold described the protesters as “not of French culture … France is learning that importing an underclass of foreigners causes broader societal damage.” Um, sure, buddy, because “French culture” has no tradition of street protest. Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation claimed that “the far-left and the Islamists [are] combining forces to undermine France itself.”
This campaign to make a major political event in another country conform to Donald Trump’s fantasy world has culminated, at least for now, in a lengthy “Fox News Digital Investigation” compiled by Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter (and Salon contributor). Nomani is a strange case. She originally came to prominence after 9/11 as a liberal Muslim reformer and has gradually traveled down the ideological slippery-slide, first as a regular Islam-bashing guest on Bill Maher’s show and finally as a full-time inhabitant of the MAGAsphere. Her most recent book is called “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Undermining America’s Freedom.” (In her scheme, “green” refers to Islam, not environmentalism.)
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I didn’t know Nomani when she wrote for Salon, but her work at the time was eloquent and widely respected. Her “investigation” of the French student movement, however, is a bizarrely earnest document, something like an ex post facto catalogue of the obvious. It leads with alarming language about “a transnational network of far-left communist and socialist organizations” — which mostly turns out to mean Hasan Piker and a handful of left-liberal funders and activist groups — and tries to supply evidence for Trump’s allegations of an Islamist conspiracy, without much success.
The French protesters, Nomani writes, are pushing toward a “broader political and ideological confrontation” with the centrist establishment, and their movement has “attracted organizations advancing broader political agendas involving capitalism, ‘austerity,’ policing, military spending and Israel.” This, evidently, is the Fox News take on what’s happening in France, minus the racist paranoia: Young people are angry about a broad range of issues, and their anger poses a real threat to the established order, not just over there but here as well. No lies detected.
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from Andrew O’Hehir