Here’s a fun little detail the cable news people hope you missed while they were busy fact-checking the president’s tone. France is on fire. Actual curfews, actual mass arrests, thousands hauled in over a weekend, a historic town hall burning in Limoges. And it turns out one of the student groups out there cheerleading the chaos, the Muslim Students of France, was labeled a “student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood” by the French parliament’s own investigation back in May 2025. That’s not some blogger in his basement. That’s the French government, on paper, saying it out loud.
Now ask the question the experts never want you to ask: who benefits? Because the same people who spent a decade telling you the Brotherhood was a “moderate” civic organization, the same think-tank crowd, the same media voices that sneered at anybody raising an eyebrow, are the ones now insisting the riots are just about crumbling classrooms and fuel prices. Sure. High schoolers marching for better desks somehow end up with a union, the CGT, a Brotherhood-linked student outfit, and looters all marching under the same banner, and we’re supposed to believe it’s spontaneous. When three different movements with three different agendas converge on the same street at the same time, that’s not a coincidence, that’s coordination. I can’t prove it. But I’ve been watching the swamp long enough to know the difference between weather and a sprinkler system.
And Trump? He told Macron flat out, “Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon, and that wasn’t the deal.” The Guardian calls that “baseless,” which is the paper’s favorite word for anything the president says that happens to match what the French parliament already documented. He told France to close the borders, fast. The White House posted “if you import the third world, you become the third world,” and Vance piled on: “Western liberals imported the third world into France.” The pearl-clutching from our media was instant and loud, and notice what it never addresses. Not the curfews. Not the 1,800 arrests in one weekend. Not the parliamentary report. Just the tone. Always the tone.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Lecornu is imposing 8 p.m. curfews in Paris, Lille, Nice, Marseille, banning public gatherings, detaining people by the hundreds. Interesting, isn’t it, that when a European government finally cracks down, it does it with measures our own experts would call fascism if an American governor tried them. The French establishment let the situation ripen for years, and now that it’s boiled over six months before Macron’s successor gets chosen, they’re shocked, shocked, that the far right’s Jordan Bardella is sitting there saying “told you so.” You hand the National Rally the argument on a silver platter, then act surprised when they take it.
The lesson for us is simple, and it’s the one Trump is carrying into the midterms: borders are not a slogan. France didn’t close theirs, and now Paris has soldiers in the streets and a curfew. We closed ours. The experts said that was cruel. The experts also said the Brotherhood student club was harmless, and the French parliament disagreed.
Funny how the fact-checkers only ever check one side’s facts.