I haven't watched it yet. Ben Shapiro on the France and Italy riots that blew up over the weekend after a month of school protests: the crowds aren't there for better schools or lower prices. He says they are there to break the cities.
Watch Shapiro's recent podcast here: VIDEO
I put this on because the title was sitting there. The school protests that fed the weekend’s riots started about a month ago—teachers striking and students blockading a lycée in Créteil over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and run-down buildings. It spread, with repeated marches and closures through early October. The large-scale violence (Limoges town hall torched, shops looted, thousands arrested) broke out Saturday when those actions joined a planned cost-of-living day with unions and former Yellow Vests.
The same weekend the violence crossed into Italy. Cost-of-living marches in northern cities—Milan, Turin, Bologna, Bergamo—drew thousands and then frayed at the edges. In Milan the trouble centered on Piazza Duomo and the Galleria: masked groups threw stones and fireworks at police, looted shops, set bins alight, and forced officers back with tear gas and water cannons before a second night of the same. Hundreds were detained across the two days, most of them young, many of them minors. Meloni said demonstrating is a right and setting cities ablaze is not; she called an emergency meeting for Monday and told the opposition any hesitation in condemning it would look like justification. The Italian numbers were smaller than France’s, but the pictures were of the same kind of night.
Ben Shapiro is talking about the riots that have been running through French and Italian cities—Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Limoges, Milan, Turin. Historic buildings torched, stores looted, cars burned, police and firefighters attacked, Palestinian flags and keffiyehs everywhere. The official framing is students and unions out for better schools, more classrooms, and relief from the cost of living. Shapiro says look at the composition of the crowds, who is cheering them, and the numbers on who has arrived in those countries over the last forty years. He treats it as a red-green alliance—communists, radical Muslims, and third-worldists—united in hatred of the West and trying to wreck the place rather than negotiate a policy. He points to the already-high welfare spending (France at 31 percent of GDP), the demographic shifts, the preference among younger French Muslims for Sharia over French law, Mélenchon’s encouragement, and the old Sartre introduction to Fanon about killing a European. The American warning is that importing the third world without assimilation turns the place into the third world. I haven’t sat through the whole episode, so this is just the shape of the argument.
When Shapiro says the riots are meant to break the cities, he is not claiming the official organizers handed out maps for arson. He is saying the violence is not a side effect of a negotiation over teacher shortages or fuel prices. The targets—town halls that survived wars, tourist offices, stores, police—are the ordinary furniture of the place, and the people doing the breaking are not, in his reading, the parents who want more classrooms. He treats the Palestinian flags, the keffiyehs, the communist cheers, and the demographic numbers as evidence that a portion of the crowd has already decided the existing city is the enemy, not a project to improve. The “break the cities” line is his way of saying the destruction is the point for that portion, not a tactic to win a budget fight.
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