It’s Thursday, October 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Frannie Block on the Ohio city that has become the “rehab capital of the world.” Brad Polumbo attends Harvard Medical School’s “fat liberation” conference. Elliot Ackerman on how AI could send us back to the Dark Ages. And much more.
But first: The radical network driving the disorder in France.
In the immediate wake of the violent protests in France over the weekend, the overriding reaction was shock. And understandably so: Shopkeepers saw their livelihoods destroyed overnight; innocent bystanders were threatened by protesters; iconic symbols of the French Republic were toppled and burned with impunity; and one of the great nations of the West seemed, all at once, to teeter on the brink of collapse.
But amid all the destruction, one question has gone largely unanswered: Who really organized these protests?
If you believe it was simply high school students fed up with teacher shortages and poor classrooms, you would be sorely mistaken. Rather, “the protests of October 17—and the ones planned for this coming weekend,” writes French investigative journalist Nora Bussigny, “were meticulously prepared, organized, and justified by a concerted coalition of Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists.”
Nora spent more than a year undercover in France’s anti-Israel movement, and today, she walks us through the messages, posts, and funding streams that reveal the radical network behind the protests—a red-green alliance that’s become increasingly familiar across the West in recent years. “What we are seeing in France is only a symptom of a much larger problem,” she writes. And if we hope to stop its spread, “it must be identified and called out for what it is.”
If you ask Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, the chaos in France is already spreading—and Britain could be next. In today’s episode of Conversations with Coleman, he explains how lax immigration policy in Britain, as in France, has changed the fabric of his country. Watch the episode to understand why Konstantin believes the cultural differences that France and its neighbors have so aggressively celebrated for years could well prove to be Europe’s undoing.
—Jillian Lederman
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