France’s rioters have inadvertently performed one public service: they have illuminated the darkness Western institutions have spent decades refusing to confront.
Historic buildings torched. Businesses looted and ransacked. Police viciously attacked and assaulted. Nearly 2,400 arrests and entire cities resembling a war zone.
These are not demonstrations. They are violent, destructive riots. The perpetrators are not enlightened revolutionaries or misunderstood idealists. They are criminals exhibiting a contempt for the laws and institutions upon which civilised society depends.
Yet pockets of the legacy media retreat into euphemisms about ‘largely peaceful demonstrations’. After years of near-obsessive coverage of January 6, the reluctance to describe nationwide arson and chaos with comparable moral clarity exposes a spectacular ideological double standard.
Violence does not become virtuous because its perpetrators claim so-called progressive intentions. Indeed, there is nothing progressive about their conduct. It is rabid, regressive and profoundly illiberal – an assault on the very civilisational principles that made Western progress possible.
To be clear, France’s institutional failures are damning. Macron’s popularity has collapsed to 15 per cent in what has been a trainwreck tenure, public expenditure consumes 57.2 per cent of GDP and national debt exceeds 115 per cent.
France has mistaken the capacity to spend for the ability to govern. You cannot borrow artificial prosperity indefinitely, nor subsidise social cohesion into existence. This all might sound eerily familiar…
Decades of poorly managed immigration and patently inadequate integration have compounded the problem. Mass migration without meaningful thought over selection, economic capacity and civic integration is a world away from enlightened policy. It is a reckless, long-shot gamble with national cohesion at great risk to culture, principles, values and national identity.
Last year, I spent two weeks in Paris’s Barbès district, home to a substantial North African community. From my hotel window, I watched large groups openly dealing drugs outside the Métro station, shouting at and intimidating passers-by throughout the day. After dark, the hotel locked its doors, with security required to vigilantly usher guests inside. This was not the Paris of postcards nor the glamorous depiction of France you see on Netflix’ Emily in Paris, but instead a disturbing portrait of what happens when poor policy is enacted and potential issues gradually become everyday problems.
But the deeper ideological menace on clear display in Europe, lies in the absurd convergence between the radical left and Islamism.
The mainstreamed, enabled, entitled leftist radicals set profess devotion to a logic-lacking form of feminism as well as unrestricted individual liberty and sexual freedom while finding common political cause and staunch alliance with a religion whose doctrines repudiate those very principles.
The intellectual bankruptcy is breathtaking.
A French parliamentary inquiry has even documented the intimate political proximity between certain left-wing representatives and supporters of some branches of Islamist ideology.
Those who excuse and defend Hamas, fuel the flames of antisemitism, romanticise or sympathise Iran’s appalling theocracy, or treat Western liberal democracy as uniquely contemptible have surrendered not merely their judgement, but their moral credibility.
And this corrosive ideology is sadly no longer confined to the political fringes.
In America, the ascendancy of the likes of Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and El-Sayed illustrates the growing influence of the Democrat Party’s radical activist wing. Moderate liberals are becoming more of an oxymoron by the day but those still in that camp face a defining choice: defend pluralism, capitalism, and constitutional restraint, or surrender their principles to an increasingly uncompromising, toxic political culture.
The great perversity of modern radicalism on the left is that intolerance masquerades as virtue, ideological conformity as enlightenment and moral absolutism as intellectual sophistication.
Disagreement becomes bigotry. Scepticism becomes complicity. A demand for evidence becomes hostility.
It is an extraordinarily convenient intellectual arrangement: declare your opponents morally illegitimate, brandish them with all sorts of grossly unsubstantiated labels, dispense with the burden of persuasion, and congratulate yourself on your superior compassion.
Our universities and legacy media have helped confer respectability upon this intellectual decay. There is a major west-wide problem with significant left-wing ideological imbalances in academia, with intellectual conformity and near-censorship becoming serious subsequent concerns.
Universities should teach students how to think, not what they are permitted to think.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk demonstrated the chilling consequences of political hatred. A 2025 YouGov survey found 26 per cent of left-wing people under 45 believed political violence could sometimes be justified, compared with just 7 per cent of conservatives their age – almost four times the rate. Separate PRRI polling subsequently found Democrat support for potential political violence had risen from 12 to 17 per cent in just three months. A deeply disturbing trajectory.
And Australia would be spectacularly naive to imagine itself immune.
Consider August’s pathetic spectacle of Australian schoolchildren, many seemingly very indoctrinated, abandoning classrooms en masse to protest Pauline Hanson. Amidst the petulant chanting, these events exposed how early radical-left indoctrination can take hold, flourishing within education systems like ours that too often rewards and strongly recommends deeply flawed ideological conformity over independent thought.
The scary part is that we face familiar pressures to France and much of struggling Europe: economic self-sabotage and deep cost-of-living frustration, overstretched infrastructure, major challenges with substantial immigration, and lack of integration and imported ideological conflicts. ASIO warns politically motivated violence will remain an elevated threat through 2030.
The threat could not be clearer and the response must be unequivocal: responsible, selective immigration, serious civic integration, intellectual pluralism, unapologetic economic ambition underpinned by a return to stronger capitalist principles and uncompromising enforcement of the law against political violence.
The right to dissent is fundamental. The right to destroy does not exist.
The West’s greatest vulnerability is not merely economic decline or failed immigration policy. It is the erosion of its confidence in the principles that made Western civilisation prosperous, free and worth defending.
Civilisations seldom collapse because their enemies are strong. They become vulnerable when their institutions lose the courage to defend what makes them civilised. The threat from within has revealed itself, and it is a terrifying prospect that must be confronted decisively, held unequivocally accountable, and defeated through democratic resolve, the rule of law, and the restoration of common sense and the Western values that made our civilisation prosper.
France’s flames have illuminated what the West has spent years refusing to see. Australia must not make the fatal mistake of looking away.
