Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The chaos in the streets of France has a familiar ring to Americans who watched several cities burn in the summer of 2020. What started as "mostly peaceful" protests were quickly hijacked by chaos actors who whipped up excitable populations into a looting and pillaging frenzy, resulting in police crackdowns in the best cases but utter destruction in the worst cases.
The metaphor of the powder keg is one that is often invoked here. In the U.S. case, we had suffered months of COVID lockdowns that created pent-up energy on the part of an entire generation that had been shut out of schools, spilling into the streets in the name of protesting racism.
Oddly, a media that had been screaming for people to stay home and stay safe flipped on a dime to urge everyone to get out in the streets for purely political protests.
Something similar seems to have happened in France. Rising unemployment, high cost of living, underfunded and failing schools, loss of opportunity, rising crime, and frustration over waves of new immigrant populations have reached a fever pitch. Peaceful protests turned violent with masked and destructive provocateurs lighting fires and pillaging whole commercial sectors in many cities.
It was six years ago that France experimented with some of the toughest lockdowns in Europe. They kept schools open but restricted gatherings of all sorts. Bars, restaurants, and cafés faced particularly long disruptions: closed from mid-March 2020, reopened gradually in June 2020, t
