2026-10-22
2 小时 38 分钟Well, good evening and welcome.
If you've got Internet access, you may have spent part of the weekend looking
at horrifying violent images from Europe, particularly from France and its capital city, Paris,
where protests turned, as they so often do, into riots and then chaos and stores burning
and people assaulted and mobs of black clad, apparently young people with face masks.
Running through the streets, setting things on fire,
basically just hellish chaos that you wouldn't want in your hometown.
And in the days since, there's been a lot of analysis over what this is and what it means for France
and Europe, and honestly, for the United States and the rest of the West.
And it does mean something, and we'll tell you what we think it means in just a minute.
But before we get to that, before we get to the analysis
and superimposing our worldview on a world event, just to the facts of it, because those are real too.
So the riots you're watching in France were originally organized and maybe even conceived as protests.
And the organizers were not just fringe groups,
but they were all kinds of different groups, including the country's largest labor union, which is hardly fringe.
In France, labor unions are still powerful.
So they are stakeholders.
They may be crazy, but they're not nihilistic.
They don't want to burn it all down because, well, they live off GDP like everybody else.
In the nation of France.