October 12, 2026

IS PARIS BURNING? France’s Riots Stem from a Deep Rot.

Rioters carry the flags not of France, but of other nations and terror groups from the Arab world. In Marseille, they were filmed riding motorcycles through the city center, carrying Algerian and Palestinian flags.

For France, it’s been a long way down. Riots and street violence are not new to the French nation. The country’s infamous revolution in 1789 was born amid them. The modern conception of political divisions—right vs. left, secular vs. religious—also traces back to France.

What is unfolding in France is about the continued existence of the French nation itself. It is, to use a French term, existential. It began, fittingly enough, with World War I, the conflict that birthed the modern Middle East and laid the roots for the spread of communism and fascism, and other great ills.

France lost more men than any other nation. An astonishing 1.3 million—nearly 20 percent of all French men aged 18-27—fell in battle. This “deeply scarred its psyche and affected its economy for a generation,” the late historian Alistair Horne observed.

To cover the shortfall, France imported labor from its colonies. The country seemed lost, and poisonous ideologies and divisions crept in. This led to the collapse of the Third Republic and the imposition of Nazi and collaborator rule in 1940.

The Nazi-allied Vichy government that took over was an active collaborator, fighting the Allied Powers and sending thousands of Jews to their death. After the war, the historian Paul Johnson observed that France was “driven by necessity to a fundamental reappraisal.”

Perhaps that “fundamental reappraisal” took things un tout petit peu trop loin: Where Wokism Is a Oui Bit Different.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

NO MEANS NO, BUT SO DOES YES.

“Feminists understandably balk at the idea that women ought to be at all times under the supervision and control of the men around them. Yet they now claim that ‘no’ is so difficult and so beyond women’s ability that we need to reinvent the old patriarchal structure, this time made more insane by the fact that it’s no longer a woman’s father or husband — who at least presumably love her and have her best interests at heart — who is responsible for controlling or curtailing her sexual escapades, but random fraternity brothers instead.”

Posted at 7:32 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY: Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. For those of a different bent, I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:

At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .

Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”

Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.

Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:

This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit. (Reposted from 2005, but it still fits.) [Doesn’t this leave you vulnerable to charges of recycling too? –ed. I prefer to think of it as “They came at us in the same old way, and, you know, we beat them in the same old way.”]

I post this every year, as it’s evergreen. The original link to Bennett’s column seems to have succumbed to link-rot, but I believe this is it.

Meanwhile, SpaceX and the other new space companies are doing their best to step into the role of Columbus in regenerating our culture. I hope it works. We need it.

Related:

Columbus did not interrupt a prelapsarian paradise.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

ANARCHO-TYRANNY, UK-STYLE:

Labour has to call an election no later than July, 2029 — and Labour looks to be doing everything it can to tip the scales before then.

Posted at 7:16 am by Stephen Green

AGES OF BARACK:

The first book under the Obama name, Dreams from My Father, was “kept secret during the 2008 presidential campaign,” Voegeli contends, because his fans “were completely invested in the idea of a post-racial Obama.” Maybe so, but there was more to it, as David Garrow showed in his massive tome Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, from 2017. The book’s “most discussed” revelation, Voegeli explains, was one from former girlfriend Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who said that she believed Obama had not learned much from history. In fact, however, the most significant revelation from that book was something else:

Dreams From My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

Garrow identified the black poet “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis, whose “Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” Profiled by Paul Kengor in The Communist, this Stalinist was also a prolific pornographer. Obama, who was known as a young man as Barry Soetoro, is the stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student whom his white mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry could have adopted an African name in the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), but he took a different route.

In the Dreams novel, Barack Obama, Sr., “bequeaths his name” to Barry, and by the end of the book the Kenyan student whom his mother once dated is a nameless “Old Man,” a convenient “prop” in this narrative. Trouble is, Obama Sr.’s writings from 1958 to 1964, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York,  mention nothing about an American wife and son. Jump ahead to Garrow’s interview in August 2023 “The Obama Factor” published in Tablet magazine.

“He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him,” Garrow told Tablet editor David Samuels. Obama lawyer Bob Bauer, “was also coaching me,” and warned Garrow “whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.” Upon learning all  this Samuels, a longtime Obama fan, took it to another level.

“There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now,” Samuels told Garrow (emphasis added). “The easy explanation, of course, is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t.”

Meanwhile, back at the flak tower: The Obama Death Star is out of hope.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

ON SUNDAYS I DO A PROMO POST FOR (MOSTLY) INDIE AUTHORS:  Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

Read people who don’t hate you! Also, for readers of according to Hoyt, if it’s late tomorrow morning, it’s because there’s some kind of DDS attack going on. You can see the front of the blog but I can’t do anything in the back panel. It just spins on uselessly. Don’t know if me or WordPress.

Posted at 12:43 am by Sarah Hoyt