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Right-wing street fighters take on French rioters

Rassemblement Étudiant de Droite members clash with police. Credit: Facebook

July 5, 2023 - 11:15am

While France’s week of violent riots at first seems a retread of the banlieue uprising of 2005, in one respect it has displayed a new development, under-discussed in Anglophone media, which was absent a generation ago. Namely, the first evidence of a Right-wing counter-mobilisation against the rioters. In provincial cities like Lyon, Angers and Chambéry, groups of masked and hooded youths have appeared, dressed in black and armed with batons and pepper spray, to confront the rioters and the Left-wing demonstrators supporting them.

In Angers earlier this week, violent daytime clashes took place between Right-wing youths and Left-wing demonstrators in the city centre. Over successive evenings, there were further melees outside the Angers hub of the local Rassemblement Étudiant de Droite (RED), or Right-wing student rally, in opposition to rioters from the suburbs. RED is a rebranding of the revolutionary nationalist Alvarium centre — banned by France’s Interior Ministry in 2021 — and one of a network of Identitarian spaces operating in France, inspired by the “autonomous nationalist” examples of Italy’s postmodern-fascist CasaPound organisation and Ukraine’s Azov movement. 

In a press release published by CasaPound’s student wing, Blocco Studentesco, RED activists declared that “those who are indignant at patriots defending their premises against far-Left and suburban scum […] are manipulators and traitors to the nation. Fortunately, we can count on massive support from all over France but also from abroad. Messages of support are pouring in from everywhere.” Similarly, the far-Right French students’ union GUD expressed support for RED, declaring, “Faced with state repression and the barbarians of the cities: popular self-defence!” A judicial case has now been opened against RED following the violence.

In Lyon, for three nights around 50 masked militants, some armed with batons, paraded through the city centre, chanting “French people wake up: you are at home” and “Blue, White, Red: France for the French.” An initial gathering outside the city’s town hall was dispersed with police tear gas, with the local prefect Fabienne Buccio declaring that “an ultra-Right group attempted a communication operation this evening in front of the Town Hall of #Lyon. Thanks to the intervention of [the national police], their action was immediately prevented.” As the Left-wing magazine Marianne notes, “There followed an avalanche of reactions under his message — ‘unheard of at this level’ assures the prefecture — to reproach him for acting more effectively against ‘citizens exasperated by the riots’ than against the rioters.”

In Chambéry, meanwhile, there were skirmishes between Identitarian militants and rioters following a series of Right-wing marches, escorted by police, through the city centre. Telegram footage shows a petrol bomb being thrown against the Right-wingers, as well as an Identitarian lying wounded in the street after being hit in the head with a hammer. While France, unlike Britain, has long possessed a number of militant youth movements on the Right, the street mobilisation and increased visibility shown during the current riots is a new development. Already, new Telegram groups have sprung up to connect prospective new militants to local recruiters: in chats, activists approvingly refer to the ongoing disorder as a “red pill” for previously apolitical youth. 

Yet the French radical Right is also divided over the advisability of direct action in the current circumstances. The influential Identitarian video blogger Papacito released a message encouraging his followers to resist the urge to take part, insisting that they would merely be “defending the regime”, and insisting that “now you must leave the hordes of Huns to ransack the residences of those who voted for Emmanuel Macron”. What’s more, he suggested, “we’ve got to let the Republic go to the end of its logic.” 

With the violence now apparently dying down, the 2023 riots will mark another grim milestone in France’s growing angst over its future. Though barely reported beyond France, the Right-wing counter-mobilisation throws a new element into the country’s combustible mix.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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Steve White
Steve White
9 months ago

Let’s assume that everything Aris said here is true. How did it all get to this point? At least psychologically, it is said that whatever is oppressed, typically rises later with an extreme vengeance. So, in other words, if you want right wing extremism to rise, you suppress and demonize anyone right of center, and elevate all things left of center. I would argue that’s what has happened. Certain things artificially promoted (nudged), and controlled. Demonizing anyone who was against immigration, particularly as they felt squeezed more and more by a system that seemed to have compassion on anyone and everyone except for them, the middle class white conservative male, raised to be faith, and family centric Westerner. In fact, to even be a man in the West now is to be called “toxic”. Anyone with anything close to a traditional formerly mainstream value in regard to sex is now a bigot, promoting hate speech.
When LGBT and trans issues get propped up, elevated, even crammed down people’s throats, and anyone who says anything at all is branded as a social pariah, you’ve got to know that is going to make for some future extreme actions. In fact, I think those doing it know it, which is why they’re doing it. They know it’s going to happen, and are preparing for it. They seem to assume that narrative control, pervasive digital surveillance, domestic terrorism laws, and owning all the guns will win.
As Mr. Democracy, Joe Biden told gun owning Americans that their rifles wouldn’t do much good because he controlled the F-16 fighter jets over them. The threat there to about half the population of America is, “we can do what we want, call you what we want, and take you out when we want.” You don’t want to be called an insurrectionist do you?
So, in France we have the 45,000 strong police force as the last line of defense against these young men, but they themselves wrote a letter saying if they didn’t get some sort of legal protections for themselves in all of this that at some point they themselves would become part of the resistance (part of the radical right?).
Macron’s answer is to call on online media platforms to delete the videos of the riots. More censorship and narrative control from the top… Is that working? In 2021 25 retired French generals warned Macron in an open letter that the country was headed into civil war. What did he do then? Threatened to punish any active soldiers who signed it. How is that working?
France is facing many different factions saying “enough”, and it’s spreading to the rest of Europe. It appears we are in the late stages of a lot of things in the West. The breaking point is past, and change seems to be coming. For now the riots have reached cities in bordering Belgium and Switzerland. One wonders if the EU can survive what appears to be brewing. On thing is sure, this is not your typical French summer protest.

Last edited 9 months ago by Steve White
Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Very well said. I would add one element to your diagnosis. Not only has the hard left establishment demonised all expression of conservative feeling, but it has set the pattern of extreme chauvinism in the attitudes it fosters among minorities. They are expected to act as a collective; they are expected to assert group identity and group rights; they are more or less obliged to settle all blame for any misfortune on others. Well, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; and unsurprisingly indigenous Europeans are at last playing the identity game, too. Given the scale of the threat we now face – defamed, discriminated against, attacked and not taken remotely seriously in our suffering – Lee Rigby, anyone? – perhaps that’s the only game left in town.

Tracy Cook
Tracy Cook
9 months ago
Reply to  Simon Denis

Many minorities, ethnic or sexual, do not want to see themselves as a collective, assert a group identity or blame others for their misfortunes. Many do not see themselves in the victim narrative forced upon them by the self-righteous authoritarian left-wing cult now dominating the European political landscape. While I understand your frustration, turning the tide of this madness will require a collective effort that embraces traditional liberal values.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  Tracy Cook

Well said, but I must offer a small caveat. Liberalism, I am now persuaded, is for all its virtues a quasi-parasitic doctrine, meaning that it cannot form a basis for life. It can only be an adjustment, a reform, an adaptation of something else. That something else is either a community of belief or a community of origin. Of the two, the latter is more easily “liberalised” precisely because in not depending on a large body of public doctrine it can allow for greater diversity of thought. The origin-basis of western societies is (or was) ethno-culturally European and it is this foundation which is being deliberately and malignantly corroded by the Marxist establishment.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  Tracy Cook

Well said, but I must offer a small caveat. Liberalism, I am now persuaded, is for all its virtues a quasi-parasitic doctrine, meaning that it cannot form a basis for life. It can only be an adjustment, a reform, an adaptation of something else. That something else is either a community of belief or a community of origin. Of the two, the latter is more easily “liberalised” precisely because in not depending on a large body of public doctrine it can allow for greater diversity of thought. The origin-basis of western societies is (or was) ethno-culturally European and it is this foundation which is being deliberately and malignantly corroded by the Marxist establishment.

Tracy Cook
Tracy Cook
9 months ago
Reply to  Simon Denis

Many minorities, ethnic or sexual, do not want to see themselves as a collective, assert a group identity or blame others for their misfortunes. Many do not see themselves in the victim narrative forced upon them by the self-righteous authoritarian left-wing cult now dominating the European political landscape. While I understand your frustration, turning the tide of this madness will require a collective effort that embraces traditional liberal values.

Paul Curtin
Paul Curtin
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Yes to all of the above. Change is afoot and it may become very messy.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
9 months ago
Reply to  Paul Curtin

Unfortunately, the quote from above,In fact, I think those doing it know it, which is why they’re doing it.” says it all. Leftist governments know full well that the only way they can implement martial law is during periods of revolution. So revolution they will create.
How else can the utter insanity of what amounts to throwing petrol onto a burning heap of books be explained?

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
9 months ago
Reply to  Paul Curtin

Unfortunately, the quote from above,In fact, I think those doing it know it, which is why they’re doing it.” says it all. Leftist governments know full well that the only way they can implement martial law is during periods of revolution. So revolution they will create.
How else can the utter insanity of what amounts to throwing petrol onto a burning heap of books be explained?

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Excellent Steve – I much prefer your analysis of cause and effect to Aris’s: Aris uses the words “far”, “extreme” etc to describe citizens who are tired of the burning of city halls and destruction of monuments (eg, the desecration of the memorials to Jews delivered to Nazis by Frenchmen).

Why aren’t the “identitarian” rioters referred to as fascists and extreme right wing? – they Riot because a man with a long police record and driving a car with likely fake Polish license plates tried to flee from the police and was shot.

Last edited 9 months ago by Richard Pearse
Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Sure, back in the US, let’s all start a bloody revolution against our Patriotic Nation
because we think taxes are too high & we don’t like the government,
maybe storm the Capitol, our own house; just like the British War Veteran
George Washington did to his Mother Country.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Very well said. I would add one element to your diagnosis. Not only has the hard left establishment demonised all expression of conservative feeling, but it has set the pattern of extreme chauvinism in the attitudes it fosters among minorities. They are expected to act as a collective; they are expected to assert group identity and group rights; they are more or less obliged to settle all blame for any misfortune on others. Well, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; and unsurprisingly indigenous Europeans are at last playing the identity game, too. Given the scale of the threat we now face – defamed, discriminated against, attacked and not taken remotely seriously in our suffering – Lee Rigby, anyone? – perhaps that’s the only game left in town.

Paul Curtin
Paul Curtin
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Yes to all of the above. Change is afoot and it may become very messy.

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Excellent Steve – I much prefer your analysis of cause and effect to Aris’s: Aris uses the words “far”, “extreme” etc to describe citizens who are tired of the burning of city halls and destruction of monuments (eg, the desecration of the memorials to Jews delivered to Nazis by Frenchmen).

Why aren’t the “identitarian” rioters referred to as fascists and extreme right wing? – they Riot because a man with a long police record and driving a car with likely fake Polish license plates tried to flee from the police and was shot.

Last edited 9 months ago by Richard Pearse
Mark M Breza
Mark M Breza
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Sure, back in the US, let’s all start a bloody revolution against our Patriotic Nation
because we think taxes are too high & we don’t like the government,
maybe storm the Capitol, our own house; just like the British War Veteran
George Washington did to his Mother Country.

Steve White
Steve White
9 months ago

Let’s assume that everything Aris said here is true. How did it all get to this point? At least psychologically, it is said that whatever is oppressed, typically rises later with an extreme vengeance. So, in other words, if you want right wing extremism to rise, you suppress and demonize anyone right of center, and elevate all things left of center. I would argue that’s what has happened. Certain things artificially promoted (nudged), and controlled. Demonizing anyone who was against immigration, particularly as they felt squeezed more and more by a system that seemed to have compassion on anyone and everyone except for them, the middle class white conservative male, raised to be faith, and family centric Westerner. In fact, to even be a man in the West now is to be called “toxic”. Anyone with anything close to a traditional formerly mainstream value in regard to sex is now a bigot, promoting hate speech.
When LGBT and trans issues get propped up, elevated, even crammed down people’s throats, and anyone who says anything at all is branded as a social pariah, you’ve got to know that is going to make for some future extreme actions. In fact, I think those doing it know it, which is why they’re doing it. They know it’s going to happen, and are preparing for it. They seem to assume that narrative control, pervasive digital surveillance, domestic terrorism laws, and owning all the guns will win.
As Mr. Democracy, Joe Biden told gun owning Americans that their rifles wouldn’t do much good because he controlled the F-16 fighter jets over them. The threat there to about half the population of America is, “we can do what we want, call you what we want, and take you out when we want.” You don’t want to be called an insurrectionist do you?
So, in France we have the 45,000 strong police force as the last line of defense against these young men, but they themselves wrote a letter saying if they didn’t get some sort of legal protections for themselves in all of this that at some point they themselves would become part of the resistance (part of the radical right?).
Macron’s answer is to call on online media platforms to delete the videos of the riots. More censorship and narrative control from the top… Is that working? In 2021 25 retired French generals warned Macron in an open letter that the country was headed into civil war. What did he do then? Threatened to punish any active soldiers who signed it. How is that working?
France is facing many different factions saying “enough”, and it’s spreading to the rest of Europe. It appears we are in the late stages of a lot of things in the West. The breaking point is past, and change seems to be coming. For now the riots have reached cities in bordering Belgium and Switzerland. One wonders if the EU can survive what appears to be brewing. On thing is sure, this is not your typical French summer protest.

Last edited 9 months ago by Steve White
polidori redux
polidori redux
9 months ago

Let’s cut to the chase. We are in the early stages of a very poisonous race/culture war, and it could well devastate the continent. Immigrants to Europe do not, in the main, come because they love your culture, or your values – They see what you have and they want it. Perfectly natural human behaviour of course. Just don’t be on the losing side.

Steve White
Steve White
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

I have a different take on it. I beleive that we are in late-stage hyper-financed, neo-liberal globalism.
Here is the little secret. This is one thing they don’t want anyone to put together. Inflation hits both the heterosexual and the LGBT. It hits pro-abortion and anti-abortion people. People who are Christians and people who are atheists or Muslim all want to be able to attain a house and other nice things. People who are left-wing and people who are right-wing like to be able to eat food, good food, and to be able to afford it, or a vacation, or something good for them and their family
However, if they can keep us laser focused on these wrong issues, or on issues like war with China or Russia being the main issue, they win. That’s why they need a war, and they need it ASAP.
As soon as the rioters in France join up with the police in France and both say “I’d like to be able to afford to live in a nice house, let’s throw the current establishment leadership out of office”, then it’s over for the neo-liberal Macron, and the rest will start to follow. I think that is what we are seeing the early stages of.
The Western establishment no longer represents the middle and lower classes in those nations.  

Last edited 9 months ago by Steve White
Andrew Dalton
Andrew Dalton
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Quite possibly.
For some time, I have hypothesised the rise of identity politics (being clearly nudged from above) as a response to the universal condemnation of the banking sector following the financial crash.
At the time, there was strong agreement between liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists. I don’t think the elite wanted that state of affairs to remain.

Steve White
Steve White
9 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Dalton

What does a poor Muslim in France with no good future and a Dutch farmer with no future have in common? The neo-liberal governments over them.  So, of course, war with Russia…

Last edited 9 months ago by Steve White
Derek Smith
Derek Smith
9 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Dalton

I think that is also Vivek Ramasamy’s understanding, too. He wrote a book on it, called ‘Woke, Inc’.

Steve White
Steve White
9 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Dalton

What does a poor Muslim in France with no good future and a Dutch farmer with no future have in common? The neo-liberal governments over them.  So, of course, war with Russia…

Last edited 9 months ago by Steve White
Derek Smith
Derek Smith
9 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Dalton

I think that is also Vivek Ramasamy’s understanding, too. He wrote a book on it, called ‘Woke, Inc’.

Paul Curtin
Paul Curtin
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Divide and rule.
If you have a society at war with itself fretting about our differences (identity, sexuality colour – whatever the ruling class promotes this week) then you can quietly implement whatever you feel like when the proletariat are preoccupied.
It’s the neoliberal globalist way (or the “new feudalism” – top down led regimes)
Divide and rule is as old as time.
They represent only themselves and their agenda of the acquisition of control regardless of cost to other’s and our wider society.

Last edited 9 months ago by Paul Curtin
Ray Andrews
Ray Andrews
9 months ago
Reply to  Paul Curtin

Exactly. Cui bono? Who’s getting rich? The globalist elite. They call themselves lefties, they are very woke, but they keep the money for themselves. By dividing society along identitarian lines they divide and rule.

Ray Andrews
Ray Andrews
9 months ago
Reply to  Paul Curtin

Exactly. Cui bono? Who’s getting rich? The globalist elite. They call themselves lefties, they are very woke, but they keep the money for themselves. By dividing society along identitarian lines they divide and rule.

Rose D
Rose D
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

I’d boil it down even further: it’s the energy price.

More specifically, it’s the exponential increase in the price of electricity that’s hitting all UK & EU residents – most obviously in their monthly utility bills but also in the inflation hitting the prices of everything else.

The costs of voting for “go green or go home” politicians are showing up & all but top-percentile earners are feeling the pinch.

Andrew Dalton
Andrew Dalton
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Quite possibly.
For some time, I have hypothesised the rise of identity politics (being clearly nudged from above) as a response to the universal condemnation of the banking sector following the financial crash.
At the time, there was strong agreement between liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists. I don’t think the elite wanted that state of affairs to remain.

Paul Curtin
Paul Curtin
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

Divide and rule.
If you have a society at war with itself fretting about our differences (identity, sexuality colour – whatever the ruling class promotes this week) then you can quietly implement whatever you feel like when the proletariat are preoccupied.
It’s the neoliberal globalist way (or the “new feudalism” – top down led regimes)
Divide and rule is as old as time.
They represent only themselves and their agenda of the acquisition of control regardless of cost to other’s and our wider society.

Last edited 9 months ago by Paul Curtin
Rose D
Rose D
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve White

I’d boil it down even further: it’s the energy price.

More specifically, it’s the exponential increase in the price of electricity that’s hitting all UK & EU residents – most obviously in their monthly utility bills but also in the inflation hitting the prices of everything else.

The costs of voting for “go green or go home” politicians are showing up & all but top-percentile earners are feeling the pinch.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Precisely. The nationalists were right and the socialists were wrong. Community arises from ethnicity, not class. Class is not a division, it is merely an articulation of society. The most you can do to adjust this fact is to curb it through toleration – the toleration of small, historic, self-sufficient and assimilated minorities – the modified nationalism of Churchill and de Gaulle. It is this Liberal nationalism on which the hard left declared war as long ago as 1917 and it has waged it on the west through destructive rates of immigration. Once the client base was settled, the left has deliberately fostered division and resentment, with a view to tinging its beloved “class conflict” – which is no conflict at all – with ethnic tension. It has also defamed, demoralised and travestied the old indigenous culture, absurdly blaming it for slavery, when slavery was a universal which European culture put down. Where the left are not miserable narcissistic ignoramuses they are actively malignant liars and – yes – practitioners of racial hate. And their target is us. They must, must, must be brought down. The growing evidence of the financial persecution of their opponents is one of many wake up calls. As Cato might have said, “Destroy the Left”; or as Voltaire would have put it: “Ecrasez l’infame” – crush the infamous thing.

Last edited 9 months ago by Simon Denis
Ray Andrews
Ray Andrews
9 months ago
Reply to  Simon Denis

Yes! When will workers learn that their wages will always be dropping — anything else is infamy. The very *idea* that working people should enjoy a small cut of the wealth that they produce! It’s scandalous.

Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  Ray Andrews

Hmm – wasn’t sure at first whether you were touting the old Marxist nonsense about nationalism covering for poverty. From your other posts I see you’re not. Hence the edit.

Last edited 9 months ago by Simon Denis
Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  Ray Andrews

Hmm – wasn’t sure at first whether you were touting the old Marxist nonsense about nationalism covering for poverty. From your other posts I see you’re not. Hence the edit.

Last edited 9 months ago by Simon Denis
Ray Andrews
Ray Andrews
9 months ago
Reply to  Simon Denis

Yes! When will workers learn that their wages will always be dropping — anything else is infamy. The very *idea* that working people should enjoy a small cut of the wealth that they produce! It’s scandalous.

Emre S
Emre S
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Wouldn’t it also be germane to ask the question why they are needed in the continent? Unlike what some may assume here, many of these so-called immigrants have been actually invited to their host countries from the 70s onwards to work. Why was that?

Steve White
Steve White
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

I have a different take on it. I beleive that we are in late-stage hyper-financed, neo-liberal globalism.
Here is the little secret. This is one thing they don’t want anyone to put together. Inflation hits both the heterosexual and the LGBT. It hits pro-abortion and anti-abortion people. People who are Christians and people who are atheists or Muslim all want to be able to attain a house and other nice things. People who are left-wing and people who are right-wing like to be able to eat food, good food, and to be able to afford it, or a vacation, or something good for them and their family
However, if they can keep us laser focused on these wrong issues, or on issues like war with China or Russia being the main issue, they win. That’s why they need a war, and they need it ASAP.
As soon as the rioters in France join up with the police in France and both say “I’d like to be able to afford to live in a nice house, let’s throw the current establishment leadership out of office”, then it’s over for the neo-liberal Macron, and the rest will start to follow. I think that is what we are seeing the early stages of.
The Western establishment no longer represents the middle and lower classes in those nations.  

Last edited 9 months ago by Steve White
Simon Denis
Simon Denis
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Precisely. The nationalists were right and the socialists were wrong. Community arises from ethnicity, not class. Class is not a division, it is merely an articulation of society. The most you can do to adjust this fact is to curb it through toleration – the toleration of small, historic, self-sufficient and assimilated minorities – the modified nationalism of Churchill and de Gaulle. It is this Liberal nationalism on which the hard left declared war as long ago as 1917 and it has waged it on the west through destructive rates of immigration. Once the client base was settled, the left has deliberately fostered division and resentment, with a view to tinging its beloved “class conflict” – which is no conflict at all – with ethnic tension. It has also defamed, demoralised and travestied the old indigenous culture, absurdly blaming it for slavery, when slavery was a universal which European culture put down. Where the left are not miserable narcissistic ignoramuses they are actively malignant liars and – yes – practitioners of racial hate. And their target is us. They must, must, must be brought down. The growing evidence of the financial persecution of their opponents is one of many wake up calls. As Cato might have said, “Destroy the Left”; or as Voltaire would have put it: “Ecrasez l’infame” – crush the infamous thing.

Last edited 9 months ago by Simon Denis
Emre S
Emre S
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Wouldn’t it also be germane to ask the question why they are needed in the continent? Unlike what some may assume here, many of these so-called immigrants have been actually invited to their host countries from the 70s onwards to work. Why was that?

polidori redux
polidori redux
9 months ago

Let’s cut to the chase. We are in the early stages of a very poisonous race/culture war, and it could well devastate the continent. Immigrants to Europe do not, in the main, come because they love your culture, or your values – They see what you have and they want it. Perfectly natural human behaviour of course. Just don’t be on the losing side.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
9 months ago

When hundreds of Turks and Turkish Cypriots mobilised to defend Haringey against the 2011 shopping riots, nobody called them ultra-right.

polidori redux
polidori redux
9 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

Commendable, but they were willing to defend their own community, not yours.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Maybe, maybe not, but this is somewhat aslant of the point I was making.

polidori redux
polidori redux
9 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

Fair enough. I admit that I was being a tad snarkey.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

No problem.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

No problem.

polidori redux
polidori redux
9 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

Fair enough. I admit that I was being a tad snarkey.

Emre S
Emre S
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

They were out mainly to protect the shops I think. They probably ended up defending a disparate group from the hipsters to Hassidic Jews in the end.
And I’m glad they did, some of the best food in London if you ask me.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Maybe, maybe not, but this is somewhat aslant of the point I was making.

Emre S
Emre S
9 months ago
Reply to  polidori redux

They were out mainly to protect the shops I think. They probably ended up defending a disparate group from the hipsters to Hassidic Jews in the end.
And I’m glad they did, some of the best food in London if you ask me.

polidori redux
polidori redux
9 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

Commendable, but they were willing to defend their own community, not yours.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
9 months ago

When hundreds of Turks and Turkish Cypriots mobilised to defend Haringey against the 2011 shopping riots, nobody called them ultra-right.

rob clark
rob clark
9 months ago

“Namely, the first evidence of a Right-wing counter-mobilisation against the rioters.”
Perhaps it was really a counter-mobilization of people sick and tired of their towns and cities being trashed by self-serving looters!

Aldo Maccione
Aldo Maccione
9 months ago
Reply to  rob clark

“Perhaps it was really a counter-mobilization of people sick and tired of their towns and cities being trashed by self-serving looters!”
You mean “generally peaceful” looters, looking for “justice”?
Yes, i think you’re about right.

Last edited 9 months ago by Aldo Maccione
Aldo Maccione
Aldo Maccione
9 months ago
Reply to  rob clark

“Perhaps it was really a counter-mobilization of people sick and tired of their towns and cities being trashed by self-serving looters!”
You mean “generally peaceful” looters, looking for “justice”?
Yes, i think you’re about right.

Last edited 9 months ago by Aldo Maccione
rob clark
rob clark
9 months ago

“Namely, the first evidence of a Right-wing counter-mobilisation against the rioters.”
Perhaps it was really a counter-mobilization of people sick and tired of their towns and cities being trashed by self-serving looters!

Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
9 months ago

We could draw parallels with the truly extraordinarily sentences being handed out in the UK to far right agitators, largely on ‘membership’ charges. 8 years for National Action members, I also saw 11 years for membership plus online incitement. These were tiny groupings that never committed any real violence. No IRA people ever got anything like that even during the worst of the Irish violence. The government is clamping down so hard because they know what will inevitably happen if they continue on their course of insane immigration

Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
9 months ago

We could draw parallels with the truly extraordinarily sentences being handed out in the UK to far right agitators, largely on ‘membership’ charges. 8 years for National Action members, I also saw 11 years for membership plus online incitement. These were tiny groupings that never committed any real violence. No IRA people ever got anything like that even during the worst of the Irish violence. The government is clamping down so hard because they know what will inevitably happen if they continue on their course of insane immigration

William Shaw
William Shaw
9 months ago

Sounds like French patriots are simply trying to defend the community and culture against left wing ideology, looting, and destruction of property by immigrant groups.
Apparently the media won’t describe it this way because 1) they say they would be inflaming the situation, and 2) they support the elites who are responsibly for the invasion of the country.

William Shaw
William Shaw
9 months ago

Sounds like French patriots are simply trying to defend the community and culture against left wing ideology, looting, and destruction of property by immigrant groups.
Apparently the media won’t describe it this way because 1) they say they would be inflaming the situation, and 2) they support the elites who are responsibly for the invasion of the country.

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
9 months ago

At least the migrants illegally turning up on the south coast of England are now really fleeing a war-torn and dysfunctional hell-hole.

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
9 months ago

At least the migrants illegally turning up on the south coast of England are now really fleeing a war-torn and dysfunctional hell-hole.

Ray Andrews
Ray Andrews
9 months ago

I like the idea of a divorce, especially in the USA — blue states can go totally woke, make whiteness a crime, and declare gender reassignment to be almost compulsory for kids — only when everyone is trans will trans really be accepted, yes? Red states can declare that the world is flat. The essential thing being that neither side will attempt to impose their values on the other — Alabama will let California be California and California will let Alabama be Alabama.
But how to achieve this in France or Britain or Europe in general? Surely there should be refuge cities where whitey can live in peace? Cities where ‘right wing’ Frenchmen can live among themselves, far from the barbarians? Or, as the progressives would say, far from the joys of Diversity. In contrast, Progressive cities can do what they do — burn.

Ray Andrews
Ray Andrews
9 months ago

I like the idea of a divorce, especially in the USA — blue states can go totally woke, make whiteness a crime, and declare gender reassignment to be almost compulsory for kids — only when everyone is trans will trans really be accepted, yes? Red states can declare that the world is flat. The essential thing being that neither side will attempt to impose their values on the other — Alabama will let California be California and California will let Alabama be Alabama.
But how to achieve this in France or Britain or Europe in general? Surely there should be refuge cities where whitey can live in peace? Cities where ‘right wing’ Frenchmen can live among themselves, far from the barbarians? Or, as the progressives would say, far from the joys of Diversity. In contrast, Progressive cities can do what they do — burn.

Perry de Havilland
Perry de Havilland
9 months ago

Most “Identitarians” are actually on the woke far-Left (not that there is actually much difference from the far-Right, they just have different iconography & tribal affiliations).

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
9 months ago

x are the real racists!

Last edited 9 months ago by Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
9 months ago

x are the real racists!

Last edited 9 months ago by Albert McGloan
Perry de Havilland
Perry de Havilland
9 months ago

Most “Identitarians” are actually on the woke far-Left (not that there is actually much difference from the far-Right, they just have different iconography & tribal affiliations).