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This thread is at best clueless and at worst deliberately misleading. In general, it's starting to piss me off to see people use the tired cliché of French rioting to pretend that it was just another Saturday in France and that it has nothing to do with immigration (as Hayes is doing in the tweet I'm screenshotting below, which was reacting to Mair's thread), so let me explain. Yes, the vast majority of the people who protested yesterday were white, nobody serious is denying that. It was a typical protest about the cost of living, which happens almost every year in France after summer. The protests were larger this year because 1) the left was energized by the high school protests from a few weeks ago and was hoping that it would be able to ride out that wave, 2) the price of gas has increased a lot because of the war and people are pissed and 3) Macron has been president for almost 10 years, he is very unpopular and there is a presidential election in a few months. The protests themselves were generally peaceful, which is not surprising. Again, despite the meme about how French people are constantly rioting, French protests traditionally don't lead to a lot of violence. That's because they are organized by unions who coordinate with the authorities and have a security service that deals with trouble makers. The violence doesn't come from the mass of protesters, who in the overwhelming majority of cases are just left-wing French normies with inchoate demands about the cost of living, Macron and public spending, but are law-abiding and would never burn a car in a million years. It comes from 1) ultra-left groups and 2) gangs of Black and Arab hoodlums who opportunistically join the protests, typically toward the end as they are disbanding and protesters start to scatter, to cause mayhem and loot. The former are relatively small in numbers, very organized and basically professional activists, while the latter are much more numerous, not ideological and just take part in the protests because they think rioting is fun and they can steal shit. Anyone who denies that the violence and looting is overwhelmingly committed by children of immigrants is either clueless or lying to you. Basically everyone in France knows it and, at this point, even left-wing journalists often don't even bother denying it anymore and just blame that on racism. Sure, there are also some white people who loot stores because there is also a white underclass in France and it would be surprising if this didn't happen in protests that involved hundreds of thousands, but even when they do they are rarely the initiators of this kind of violence and probably would never have done it had Black and Arab youths not initiated it. Anyone who has ever witnessed this kind of events in France knows that and, even if you don't live in France, you just have to watch videos to see it. It really takes an incredible amount of bad faith to look at the hundreds of videos showing looters, almost all of whom are Black or Arab, then cherry-pick to find the handful of white people and pretend it's not overwhelmingly a phenomenon driven by children of immigrants. Obviously, not every Black or Arab is a looter and many of them were among the people who protested peacefully, but everyone with a brain understands that and it doesn't change the fact that almost every looter is Black or Arab. The only reason to bring up this obvious fact is to divert attention from the fact that immigration played a massive role in creating this situation. Same thing for people who are showing photos of peaceful protests to argue that most of the protesters are white. Again, that's obviously true, but also completely irrelevant and dishonest if you're using that fact to argue that immigration has nothing to do with the violence. It's different for rioters who engage in confrontation with the police, because again those are far-left activists and are generally white, but they are also not very numerous although they play a disproportionately important role in initiating the violence because they are very organized. But if the police didn't also have to deal with a much larger number of immigrant hoodlums, which ties up a lot of manpower, it would be much easier to deal with anarchists and the kind of things we have seen yesterday would be much less likely to happen. So no, looting or even rioting is not part of French culture, at least if by that you mean that it's behavior typical French protesters regularly engage in. It's overwhelmingly done by a small minority of professional far-left activists and a much larger number of Black and Arab hoodlums who opportunistically piggyback on traditional French social movements. The only social movement during which regular French people have engaged in serious violence in recent decades was the yellow vests movement in 2018 and it's precisely because this was so unusual that Macron was so scared at the time. When people make the kind of sarcastic comment Hayes made, about the supposed French culture of rioting and looting, the only thing they are proving is that they have no idea what they're talking about. Yes, I know that we took the Bastille in 1789 and that French people engaged in various insurrections in the subsequent century, but that's pretty much completely irrelevant to what is happening right now. If you want to go back even further in time and look really smart, you could even mention the Bagaudae in 3rd century AD Gaul and talk about how it was a proto-communist movement that shows how deeply ingrained rioting is in French culture. But if you think that bringing up that stuff to explain current events makes you smart, you should think again. It just makes you intellectually lazy at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, although to be clear those are not mutually inconsistent possibilities.