The 174-year-old tourism office you see burning down above stands about 50 yards away from a playground that my daughters have visited probably 100 times. It’s an 8-minute walk to their grandparents’ apartment, in the fashionable and touristic neighborhood of Presqu’île, the heart of France’s second city, Lyon.
“No business was spared on the Presqu’île,” Lyon Magazine reported this morning, adding: “You have to see it to believe it.” Smashed storefronts, looted stocks of clothing and electronics, graffiti everywhere (“Free Palestine,” “ACAB,” etc.) defying both local language laws and the head-in-sand fiction that these passions were ignited primarily by school policies and the cost of living. I am grateful the little fuckers didn’t get close enough to damage one of my favorite churches in the world, the nearly thousand-year-old Basilica of Saint-Martin d’Ainay.
Lyon did not see the worst of France’s Oct. 17 ignominy. In wildly chaotic Marseilles, according to the television journalist Paul Amar, “They came prepared. They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners. In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren’t.” A synagogue was ransacked in Paris. And in the central-France city of Limoges, this:
Hard not to agree with past Fifth Column guest and current part-time resident of France, Thomas Chatterton Williams, when he says, “What is happening in France today is evidence of true sickness, a body politic that has turned cancerous.” And unfortunately both for single-issue enthusiasts and the country as a whole, that sickness is not monocausal. France has an unhealthy and mathematically untenable approach toward work vs. government-provided entitlements (a main driver of the past two weeks of protests), toward destructive vandalism as political expression (note that the Yellow Vests, last season’s burn-shit protagonists, were out in large numbers on Oct. 17), toward assimilating large numbers of Muslim immigrants, and toward fixating on Israel and the United States as the root of geopolitical evil. Those foreigners pining for the long-delayed, now almost guaranteed Le Pen victory in next year’s elections likely underrate the gargantuan structural problems that the pro-welfare-state nationalists will face either when speeding the country toward its inevitable fiscal cliff, or in having to tell an eternally restive population that, well, maybe you’ll need to retire at 63 instead of 62.
As I mentioned in some recent episode, debt crises and cost-of-living squeezes—which we are seeing all over the globe—providing kindling for all kinds of potential unrest, including of the cross-border variety. France is not the only European country on fire. Shit with Russia is getting dangerously weird. Trumpworld is not getting less erratic in the run-up to the midterms. I don’t mean to spread my internal vapors, but … I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
* Hey, let’s move some damn tickets! Nov. 12, post-midterms breakdown & related hilarities at Fairfield University in Connecticut. You can also see me Oct. 31 at an “American Patriotism at 250” panel hosted by the University of Austin.
* Speaking of Midterm Madness, we had poll-cruncher extraordinaire (and more importantly, PECOTA-inventor) Nate Silver on Members Only #350. Here’s a free clip on why Republicans are in serious trouble (and maybe Donald Trump is the new First Gay President):
Silver’s latest is titled “The Good, Bad and Ugly Outcomes in the Senate: Can Democrats still win the Senate if the polls overestimate them? And how ugly could the map get for Republicans if the polls are wrong in the other direction?”
* Moynihan on his Report this week interviewed the great (and greatly named) historian Simon Sebag Montefiore on why “You’re (Probably) Wrong About the Middle East.”
* Speaking of the Blonde Zionist, he was on the recently re-christened Chosen People Problems this week, to talk about “the media landscape, the state of Europe, why having a podcast is better than being a father, and why he spends his days looking for antisemitic quotes in books from 100 years ago.”
* On Episode #579 we talked with listener-beloved Demo-guest Yemisi Egbewole in part about the disastrous debut of White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. K-Zach was then shitcanned. That episode also discussed the also-shitcanned corruption grotesque Kimberly Guilfoyle from her post as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Dear Fifth friend Kennedy (veteran of #37) dropped a Daily Mail hammer on her former Fox News colleague just prior to her ouster, in a piece headlined “Kimberly Guilfoyle Flaunted Her Nudes Album to Me... With Each Man’s Amex Card Next to His Compromising Photo.”
Kmele & the Tanglers talked Guilfoyle this week:
* Forgot to mention last week that Reason posted a lil’ print-mag column from me on “The Democrats’ Socialist Moment.” Excerpt:
Insurgent blocs within major political parties reveal themselves by showing when they’re willing to lose. The Tea Party during its productive heyday of 2009–13 backed some pretty out-there primary candidates who went on to squander some winnable general elections, such as anti–sharia law crusader Sharron Angle, who face-planted in her attempt to unseat a vulnerable Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.). Trump, too, has enforced loyalty by jeopardizing seats, as he did earlier this year by bouncing longtime Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) with the abjectly corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Nothing matters more this year for Democrats—and, arguably, the national electorate—than wresting control of the closely divided Senate, which at press time was almost universally forecast as a 50–50 toss-up. Trump’s final two years in office will look a lot different should the opposition party hold the whip hand on the legislative branch’s oversight and investigatory functions. And yet such is the antipathy of younger Democratic voters toward the perceived crusts of the party’s establishment that the DSA and DSA-adjacent cheerleaders fought viciously to elevate three very flawed candidates to contested statewide Senate elections. […]
Numerically minor as it may be, the DSA insurgency is jerking the much larger party leftward on taxing billionaires (including California’s disastrous wealth tax ballot initiative this November), blocking data centers, drastically expanding the already unaffordable entitlement state, and condemning Israel. This remains true even if El-Sayed loses: If you are more likely to lose your job in a primary election than the general, then what matters more is the passion of the grassroots mob, even if that proves to be normie poison.
* This Date in Fif’ History: On Oct. 18, 2018, beloved Aussie c**t Josh Szeps made what was already his fourth appearance on The Fifth Column, in an episode that discussed the Proud Boys fighting Antifa, Kanye West visiting the White House, Norman Mailer stabbing his wife, and Saudi Arabia doing much worse to Jamal Khashoggi.
That same day, Reason published a top-five favorite article of mine, titled “Mad Genius: The Reason founding story.” My talented colleagues made a great video version:
* Comment of the Week goes to Mike W G:
I debated this guy in high school and he crushed everyone. We came second in the state of Michigan, but he and his partner were on another level. Still crazy to see him all the time and hear his Michigan accent.
Sendoff: Rory Bourke, member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, died Oct. 11 at the age of 84. How do you get into this particularly HoF? Writing this bad boy:
Blond* Zionist. I am the Blonde Zionist.
I saw footage of a young lady who was trying to defend her shop against looting. Reportedly, she pleaded with the looters, reportedly urging that she was in solidarity with their interests. Didn’t matter. They pushed her aside. Her facial expression is painful to behold.