Les Republicans Pounce! Media Denounces 'Far Right' Candidate in France For Noticing Riots Are a Bad Thing
We’ve exported the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” narrative to France. Now, the media is sending them the “Republicans pounce” storyline, as well.
As you’ve probably heard, France is burning thanks to “student” protests. I put that word in quotation marks because there’s every indication that these riots are being funded by the same network that boosts Marxist protests in the United States, as well. But that’s not being reported.
Instead, this is what happened in Limoges during unrest the BBC said was “mostly peaceful.”
The Limoges Town Hall survived two world wars and stood as a symbol of French history.
Now it will be remembered as a symbol of the country’s downfall.
This is so incredibly tragic. https://t.co/35t2HtvSP1
— Dr. Maalouf (@realMaalouf) October 18, 2026
Fiery! But “mostly peaceful.”
This is being reported pretty widely, even if the genesis of the riots isn’t being accurately conveyed. What’s receiving less coverage is the political subtext of the riots, particularly as France may be about to undergo a generational political change.
French President Emmanuel Macron is term-limited, and the man probably thanks the sweet Lord (or whatever he worships) that he is, since he was about as popular as a diphtheria outbreak even before the country collapsed into rioting.
Who will replace him remains to be seen, but polling says that the top two candidates are likely populist conservative Marine Le Pen of the National Rally — often painted as France’s version of Donald Trump — and leftist hardliner Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise in second.
France uses a runoff system where the top two candidates face each other if neither attains 50 percent of the vote, which seems likely. In this scenario, Le Pen is ahead of Mélenchon by a wide margin.
Given that Le Pen has been a longtime immigration hawk and a law-and-order candidate, it’s not difficult to see why the current unrest would play into her hands. A politician would be a fool not to call a spade a spade, particularly if they’ve been doing so for decades, like Le Pen has.
But, as Heather Mac Donald of the conservative Manhattan Institute noted, pretty much every report out of France about the political repercussions from our establishment media uses the same playbook: the “Republicans pounce” trope repackaged for the National Rally.
“The mainstream media are fuming. Marine Le Pen, head of France’s most popular party, National Rally, is exploiting the French riots for her political advantage, the media grouse,” Mac Donald said on X on Tuesday.
“Le Pen and her right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, portray the riots as the confirmation of everything they have been warning about for years, especially regarding Third World immigration. This is a ruse, complains the press and its establishment sources, a mere rhetorical trick.”
The mainstream media are fuming. Marine Le Pen, head of France’s most popular party, National Rally, is exploiting the French riots for her political advantage, the media grouse. Le Pen and her right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, portray the riots as the confirmation of everything they have been warning about for years, especially regarding Third World immigration. This is a ruse, complains the press and its establishment sources, a mere rhetorical trick.
A front-page article in today’s New York Times quotes a political scientist at Paris’s Sciences Po: “The picture of France emerging this morning, in light of all the destruction, plays well into their hands.”
The Wall Street Journal sounds the same note today: “The social instability over the weekend absolutely plays into Le Pen’s campaign that the establishment has delivered chaos,” said Mujtaba Rahman, from the risk analysis firm Eurasia Group.
Even the papers’ headlines echo each other: “France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country” (New York Times); “Marine Le Pen Seizes on French Chaos to Present Herself as Leader in Waiting” (Wall Street Journal).
It is necessary to deconstruct these far-right narratives; thankfully, the press is there to help us. The violence “perfectly aligned with the image the National Rally has long painted of a France divided into two and battling for survival,” a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur told the New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal writes that the “far-right” Le Pen has “cast” France as a nation adrift, “buffeted by waves of immigration and lawlessness that have torn at the country’s social fabric.”
It is mere coincidence that that image of a divided, degraded France constructed by the National Rally and the violence on the streets seem to align. That alignment does not mean that the National Rally was right, just that its demagogy was opportune.
But the waves of hate-filled destruction crashing over France’s once great cities validate Le Pen and Bardella’s diagnosis of France’s demographic catastrophe, not as narrative but as empirical fact. The Wall Street Journal again tries to dismiss Le Pen’s prognostications as a rhetorical maneuver: “Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance…gives her another way to frame the unrest. Le Pen has cast the unrest as the work of far-left radicals allied with youths from France’s banlieues, the poor urban outskirts where much of the country’s minority Muslim population resides.” How else would the Journal “cast” the “unrest?” As the work of lavender harvesters from Provence?
The elite effort at euphemism is by now desperate: “The looting drew attention to a segment of the population—specifically young people from certain neighborhoods, some of whom are from immigrant backgrounds,” pollster Adélaïde Zulfikarpasic told the Journal. “And that hits the themes at the heart of National Rally’s rhetoric.”
A conversation on German public media station ZDF yesterday between the ever-pinched and purse-lipped anchor Marietta Slomka and a French academic in Bonn referred delicately to the “decades-long problem” of poverty, concentration, and “integration” in the Plattenbauten (the concrete slab housing projects) around Paris. The problem is not “integration,” which suggests a failing in the host country, however, it is large-scale Third World immigration, which has turned many of these projects into no-go zones. And now that local anarchy is spreading.
If naming a deliberate attack on Western civilization by those who feel only resentment and envy earns one the title of far-right extremist or racist, so be it. The mayhem in France is not rhetoric, it is reality. And the National Rally’s law enforcement and deportation proposals are precisely what France and the rest of Europe need today.
— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) October 20, 2026
For those of you unfamiliar with the “Republicans pounce!” narrative, Kevin D. Williamson, then of National Review, wrote my favorite TL;DR summation of it back in 2018:
When a Republican does something stupid or wrong and gets criticized for it, the story is that a Republican has done something stupid or wrong. When a Democrat does something stupid or wrong, the story is “Republicans pounce!” on the episode, cynically looking to wring some petty advantage out of the mess. For those who lean Democrat, that is a much more pleasant story to report.
And I know you’ll never believe this, but this works in France, too!
The New York Times, Monday: “France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country.” Catherine Porter blamed Le Pen and Bardella for seizing, the media’s favorite stand-in for “pouncing” when that’d just be too obvious.
After riots erupted this weekend in cities across France, its centrist government blamed the main far-left party, accusing its politicians of inciting the violence. That party blamed the government, accusing it of stirring public anger through years of bad governance and heavy-handed policing.
What did the main far-right party do? It blamed both, and launched into campaign mode.
Advertisement - story continues below“We are paying for decades of being soft on crime, of weak authority, of the moral, psychological, and material disarmament of our internal security forces,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally party, said after emerging from a police station in central Paris on Sunday. He said had gone there to support police officers.
Yes, political parties addressing the issues is now “seizing” on rioting because rioting is bad and the rioting is also linked to populations that France has imported from the Third World.
The words “far-right” were used to describe the National Rally eight times, compared with two uses of “far-left” to describe Mélenchon and his confederates twice.
(It’s worth noting that Mélenchon really is quite far-left, given that he’s an anti-Semite who believes that France shouldn’t pay its debts and that the rioters are “voicing their demands in the most beautiful way possible.”)
Over at The Wall Street Journal, nominally more conservative than The New York Times, we got this headline: “Marine Le Pen Seizes on French Chaos to Present Herself as Leader in Waiting.”
At least we only got “far-right” four times in that story, including the subheadline, but it was better in a marginal sense only.
For more than a decade, the far-right leader has cast France as a nation adrift, buffeted by waves of immigration and lawlessness that have torn at the country’s social fabric. As bands of hooded rioters in dark clothing have descended on city centers across France, raiding city halls and looting thousands of stores, Le Pen has sought to present herself as the sole candidate in this spring’s presidential election willing to restore order.
The strategy was on display this week as Le Pen released a video address that bore the hallmarks of a president addressing the nation. Seated at a desk before an august bookcase and flanked by France’s tricolor flag, Le Pen cast the riots as a crisis of faith in President Emmanuel Macron’s authority.
Advertisement - story continues below“Our country is caught in a vice, held hostage between violence and powerlessness,” Le Pen said. “In six months, the French people will be able to choose a different path — one of authority and restored security.”
The approach has given Le Pen an air of inevitability as she pursues France’s highest office.
Yeah, imagine — a presidential candidate acting presidential. Where’s the ghost of Émile Zola to give a hearty J’accuse… !, one wonders.
And that was hardly the only outrage. This pull-quote from pollster Adélaïde Zulfikarpasic takes the cake: “The looting drew attention to a segment of the population — specifically young people from certain neighborhoods, some of whom are from immigrant backgrounds,” she said. “And that hits the themes at the heart of National Rally’s rhetoric.”
Oh, which neighborhoods might those be, Adélaïde?
NBC News, to its marginal credit, went further into the thesaurus to find a synonym for pounce: “How France’s far right has capitalized on a weekend of riots, looting and chaos.”
She was “trying to take advantage of the situation to change her persona and the way she embodies politics, no doubt to appear more presidential but also more authoritative,” said Gaspard Gantzer, an ex-top adviser to former President François Hollande, Macron’s predecessor.
“At a time when the country seems to be descending into chaos, this attitude is meant to project reassurance and authority,” he said.
Advertisement - story continues belowThe masked looters wreaking havoc in the French streets were a minority. The government estimated that 550,000 people joined Saturday’s demonstrations, most of them peacefully, after weeks of protests against poor school conditions and a punishingly high cost of living.
Yet the images of burning shops and helmet-clad riot police only sharpen the narrative that Europe is in turmoil.
Imagine that: “capitalizing” on the those “mostly peaceful” demonstrations that ended up burning down a historic city hall by noting they look a lot like “turmoil.”
What does this look like to you — turmoil or “mostly peaceful… protests against poor school conditions”?
The looting in Paris today.. France riots https://t.co/lzz3sLLB80
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 17, 2026
🇫🇷 Rioters, deeply concerned about France’s education system, continue looting shops across the country https://t.co/jYMfTteudS
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 19, 2026
Looters clear out Louis Vuitton store in Bordeaux, France, amid cost-of-living protests
https://t.co/fbOXIGlPYE
— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) October 18, 2026
Didn’t know the lycées held class at Louis Vuitton. You learn new things every day.
Of all the outrages coming out of France the last month, the fact our mainstream media is exporting its narrative slop to the streets of Paris and Lyon pales in immediate impact next to the burning of the Limoges City Hall, say, but it may have greater long-term consequences.
Marine Le Pen and the National Rally were right. If you refuse to stop the importation of chaos, this is what you reap.
This isn’t pouncing or seizing or capitalizing. It’s stating the facts — and if you want to end this madness, France, vote for someone who’s built their career around doing so.
This is hardly “far-right” sentiment in 2026, not when we’ve seen a billion different ways this can go sideways.
Not that the media cares about the truth, of course. Get ready for an avalanche of “Les Republicans pounce” rhetoric before France goes to the polls in 2027.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
