The media has been so quiet on the Yellow Jackets in France that you could be excused for thinking my title refers to some kind of invasion by weird wasps.
Well, for the record, it doesn’t. It refers to the ongoing revolt in France by various groups, but mostly, honest, middle-aged, middle-class people who are setting fires to things and making life hell in the ritzy districts of Paris (and elsewhere).
You probably thought that was all over and done with, and you’d be excused for thinking it, because our media has worked so hard not to report it.
The thing is, it’s very much still alive and it’s giving French President Emmanuel Marcon problems: “Macron cuts short ski trip to attend emergency meeting of French ministers as Yellow Vest violence explodes in Paris and ‘stretched’ police arrest 25 rioters after cars are torched and shops are trashed.”
To give you an idea of how serious Marcon interrupting his ski trip is, imagine that John Jean Kerry was president, and imagine how hard it would be to make him give up his vacation for anything government-related. French and French-acting would-be elites take their leisure very seriously, enfim.
There are two very curious things about all of this and we’re going to go into both of them:
- Why our media is not reporting on this
- Who the core group of the Yellow Jackets is and therefore what this means
We’ll take the second point first:
I know a lot of us are ambivalent about the Yellow Jackets. First, because we are, most of us, fairly law-abiding, responsible people. Even when the TEA party was at its most… er… testy, we left our demonstration sites cleaner than we found them.
Second, because what the media reports about them are things that make us feel squirmy: destruction of property, most of them are Islamist or the French equivalent of Antifa, etc.
Here I’m just going to say that how the media report on the Yellow Jackets is related to why they don’t report on them if they can help it. More on that later. The point is, what they say is not necessarily the truth. Since when has our extreme left-wing media been in the business of reporting anything resembling reality? It’s all in the service of the narrative. It’s also curiously similar to how they reported on the TEA party. So don’t dismiss the Yellow Jackets out of hand.
Friends in France tell me that the Yellow Jackets are mostly middle-class and middle-aged people who never even joined in the perennial French sport of striking; people who have jobs, bills, families. My corroborative evidence for this is that the protests happen mostly on the weekend. These people are busy the rest of the time, and can’t afford to lose their jobs.
And in my opinion, this is why the media is not reporting on them, if they can help it (note that I linked a British newspaper, and even those try not to report on these demonstrations if they can).
Because when middle-class and middle-aged people go rogue and take to the streets, it means that most people in the country are very, very, very pissed off. The bourgeois, which the left has tried to make into an insult, but which are in fact the backbone of the West, are the people who do things and keep our communities ticking. They have to get very, very mad before they risk family and job and a clean record. When they get to that point, they are ten seconds from having nothing left to lose. Which is the point.
Found on Facebook: What France is starting to look like for those of us with contacts there:
Most Americans, thank heavens, don’t understand the causes that MC & MA (for short, I’m getting tired of writing it) people in France, and frankly in the rest of Europe, particularly Southern Europe, have to be so furious. We’re not there yet. We might be if we don’t clean up our elections and allow the left to Calvinball their way into permanent power.
What you have to understand is that the EU in many ways stopped representative government in Europe. That is, the internationalists got their wish and the multinational bureaucracy from Brussels can not only completely ignore the elected governments of the individual countries, but supersede them and circumvent them. And the regulations they’ve brought in, many of them as crazy as anything in Occasional Cortex’s Green Nude Heel are destroying not just small businesses (to the extent they existed in Europe) but also long-held traditional crafts that have sometimes been in families for generations. This means most people are either jobless or have experienced a profound loss of identity and connection with the past.
At the same time, economically, Southern Europe has its butt in a bear trap. We joke about the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) and how their greed for borrowed money from Germany has threatened to bankrupt the EU. And I’m not going to claim that the Southern Europeans have any kind of grasp on economics. They, plus France, are way too attached to the idea that the government is supposed to give all sorts of things and have the money discipline of a drunken sailor on Mardi Gras. But they had found a way to survive modern finances. They ran up debt, inflated their way out of it, ran up debt again, inflated their way out. It sucked, and they took a lot of money from Northern European countries. But they survived.
Now, with the euro not under their control, they can’t do that. And mostly? Most people don’t have jobs or, labor still being very cheap in those countries, when they do, they don’t make enough to compete with Northern tourists, retirees, and relocating foreigners for the houses in their cities and villages.
I became aware of this when I read a piece from Portugal complaining that people in their thirties and forties couldn’t even begin to afford small places in the villages they’d grown up in. And then I became aware it was the same in France. And Greece. And…
These people are not like us. Blood and soil is a thing in Europe. And the “soil” refers to the village your grandparents lived in, around the cemetery where your ancestors, sometimes going back two thousand years, are buried. I know. Even after I shook the dust from my sandals and moved here, long after I stopped thinking of myself as Portuguese, I still thought of myself as from Granja. And if tomorrow all of Europe were overrun by gnats, the only thing that would hurt me is the overrunning of my grandmother’s grave.
So, what you have are people my age and older whose kids don’t have jobs or a future, and who know that when they’re gone their kids will at best be renters working manual labor or service for the foreigners moving in. To add insult to injury, a lot of the still-affordable places are in the distant countryside, far from any services, shopping or dining, and the EU keeps ratcheting up gas taxes and disincentives, in pursuit of their green fever dreams. It’s not precisely a coincidence that smart cars (an abortion of a would-be ecological vehicle) are a particular focus of Yellow Jacket fury.
Sure, most of these people are socialist. In the American spectrum, they’re only not to the left of our mainstream Democrats because mainstream Democrats are racing at speed to the left of Lenin. They’re not TEA partiers.
They are the people of the region, the people with deep ties to country and place, the people who love their country. The internationalists have been running them out of jobs, out of house and home, out of any hope for the future.
They’ve now reached the Shakespearean point of “Tempt not a desperate man.” Or, in other words, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” They’re out of … er… copulations to give. And they’re not going to take it anymore.
And that’s why our media isn’t reporting on this. Because as the propaganda arm of the internationalist cabal, they aspire to what the internationalists of Europe have achieved. They want it so bad they can taste it, and are willing to subvert everything to achieve it.
And they thought they had us. They were almost there before 2016. And they’re trying to get there by all means — possible, impossible, and grotesquely crooked. (Like Hillary.)
They don’t want us to know that resistance is possible, even in Europe, where they’re far more advanced than we are. In fact, I believe they co-opted the name “resistance” mostly to take it from us, should we want it in the future.
But that’s okay. That’s fine. If they get away with stealing elections in 2020 (as they did a lot of the midterms) and rigging the system in their favor, I give them ten years at most. Our MC & MA are as slow to anger as anyone can be. But I doubt we’ll wait until the extremity of need our European brethren are experiencing before we blow our tops.
Because Americans are even more ornery than Europeans. Also, we are armed.
I hear the dollar store has yellow jackets cheap. I’d get them before the price goes up.
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