ON THE FRENCH PROTESTS, TRUMP, VANCE, PUTIN, AND THEIR FAR-RIGHT EURO ALLIES SPEAK WITH ONE RACIST VOICE

My response to this tweet probably isn't the same as yours.

The most common response is mockery of Vance for ignoring French history, in previous centuries and recently. A few examples from Bluesky:

Chuckling at the notion that unassimilated third-worlders inported the practice of rioting and burning shit down TO FRANCE

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France riots and the historical illiterates Trump and Vance immediately blame "third world" immigrants. Because, um, the French themselves have no history of violent urban unrest... Yellow Vest protests, 1968, 1871 Paris Commune, 1830 revolts, 1792 great terror, 1789 revolution, etc etc.

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“The French never rioted or burned things down before!”

(I mean, if anything, this shows that immigrants have assimilated to French history and culture).

But I'm more alarmed at Vance's language. It's not a dog whistle -- it's undiluted "scientific" racism. We expect this from President Trump, who posted this on Truth Social yesterday:



Trump followed up this morning with this:



Vance avoids all caps and exclamation points. His tone is measured and emotionless. I worry that our political culture won't recognize that he's as bigoted as Trump -- possibly more so -- and might divide America even more than Trump has if he has a shot at winning the president.

You might he can't possibly win in 2028. Even if he can't, it's easy to imagine a backlash against a victorious Democrat by 2032, when Vance will be only in his late forties. (If you're sure that American voters will still remember the horrors of the second Trump presidency four years later, you're forgetting their amnesia after the first Trump presidency.)

I worry about Vance because I watched quite a bit of the CBS News town hall Vance did over the weekend.



Was it impressive? No. Did Vance demonstrate charisma? No -- but I've lived through seventeen presidential elections (I was born in 1959) and five of them were won by very uncharismatic Republicans (Richard Nixon twice, the Bushes three times). You don't necessarily need charisma if you can successfully sell yourself to white heartlanders as a bulwark against dangerous leftists, liberals, and non-whites.

Vance wasn't charismatic, but he was soft-spoken, and his tone carried an undercurrent of "I feel your pain" and a willingness to admit at least some error that's absent from Trump's bloviations. Watch the first four minutes in the clip above, and try to ignore the fact that it's unconscionable that the administration mismanaged the Iran war in a way that led to the death of the questioner's servicemember wife. Watch Vance perform empathy:

So Joey, first of all, look, I owe and the whole country owes your family a debt of gratitude that is quite literally impossible to repay. I won't pretend that anything that I say is going to make it better or easier, but I hope it helps a little bit to know that your wife was a precious human being who served her country honorably, and I'm never going to forget about her.

He's better at this than you think. America might fall for it -- especially America's political culture, which clearly dislikes some of the leading 2028 Democrats.

That's why Vance's bigotry is so disturbing -- America's opinion-shapers might treat him as a reasonable man, even though he's an obvious hater. On the subject of the unrest in France, he and Trump sound exactly like Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, and like quite a few European far-rightists. Le Monde notes the similarities in a story headlined "Trump and Putin Claim French Protests Are Evidence of 'Migrant Chaos' and 'Europe's Decline'" (the story is free to read here):

Rarely have reactions from Washington and Moscow so closely aligned, both in substance and in tone. The US president feigned alarm on his Truth Social platform on Sunday: "France is burning!" Ignoring the demands raised by high school and university students for more resources for education, and showing disregard for the distress of the middle class, whose cost of living has been partly raised by the war in Iran that he himself launched, Trump analyzed the anger of the French as coming solely from "people from an entirely different world," he wrote....

"Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion. They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn't listen," Vice President JD Vance had already pontificated the day before on X.... Laura Loomer, an influencer from the Make America Great Again sphere, openly embraced racist rhetoric: "The most destructive species on planet earth is the African Muslim. Don't believe me, just look at Paris," she posted on X on Sunday.

... on X, Kirill Dmitriev, [Putin's] special representative for relations with the US, appeared to echo Washington's words, seeing in France "Western civilization's suicide through migrant chaos."

... "The West has fallen because of an inability to discuss and correct consequential mistakes on migration, energy, and warmongering," wrote Dmitriev on X.

On Sunday, several representatives of the European far right openly adopted the rhetoric of the Trump administration and the Kremlin. "If we don't wake up, the carnage in France is our future. We need to return to law, order, and borders," declared Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, on X....

In Germany, Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), was quoted Sunday by the daily Rheinische Post as seeing the clashes in Paris as an "attack on Western civilization by migrant mobs and far-left agitators," arguing that "open borders and mass immigration" were responsible for the violence. "This is what awaits Europe with Islamo-leftism. Barbarians ravaging all that remains of beauty and civilization," said Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox party, on X. "The axis of evil that unites left-wing extremists and Islamic fanatics is the number one danger to confront and defeat," wrote Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-migrant League and Italy's deputy prime minister, on the same platform, sharing footage of Limoges city hall in flames.

These are clearly the allies of the front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. If there's France-syle unrest in America, if there are terrorist attacks or an increase in crime, or if the media simply takes against the next Democratic nominee, Vance has a shot at the presidency. He also will become president if Trump dies in office. People who hate bigotry -- a group that ought to include everyone, and realistically ought to include all non-Republicans, including those in the media -- should be more alarmed about these possibilities than they are.