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By Chad Wolf
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On October 17, more than half a million French citizens marched peacefully over the cost of living and failing schools. By nightfall, the town hall in Limoges, which had survived two world wars, was a smoldering shell. Nearly 2,400 people were arrested. Roughly 1,000 police officers and firefighters were injured and at least 3,000 businesses were looted or damaged. Countless cars burned. What began as a public protest has become a crisis of public order—and a warning to the entire West.
France, and Europe for that matter, has seen protests before. But as these protests spread beyond the French borders, a troubling question emerges: What happens when organized radical movements exploit legitimate grievances to weaken the institutions that make a free society possible? It is the erosion of a civilization's confidence in its ability to defend itself.
France’s leaders are raising the alarm. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told parliament that far-left groups had pursued an “insurrectionary plan,” with intelligence services indicating networks sought to foment disorder through next year’s presidential election. President Emmanuel Macron blamed far-left activists for attacking police and public buildings. His interior minister admitted authorities “lost control” in major cities.
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Peaceful protest is a democratic right. But when organized radical and Islamist groups as well as foreign actors exploit public grievances to attack law enforcement, destroy businesses and undermine institutions, the consequences extend beyond legitimate dissent. It is intimidation.
Who is financing these attacks? Recent reporting on the 54 organizations involved in the French demonstrations found that just 16 were student or youth groups. Others were political parties, communist and Islamist groups, pro-revolutionary organizations, and other transnational and domestic advocacy organizations. Any connection between these groups and the violence should be established through evidence. Still, citizens deserve transparency to know when organized networks mobilize against law enforcement and Western institutions.
Modern activism often operates through layers of intermediaries and nonprofits that obscure funding sources.
Among the figures whose financial networks have drawn scrutiny is tech mogul Neville Roy Singham, whose global political operation faces allegations of ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Singham funds the nonprofit Tricontinental, whose leader, Vijay Prashad, publicly backed the protests. BreakThrough News, another outlet associated with Singham, amplified them.
These connections do not definitively prove these groups directed the recent violence, but they should certainly be investigated as their reach is proving to be global.
The proliferation of these well-funded radical organizations has implications at home. A variety of moneyed global progressive organizations have also been funding the harassment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the local businesses that serve them through supporting the Sunrise Movement. Sunrise has openly described using financial pressure against hotels that house ICE agents. The people who pay the price are hotel workers, business owners and ordinary Americans trying to earn a living.
Marxist revolutionaries, Islamists and regimes hostile to the West may have little else in common, but they share an interest in weakening Western institutions and deepening social divisions. Their cooperation, where it occurs, deserves investigation and prosecution—not hand wringing.
The Trump administration has framed this challenge in civilization terms. Speaking in Athens on October 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked “thumos,” the Greek concept of passion, strength, courage and pride. Without it, he warned, nations lose “their will to fight, to strive, to survive.” At February’s Munich Security Conference, he warned of “civilizational erasure.” Vice President JD Vance pressed the same point, and State Department officials have stressed that governments must take seriously the consequences of failing to enforce their laws and secure their borders. In November 2025, the State Department designated four European far-left groups as foreign terrorist organizations.
Americans need not look to Europe though, for a preview. In the summer of 2020, well-organized riots swept through American cities. Police precincts burned, small businesses were destroyed and communities suffered lasting damage. Many businesses belonged to people whose interests protesters claimed to defend. These events showed how quickly public order can deteriorate when violence goes unchecked.
The choice for Americans is clear: whether to sustain a flourishing civil society or allow intimation and extremism to erode it. That requires transparent political financing, enforcement of laws, protection of civil and peaceful protests, and accountability for violence.
Socialism and radical extremism treat people as raw material for a movement. A shopkeeper’s livelihood or a hotel worker’s paycheck becomes an acceptable price for power. America First begins from the opposite premise: the citizen comes first, not the cause.
E Pluribus Unum is more than a national motto. It is a shared commitment to a country where free people can work, raise families, worship, prosper and disagree without fear of mob rule.
The riots in France are a warning. A civilization does not collapse overnight. It weakens when leaders excuse disorder, institutions retreat and citizens lose the will to defend what generations built. A choice as to our future is at hand—a hollowed out, dysfunctional civil society cowed by intimidation or the pursuit of greatness via civilizational thumos. I choose the latter.
Chad Wolf serves as the chair of Homeland Security and Immigration Policy and chair of the Western Hemisphere Initiative at AFPI. He is the former acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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