As we learned yesterday, 40,000 extra police officers were unable to quell the riots that are currently upending the streets of Paris and other locations around France. Cars and buildings have been going up in flames and the French people are in an uproar after police officers shot and killed an Algerian teenage motorist on Tuesday. Thousands of people have been arrested or detained as a result. So what has the French President had to say about all of this mayhem? Well, as you might expect, Emmanuel Macron is blaming just about anyone but himself. While pointing out the large number of “young or very young” people involved in the riots, Macron blamed parents for not keeping their children home at night. He also implied that the kids are imitating violent video games that have infected their minds. And some of the crackdowns he’s ordering are highly alarming, as we’ll see in a moment. (Australian Broadcasting)
President Emmanuel Macron called on parents to keep child rioters off the streets, saying some young people appeared to be copying violent video games that had “intoxicated” them.
Speaking after chairing a crisis security meeting, the 45-year-old head of state said about a third of the people arrested over three nights of rioting were “young, or very young”.
“It’s the responsibility of parents to keep them at home,” he said. “It’s not the state’s job to act in their place.”
Normally, I would be sympathetic to a call for parents to take more responsibility for their children and stop them from acting in a chaotic or illegal fashion. The Lord only knows that we could use a lot more parental supervision in America’s gang-infested cities. But in Paris this week, it seems as if there is a fairly high chance that the parents aren’t keeping their kids at home because they’re out there participating in the riots themselves.
It also seems rather lame to try to place the blame for the riots on video games. We’ve had violent video games for several decades now. The riots embroiling France are something different. The French people were already upset (and sometimes rioting) over the retirement age being raised. A police shooting seemed to only pour more oil on a fire that was already burning.
Macron’s immediate tendency toward executive crackdowns was on display this week as well. He ordered “media firms” to remove the most “sensitive content” about the riots. It seems to be working.
The Western media had 24 hour coverage of the Wagner Group mutiny in Russia. Now France is on fire and there’s almost no coverage in the Western media. Why? Because they don’t want people in the West to get bad ideas. This may happen in the US and UK soon.pic.twitter.com/BCZP2kXRMU
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) June 30, 2023
Part of Macron’s crackdown is probably driven by a desire to not be embarrassed as the world gets to see that his country is just as subject to social upheaval and unrest as the United States or anyplace else where people aren’t under the thumb of brutal autocrats. But his orders to keep news and images of the riots off of social media is part of an expanding censorship state as well. The European Union is preparing to enact the Digital Services Act (DSA) in August. It would force all social media platforms to allow the monitoring of content and the suppression of any information that doesn’t fit The Narrative. This is all part of what’s coming to be known as The Censorship Industrial Complex.
Emmanuel Macron is probably wishing that the DSA was already in place about now. And you can rest assured that Joe Biden and the rest of the swamp creatures in Washington are working on something similar even as we speak. It can’t be allowed. Refuse to comply. Do not allow yourself to be silenced. They did this all through the pandemic and they grew far too used to wielding that sort of absolute power over free speech. We must force them to give it up.
Read the full article here