Greetings, and welcome to Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026. If you forgot to set your clocks back last night, you’re an hour early for everything today, which for some of us is a first. Enjoy the extra hour of sleep. Election Day is Tuesday, and you’ll want to be rested.
My calendar says it’s All Saints’ Day, Author's Day, National Brush Day, Calzone Day, Cook for Your Pets Day, and Vinegar Day. Head to church, then pick up a book by a living author (we appreciate it more than you know). Brush your teeth twice as long after last night’s candy haul, fold a calzone for dinner, and whip up something special for the dog. And save the vinegar for whatever the cable-news pundits say about Tuesday’s results.
Today in History:
1512: Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel go on public display for the first time.
1604: William Shakespeare’s Othello has its first recorded performance, at Whitehall Palace in London.
1755: An earthquake, tsunami and fires destroy much of Lisbon, Portugal, killing tens of thousands.
1765: The Stamp Act takes effect in the American colonies, fueling the cry of “no taxation without representation.”
1800: John Adams becomes the first president to live in the Executive Mansion, later known as the White House.
1870: The Army Signal Service issues the first official government weather forecast.
1894: Nicholas II becomes tsar of Russia after his father, Alexander III, dies. He will be the last.
1950: Two Puerto Rican nationalists try to shoot their way into Blair House to assassinate President Harry Truman. A White House police officer dies in the gunfight.
1952: The first hydrogen bomb, code-named “Ivy Mike,” is detonated at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific.
1954: Algerian nationalists launch coordinated attacks across French Algeria, starting an eight-year war of independence against France.
1968: The movie rating system debuts, labeling films G, M, R and X.
1993: The Maastricht Treaty takes effect, formally creating the European Union.
Birthdays Today include: Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage; Grantland Rice, the dean of American sportswriters; Alfred Wegener, the scientist behind the theory of continental drift; Gary Player, golf Hall of Famer; Lyle Lovett, singer-songwriter of “If I Had a Boat”; Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers; Fernando Valenzuela, pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers; and Toni Collette, actress from The Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine. If today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.
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Over at the New York Post, Gabrielle Fahmy writes:
Fierce protests erupted across Europe Saturday evening as the most violent rioters in France threw Molotov cocktails at military police, broke into homes and set US and Israeli flags on fire.
The clashes in Paris, which started at Porte de Bagnolet and drew at least 70,000 people, exploded after the march reached its end point at Porte de Charenton, with police attempting to disperse the crowd with tear gas, water cannons and mortar fire – and protesters responding by tossing projectiles at them.
That makes three Saturdays in a row this has been going on.
Some background for those in the cheap seats: What began last month as a protest over staff shortages at a single high school southeast of Paris has spread nationwide. Students want better schools, and workers want higher wages and pensions. Then it turned violent. On October 17, police arrested 2,397 people across France, and 997 police officers and gendarmes were injured, seven of them seriously. More than half a million people took to the streets that day, and about 3,000 shops were damaged or looted. The following Saturday, Paris police counted 110,000 marchers, and that march also ended in tear gas and water cannons.
You’d think the man running the country would have a handle on what’s happening. You’d be wrong. The clearest example of the French government’s cluelessness came from President Emmanuel Macron himself. In his televised address the day after the October 17 riots, he said: “Seeing these images, we all wondered how French people could do this in France.”
[SFX: Speaking loud enough to be heard in Paris...]
Look, Sparky, the people doing this don’t think of themselves as French. Most of them think of themselves as Islamic revolutionaries, and France is just the building they happen to be burning down at the moment.
A lot of op-ed types such as myself won't say that, but I will. The pattern has been the same for years across every country in Europe, except for those that, like Poland, effectively don't accept Islamic "refugees."
It's worth noting that Brussels doesn't allow countries to ban asylum seekers based on religion, because EU law and the Refugee Convention prohibit it. What Poland refuses is the EU’s mandatory relocation system, the program that moves asylum seekers, most of them from the Middle East and Africa, from frontline states to the rest of the bloc. Poland has taken in huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees, which is one reason it was granted an exemption. How generous of them. But that doesn't mean such restrictions are not effectively in place, and the results of that are noteworthy.
Hungary, too. It voted against all 10 pieces of legislation in the pact, calling it an attack on national sovereignty. It has pledged nothing to the solidarity fund, neither migrants nor money. One wrinkle: Viktor Orbán is now Hungary’s former prime minister, so that situation may have changed, but I can't find any evidence of violence of the kind France is seeing.
Slovakia, as well. It has also pledged nothing and has given no sign it will change course. Prime Minister Robert Fico says he won’t implement the rules.
Finally, the Czech Republic. Incoming Prime Minister Andrej Babiš rejected the quota system, citing national security, and Czechia was granted a full exemption for 2026.
So, the tie between Islamic immigrants and the riots seems to be proven by such violence not happening in those countries, a point that Brussels would rather we didn't mention.
Back on the 23rd of last month ... (yeah, it's November, already) ... I wrote:
The French republican tradition insists on one national identity, so the government largely refuses to sort its citizens by ethnicity, and INSEE, the French statistical agency, operates under real legal restrictions on the subject. A French citizen is French. No hyphens, no ethnic boxes. No worries about who you import and no worries, either, about those who decide they don't want to be French at all, but foreign invaders.
As ideals go, it's worthwhile, if you ignore reality. Declaring everyone part of the same national community doesn't make them participate in it. You can decree national unity. You can't manufacture social cohesion by pretending the question doesn't exist. And refusing to count makes the hard questions harder, not easier.
The truly maddening part is that Macron knows this. In the very same speech, he blamed the violence on “far-left groups” that, along with plenty of ordinary criminals, unleashed violence without restraint. So he identified the arsonists by name and then pretended to be baffled about who lit the match. That isn’t leadership. That’s a man reading two different speeches at once.
And if you want to know what those groups stand for, look at what they set on fire tonight: American and Israeli flags. Not even French flags. Ask yourself what American and Israeli flags have to do with French school budgets, or the price of a liter of diesel. Not a blessed thing, of course. But it has everything to do with the worldview of the people throwing the Molotov cocktails. In their eyes, the Judeo-Christian West is the villain. America and Israel are the West at its most confident, so those flags burn first, and the cost-of-living grievances are just the costume.
There are real complaints underneath all this. No question of that. Energy prices in France were 21.3% higher in September than a year earlier, pushing overall inflation to 3.1%. A government that can’t keep schools staffed has earned some anger. But Macron’s answer has been a speech, a “crisis unit,” and a promise that lessons will be learned. He also had to answer for being spotted with his wife at a Céline Dion concert the night the riots broke out. Meanwhile, about 70,000 police and gendarmes had to be deployed nationwide to keep the lid on.
The French voters see it. Far-right presidential hopeful Jordan Bardella called Macron’s speech “lamentable” and “cowardly,” and said the government can no longer even protect its own people. Over on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon says the government alone is responsible for the destruction. When the far right and the far left agree you’ve failed, you’ve probably failed. France picks Macron’s successor in May, and from where I sit, the job is going to someone who isn’t confused about who is burning the place down. Assuming France exists as such by that point.
They're not alone, though. Many countries have succumbed to the demands of Brussels on the matter of citizenship, with Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Belgium, among them. And in every single case, officials in those countries blame living costs, unemployment, extremists, or "inequality." Immigration never makes the list. Nor does a lack of cultural assimilation. But there again, why would they admit that their own hands were a part of that mess?
Recommended: The Ilhan Omar Immigration Fraud Case Is Bigger Than We Thought
Now, before anyone on this side of the Atlantic gets too comfortable sneering at the French, remember that we have our own versions of these people, and some of them are on the ballot Tuesday. (I’m looking at YOU, Michigan).
In last week’s column, I talked about the DSA’s slate of candidates and how far into the Democrat Party they’ve gotten. The ideology that burns American and Israeli flags in Paris is the same one that considers ICE a “rogue” agency and sees our own police as the enemy. The only difference is how far along each country is.
We still have time to do better. That starts Tuesday.
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Thought for the Day: A leader who can’t name the problem will never solve it. A leader who names it and then acts surprised is worse.
VIP members: Let's hear from you on this topic.
Take care gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.