Protests raged at more than 1,200 French high schools in a single week, with arson, blockades, attacks, and clashes with police. This is not a student movement grown out of control, it is a legitimacy crisis in action.
In the U.S., the plan for a similar rejection of government authority metastasized from sporadic anti-ICE violence in the 2010s to the burning of police stations and major city blocks in 2020, the roadblocks by Gaza protesters in 2024, and the dramatic anti-federal uprising in Minneapolis in January 2026.
