5 notable reactions to violent riots roiling France: 'They're destroying that country'

4. Mark Steyn: 'Civilizational dénouement'

Canadian-born political commentator Mark Steyn, who has been warning for decades about Europe's demographic crisis amid cratering native birth rates and mass immigration, penned an article Monday that described the unrest in France as "the same old same old, albeit accelerating toward the final civilizational dénouement."

Noting the destruction of the Limoges Town Hall, whose architecture he remembered visiting with admiration, Steyn rejected the media framing of the violence as education protests by "children." He argued instead that the rioters were not traditional French ones, but rather a combination of hardcore leftists and those "of a migrant background."

Citing footage of a rioter igniting a flamethrower in a woman's face and bystanders callously recording a firefighter in flames "so they can upload his incineration to TikTok," Steyn claimed neither faction cares about France, but would simply like to see the country burn.

"It's very simple—they aren't French," Steyn wrote in response to Macron questioning in his national address how Frenchmen could "do this to France." He speculated that French leftists are in some cases "pre-assimilating with what they see as an inevitable future," and warned that everyday Europeans will eventually have to pick a side as their culture collapses.

Steyn has long been writing about what he has described as the erosion of Western societies under mass immigration and failed assimilation.

In his 2006 bestselling book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Steyn warned that low birth rates, an unsustainable welfare state and post-Christian cultural exhaustion threaten to render Western civilization, and especially Europe, unrecognizable in the coming decades as Islam expands demographically and culturally.

Given its comparative religious and demographic health at the time, Steyn argued in 2006 that the United States would be left as the last major Western power. In his follow-up 2011 book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, he wrote that catastrophic debt, the welfare state, a loss of cultural self-reliance and political inertia were dragging the U.S. into the wider Western decline, and that rising powers such as China would ultimately fill the vacuum.