The smoke rising from Marseille, the smashed storefronts of Frankfurt, and the military patrols deployed to the streets of Milan over the weekend are not isolated incidents of youthful misbehavior. They are the symptoms of a dying status quo. What began as scattered student marches has metastasized into a continent-wide explosion of civil unrest. As hundreds of thousands of protesters clashed with riot police across France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium, the Western world was handed a stark, flaming preview of its own trajectory if it continues down the path of systemic denial.
Legacy media will predictably attempt to minimize these riots as simple frustration over inflation. That is a convenient fiction. The truth is far more corrosive: Europe is experiencing the total, predictable exhaustion of a strained, broken system.
