Nick Freitas on France’s Decolonisation Movement and Why It Will Not Stay in France
Nick Freitas, the former Green Beret and Virginia legislator who hosts Making the Argument on BlazeTV, has argued that the unrest unfolding in France is not merely a local cost-of-living or education protest. It is the visible expression of a broader ideological project, one that pairs radical Left "decolonization" rhetoric with political Islam, and that project has already shifted its target from former colonies to Western societies themselves. In his telling, the same framework that once justified anti-colonial violence overseas is now being applied inside France, and there is no structural reason it must remain confined there.
Freitas describes an alliance of convenience. The Left and Islamist networks, he says, hold different ultimate goals and incompatible worldviews. The left is "arrogant enough to believe that Islamists just really want to be woke leftists" once they experience a sufficiently generous welfare state. Islamist actors, lacking the military or economic capacity for classical conquest, have shifted to asymmetric strategies. One of those strategies is the selective use of taqiyya, the doctrinal permission to conceal or misrepresent one's aims when dealing with non-believers, interpreted more expansively by some contemporary imams than by others. In practice, Freitas contends, this allows Islamist networks to borrow the Left's moral language while pursuing their own longer-term objectives.
That language is "decolonisation." Drawing on the classic formulation associated with Frantz Fanon and later theorists, the argument holds that colonisation itself was violence; therefore decolonisation must also be violent. What was once directed at overseas empires is now directed inward. Freitas asks the practical question: decolonise France of what? The answer offered by the movement, he says, is Western ideology itself: Christianity, capitalism, private property, markets, and the cultural habits that sustain them. Under this framing, attacks on institutions, businesses, or even emergency services are recast not as aggression but as defensive reclamation. "You're on stolen land," the rhetoric runs. Prosperity is the product of "oppressive systems," so dismantling those systems is justice rather than crime.
France has supplied recent illustrations. In mid-to-late October 2026, large-scale demonstrations that began with student and union grievances over schools, living costs, and public services repeatedly spilled into serious disorder. Interior Ministry figures put participation in the hundreds of thousands; union estimates were higher. After the main marches, hooded groups in multiple cities, including Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and others, engaged in arson, looting of shops, attacks on public buildings, and clashes with police. One town hall was set ablaze; a tourist office was torched; police reported widespread vandalism and more than a thousand arrests across the period. Authorities described organized ultra-Left elements and criminal networks exploiting the unrest. While some footage showed protesters making way for ambulances, the broader pattern has included attacks on police vehicles, officers, and public infrastructure, the kind of escalation that makes emergency services a practical as well as symbolic target once order collapses in a neighbourhood.
Freitas's claim is that this is not an isolated French pathology. The same rhetorical toolkit, stolen land, settler-colonial guilt, the legitimacy of violence as "defence," already circulates in universities, activist networks, and political parties across the Anglosphere. Australia is not exempt. Debates over Indigenous land rights, historical grievance, and institutional "decolonisation" already employ overlapping language. When that language is paired with large-scale demographic change from societies that do not share liberal democratic premises, and when elite institutions treat the resulting friction as something that must be managed rather than contained, the French sequence becomes a plausible template rather than a unique case. The Left supplies the moral cover and institutional footholds; other actors supply the demographic weight and the willingness to escalate once the cover is in place.
None of this is presented as inevitable. France still has a functioning state, a large police force, and a political right that is gaining ground. Australia has different geography, different immigration patterns, stronger recent traditions of border enforcement in some periods, and no equivalent to France's North African colonial history. Outcomes depend on choices about immigration volumes and selection, enforcement of public order, willingness to police ideological entryism, and the cultural confidence of the host society. Freitas's point is narrower and more urgent: the intellectual and organisational machinery that reframes attacks on Western institutions as moral necessity is already transnational. It has moved from theory to street violence in one major Western country. Treating that development as a purely local French problem is, in his view, a failure of pattern recognition.
The clear-and-present danger he identifies is therefore not an automatic conquest, but the normalisation of a political grammar in which property, emergency services, and the symbols of the existing order can be attacked with reduced moral or legal cost, so long as the attackers can claim the language of decolonisation. Once that grammar is widely accepted, the practical restraints on violence weaken. Whether Australia or other Western countries allow the same grammar to take hold is a political decision, not a historical inevitability. Freitas's argument is that the decision is already being forced by events in France, and that delay in recognizing the pattern only raises the cost of any later response.
