Paris riots sparking nationalist uprising?

French President Emanuel Macron must be tremendously confused by the riots that have seized Paris.

Both conventional wisdom and polling show Europeans favor strict environmental regulations (a whopping 60 percent want the government to pass more and stricter environmental laws), but when the bill comes to pay for sweeping environmental initiatives the French people erupt in violent protests. Macron and other European globalist leaders, whose domestic approval ratings are (as President Trump correctly noted) already terrible, must also be confused or envious of how American ex-President Barack Obama was able to implement highly unpopular policies while avoiding any personal responsibility for the economic destruction that resulted for the nation and individual Americans.

Between January 2009 and January 2017, the U.S. economy dragged along under the weight of ever-increasing regulations, massive tax increases, an increasingly bloated government bureaucracy and an uncertainty among business leaders regarding future regulatory and tax changes. This insecurity resulted in record amounts of investment capital being parked for safekeeping or stashed off-shore. Investors' reluctance to invest in such a climate of uncertainty enraged liberals, who characterized this financial prudence as "hoarding wealth." The king of all drags on the economy, though, was the Affordable Care Act. Even though it was commonly referred to as "Obamacare," Obama himself was never tied to the economic catastrophe it unleashed on businesses, the U.S. health-care system and ordinary Americans.

In fact, Obama was mysteriously inoculated from any responsibility for any of the results of his own policies.

Rush Limbaugh referred to this remarkable phenomenon as the "Limbaugh Theorem," observing that Obama and his defenders portrayed the president of the United States as having nothing to do with the U.S. economy or the results of his own policies and initiatives. The Limbaugh Theorem extended to everything having to do with Obama. When he and members of his administration made comments inflaming domestic racial tensions or anti-American sentiment abroad, there was never any accountability attached to Obama. When his massive stimulus bills were passed and shown to be colossal wastes of taxpayer money, the response from liberal media was always something like, "Well, at least he's trying!"

TRENDING: Report: Trump is considering forming a new political party

Even when specific, major claims offered to support his policies were shown to be completely false, such as "The typical American family will save $2,500 per year on health-care [under my plan]," "These are shovel-ready jobs" and "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!", the left simply shrugged and argued that something besides Obama was to blame for his explicit promises being broken. Nothing that happened was ever his fault.

Barack Obama's actual performance was never questioned, because the only thing that mattered was his good intentions.

By contrast, the French people largely seem to support the vague environmental pretexts for the massive tax increases and associated bureaucratic quagmire, but they hold Macron and his government responsible for what they believe is an unacceptable increase in fuel costs. The increased fuel taxes are expected to take another $39 billion out of the pockets of ordinary French people.

Is there something else happening here, though?

As President Macron partially caved to the ongoing protests this week, postponing the imposition of the fuel tax that started the riots, it is becoming clear these demonstrations are about more than this particular tax. A protest leader told BBC, "The French people want a complete political transformation. They want to change the way things have been for the last 30 years. We're sick and tired of taxes being raised and the quality of public services going down."

Thirty years? Complete political transformation? This is not about a gas tax. This is the same message being heard across Western nations.

Globalist leaders across the U.S. and Western Europe have had a lock on political power for decades, with the change in parties in leadership having little or no effect on the advancing globalist agenda. Thirty years ago, in 1988, George H.W. Bush was elected president of the United States and so began a 28-year globalist domination of U.S foreign and domestic policy characterized by one-sided trade agreements, expensive and deadly American and allied military involvement in Middle East wars, uncontrolled immigration and dramatic increases in the size and cost of government. In 2016 a backlash against these policies culminated in the Brexit vote in the U.K. and the election of Donald Trump as president in the U.S. While other nations have had similar increases in nationalist sentiment, they have largely been quelled in major European countries by globalists and liberal media characterizing such movements as racist or xenophobic for their calls to change immigration policies.

If some European observers and the protest leader quoted in the BBC story are correct, it could be French nationalists have found a method to circumvent the accusations of racism used as an automatic defense mechanism of globalists and leftists when their leadership is challenged.

Whether or not the Paris riots turn out to be more than simply a tax protest, Emmanuel Macron and his dwindling number of supporters must be wishing for a French version of the Limbaugh Theorem.