"The Big Weekend Show" co-host says the country's violent student protests are "a cautionary tale" for the U.S., warning open borders lead to unrest and misplaced anger.
Page A3From§Eachthe midnight edition — 4 October 2026
Fox watches a teacher get doused in gasoline in France, calls it a warning about open borders
As it ran on the front
On Saturday's Big Weekend Show, the host called France's student riots "a cautionary tale," warning that open borders breed exactly this kind of unrest. It is a clean thesis delivered in one breath, and it survives for about as long as the next sentence in this network's own archive.
Start with the 1st of October, when this outlet ran its own dispatch on the unrest: "hundreds arrested, violence spreads nationwide," the story said, with "officials warning of outside agitators." Outside agitators. Not outside borders — a claim about domestic troublemakers, filed by this network three days before its own host moved the blame to the border. That is not a cautionary tale about open borders. That is — hold on. That is a different story than the one we just told.…
…(cont) Walk it forward anyway. The same week, the Washington Examiner filed its version, attributing the mayhem to "far-left instigation," which at least keeps the trouble inside the country. French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu convened an emergency meeting after more than a week of protests in the Paris region. None of it involves a border crossing. None of it involves an immigrant. It involves French high school students protesting a French funding formula, administered by a French government, in French schools.
On the 2nd of October, riot police met those students with tear gas and shields in cities across the country, battling to contain protests the New York Post described plainly as being over "classroom conditions and funding." Funding. The thing schools run out of. The day before, attackers doused a headteacher in gasoline and set fires in at least two schools — an atrocity, and also not an immigration story by any definition this desk can locate. It is a story about what happens when a funding fight curdles, in a country with no open border anywhere in the sentence.
So the warning stands, corrected: this is a cautionary tale about what happens when a school system is starved and the resulting fire is called something else on television. The open border was never in the room. The gas can was.
“This is the whole racket: French kids get tear-gassed over the same thing American teachers scream about every budget cycle — there's no money for the classroom — and Fox's answer is to point at a border nobody in the story crossed. Somebody doused a teacher in gasoline over school funding, and the network airs a monologue about immigration instead. That's not a cautionary tale, that's what it looks like when nobody fixes the money.”
“Look, the point stands regardless of the particulars — unrest is unrest, and when a society loosens control at the border, somewhere down the line the streets reflect that, that's just basic — okay, technically no one in this story crossed a border, the story says "classroom funding," our own newsroom said "outside agitators," not outside the country — did I say open borders? That's not what I meant.”
The receipts
Riot police clashed with high school students in cities across France on October 2nd, as President Macron’s government battled to contain increasingly violent protests over classroom conditions and funding.
Mayhem has broken out across France, as a student-led protest has escalated into acts of arson and battery of police, leading the prime minister to call an emergency meeting with officials. French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu convened the crisis meeting on Thursday following more than a week of protests by students in the Paris…
· Attackers douse teacher in gasoline as student protests rage across France from the morgue, 1 Oct 2026
· France rocked by student riots as hundreds arrested, violence spreads nationwide from the morgue, 1 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.