To my American friends: if you don't want to repeat France's mistakes, read this. In 1983, kids from the French suburbs, mostly sons and daughters of North African immigrants, marched from Marseille to Paris. Their demand was simple: treat us as French. Equality. Same rules, same country. A year later, the Socialist Party captured that energy. SOS Racisme was born, with its little yellow hand and the slogan "Touche pas à mon pote" (Hands off my buddy). Concerts, celebrities, prime-time TV. On paper, a beautiful anti-racist movement. In practice, it changed the deal. The message to an entire generation stopped being "become French, this country is yours." It became "you are different, you are a victim, and France owes you." The right to difference replaced the duty to belong. Anti-racism became a political weapon and a moral alibi for the left. Assimilation is a demanding promise: you take on the language, the history, the codes, and in exchange the nation adopts you completely. We abandoned that promise. Instead of building the conditions for assimilation, we built the conditions for resentment. Then add socialism on top, and you get a lethal cocktail. A school system that stopped teaching and started preaching. Fewer fundamentals, more grievance. Kids who struggle to write a paragraph but can recite that France is a colonial, systemically racist country. A welfare state that teaches you the country owes you everything and you owe it nothing. A political class that explains every failure by discrimination, never by choices, effort or culture. Tell a teenager for 40 years that he's the victim of the country he lives in, and don't be surprised when he treats it like an enemy. Look at France right now. Since mid-September, a high school "movement" has turned into weeks of street clashes: nearly 700 police officers injured, more than 200 students hurt. On October 17, a nationwide day of protest that started over fuel prices and the cost of living. The Prime Minister himself said it was no longer a student movement but urban violence. And the far left tied the day to colonial memory and the 1961 Algerian massacre in Paris. A protest about gas prices, rewired into a trial of the nation itself. That's the software we installed in the 80s, running at full speed. Now look at New York. What I see forming there is the exact alliance we've had in France for 20 years: hard-left economics plus identity grievance, with political Islam welcomed as an ally instead of recognized as a problem. We even have a word for it: islamo-gauchisme. The far left needs a new oppressed class and new voters. Islamists need a political shield. Each uses the other. To be clear: this is not about Muslims as people. Millions of French Muslims are fully, proudly French, and they are often the first victims of this alliance, because it locks their kids into a victim identity and hands their neighborhoods to the most radical voices. It's about a political model. And I've watched it play out for four decades. America's superpower has always been assimilation. You show up, you become American. Hyphen optional, flag mandatory. The day you replace that with "you are a victim and this country owes you," you've started the French experiment. We ran it. I can tell you how it ends. Don't.