by Sarah Lee

As France's street protests continue to burn and batter La République, and with new and similar protests popping off in Milan, the question of just who is doing the protesting — and who controls the narrative about it — has become as important as the protests themselves.

French President Emmanuel Macron and many legacy media outlets are determined to believe the protests are simply the voices of the unheard, legitimately disgruntled youth apparently seeking a better future for themselves by looting Louis Vuitton. Others warn the riots are driven by a red-green alliance of communists and Muslim immigrants who will ultimately begin their protests anew in the U.S. thanks to unchecked immigration. This is what Texas Sen. Ted Cruz suggested on his podcast Monday, raising the question of whether the U.S. has, as Europe has already done, "invited in an invasion."

Asra Nomani, senior editor of investigations at Fox News Digital, has released a detailed accounting of the groups behind the French unrest, collectively calling them "Chaos, Inc." At last count, Nomani has identified 101 groups — mostly adult (not student) led — that are now calling for more protests, and whose efforts are being amplified by groups reportedly aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Across the Atlantic, leaders in the U.S. franchise of 'Chaos Inc.' are amplifying the protests," Nomani writes. "University of California at Berkeley academic Hatem Bazian, founder of anti-Israel Palestinian organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, shared videos from the protests." Bazian, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) are alleged to have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, with one witness telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that "AMP functions today as one of the Brotherhood's principal propaganda arms in the United States."

This amplification of messaging interests Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation who has expertise in global politics and foreign policy.

"The marches [in France] are being advertised and elevated by BreakThrough News," Gonzalez noted. "You have to ask yourself why."

BreakThrough News, according to Capital Research Center investigator Robert Stilson, "is run by members of the explicitly communist Party for Socialism and Liberation, a group whose political platform calls for a revolution in the United States [and] is part of the broader network of U.S.-based far-left activist groups centered around pro-China funder Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans," a co-founder of Code Pink.

Experts like Jon Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), recognize the need in this online environment to analyze the European troubles at least partly through the lens of addressing information dissemination as a tactic of the larger war. It's a tactic, he admits, that the West is "behind the 8-ball on."

Schanzer's organization, among other things, busies itself by tracking Muslim Brotherhood-linked accounts on X that were impersonating Israelis during the war with Iran and "amplify[ing] divisive political and social narratives: criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, highlighting alleged Israeli security failures, claiming Israel's democracy is collapsing, criticizing Israel’s Haredi population, and occasionally calling for a revolution."

"What's needed right now is an effort to block and purge foreign influence across the U.S.," says Schanzer. "We need better guardrails on social media, [especially on accounts] engaging anonymously because it's hard to know who's who."

He pointed out that large, known networks like the Muslim Brotherhood, largely funded by the nation of Qatar, are perniciously hard to track, but that their messaging is generally consistent and recognizable, and the Marxist/Islamist partnership and associated propaganda that began after the Oct. 7 attacks falls in line with that messaging.

Schanzer noted that the U.S. already has laws that prevent foreign entities from exerting influence in the U.S.; at minimum, ones that demand disclosure. But, he says, the new front in the information war is "probably going to require some voluntary actions on the part of social media companies to flag suspicious networks and messages" similar to the way X voluntarily made an account's country of origin publicly visible.

"The same accounts that have been pushing these Red-Green narratives are also very involved in elections," he warned. "The promotion of the DSA narrative, the promotion of [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, the promotion of the so-called Squad, the promotion of Hamas candidates across the country."

Gonzalez, recognizing that some of the groups in Nomani's report are associated with Islamism (which he distinguishes as the political version of Islam distinct from the religious observance of Islam), suggested other questions people in the West need to start asking, no matter the discomfort they may feel or the criticism they take.

"Is Islamism integral to Islam?" he asks. "Are we fooling ourselves into thinking they are discrete, separate things? If that is the case, what do we do?"

Gonzalez also believes the U.S. in particular needs to get back to an immigration policy that focuses on assimilation, one that favors the cultures that are more willing to assimilate into American culture.

"Assimilation has become a dirty word, and that needs to end," he says. "CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] has as a goal to elect a number of Muslim people to political office — so we would be foolish as Americans not to have an open debate on these questions."