RIP Quentin Deranque, 23: In the Streets of Lyon, a Young French Rightist Is Beaten to Death (Video)

On February 12, a handful of young women belonging to a right-leaning group called Némésis came out in Lyon to protest against a university meeting of the LFI (La France Insoumise party) deputy Rima Hassan, and among the dozen security personnel they had retained was a young Catholic math student named Quentin Deranque. 

That day, the seven women in le Collectif Némésis, an anti-immigration collective fighting violence against Western women are confronted by a dozen members of La Jeune Garde (The Young Guard), an Antifa-type organization created by LFI's Raphaël Arnault (and officially dissolved last June), some of whom land blows on and try to strangle some of the girls. The rightists fight back and it soon became "like a rugby match" (BFMTV video, Le Parisien video, Le Progrès video, and — best, IMO — Le Monde video). According to The Guardian, 

Images broadcast by TF1 of the alleged attack showed several people hitting three others who were lying on the ground, two of whom managed to escape. One witness told AFP: “People were hitting each other with iron bars.”

After Quentin Deranque falls down, the kicks keep coming, and two days later, he dies of a severe brain injury. It soon turns out that among the suspects arrested are collaborators of deputies from the radical La France Insoumise party. 

While the Left has duly gone through the gestures of condemning the murder — participating, for instance, in the minute of silence at the National Assembly — in practice, its reaction has been more of a cornucopia of blame missives fired against the (far) right, from a student saying "I am in favor of Quentin's death" as he tears down RNJ posters commemorating the late student and a mother in Caen holding a baby saying "No to violence from the far right" to VIPs claiming that "We are the ones who were attacked. People in Lyon are scared, because of the far right!" and demanding (as did LFI's Mathilde Panot) that Nemesis be kept away from the party's organizations, "or it's going to end badly!" 

If you feel all of this is sounding reminiscent of the Leftist drama queens' reactions to the deaths of Americans like Charlie Kirk and Andrew Breitbart, you're not alone. More than a few Frenchmen have written as much in the past few days, such as Gregory Vanden Bruel, in From Charlie Kirk to Quentin, the Far Left Kills, or Patrick Atlan , in trying to explain How to Recognize Fascism. Gregory Vanden Bruel:

Quentin's death reminds us that far-left activists act with complete impunity, watchdogs of the very power they claim to fight, punks with their decadent ideas and yet lapdogs whenever courage is required. Anyone who has spent five minutes, fifty times, every day, facing them knows this. The antifascists, who have adopted this label to cloak their nauseating methods in a veneer of respectability, intimidate, flour-bomb, beat, and kill, but, since their victims are right-wing, morality no longer holds any weight in their eyes: all means are justified, even the most "impactful," to use the words of the French left's Lider Maximo.

La mort de Quentin nous rappelle que les militants d’extrême gauche agissent en toute impunité, chiens de garde du pouvoir qu’ils pensent combattre, punks à chiens d’idées décadentes et toutous dès qu’il s’agit d’être courageux. Quiconque s’est trouvé cinq minutes, cinquante fois, tous les jours face à eux le savent. Les antifascistes, qui se sont attribués cette étiquette pour couvrir leurs méthodes nauséabondes d’un vernis de respectabilité, intimident, enfarinent, frappent et tuent, mais, comme leurs victimes sont de droite, il n’existe plus, à leurs yeux, de morale qui vaille : tous les moyens sont permis, même les plus « impactants » pour reprendre les termes du lider maximo de la gauche française.

La France Insoumise hurls broadside after broadside against the right, which allegedly wishes to "transform political debate into a form of civil war" while the LFI's leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, goes so far as to ask for the dissolution of Némésis because the collective made entirely of females roughly between 18 and 30 "is dangerous. It attacks our leaders, it threatens our lives." (Mise à jour: Merci à Sarah pour l'Instalien and to Tappa Keggabru for providing an English-language France 24 video.)

As the pauvre extrême gauche's Mathilde Panot tried to diminish the death of Quentin in the Assemblée Nationale, comparing one assassination to others in the past (notice that French Wikipedia's descriptions of Quentin Deranque and especially Némésis are so extremely partisan throughout that they are almost unreadable), the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has responded to the president of the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, "What you have just done is absolutely despicable and abject!" As a leftist assitant to a politician was denied entry to the National Assembly,  President Macron has condemned "an unprecedented surge of violence". 

Meanwhile, one of the main presenters of CNews, sort of France's Fox News, has declared that the leftist television channels "are putting a target on our backs." 

As you know, conservatives both inside and outside the United States are (rightly) questioning the mainstream media for branding them far right (in contrast to their opponents being described only as "the left"), but the murder of Quentin Deranque has finally led to the French interior ministry branding several as "extrême gauche" (the far left). This led in turn the LFI's Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who is caricatured on the front page of Charlie Hebdo with blood on his hands — to react with fury, denouncing France as a "the banana republic" "à la Trump".