The same way they treat San Francisco

Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris

Apologies… This post contains some coarse language.

The Paris Olympics went just fine. Right-wingers had predicted that it would go very badly. They said that Paris was a cesspool, and that the level of crime would be terrible. According to the Associated Press, 30,000 social media bots in 13 languages were spreading ugly memes about Paris. For example: “Paris, Paris, 1-2-3, go to Seine and make a pee.”

What the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said about this won’t be distributed by 30,000 bots on social media. But you can read about it in Le Monde (though the full text of the article is available only to subscribers).

The Times of London (behind a paywall) also wrote about Hidalgo’s interview with Le Monde:

“Fuck reactionaries, fuck the extreme right, fuck all those who want to shut us in a war with everyone against everyone.”

To quote from the Times of London:

Hidalgo told Le Monde that criticism of her was orchestrated by “a reactionary and extreme-right planet” which nourished a “hatred” for Paris because it was the city “of all freedoms, the refuge for LGBTQI+, … a city that has a left-wing woman mayor, and what is more of foreign origin and with dual nationality and an ecologist and feminist to boot.” (Hidalgo was born in Spain.)

This is the same treatment that San Francisco, where I lived for 18 years, has always gotten from right-wingers. Let them say what they want. Let them eat cake, and let them live in Texas.