Video taking off 22x its usual first day

France's protests fuel WSJ Opinion's welfare-state critique

"France's Bonfire of Inanities" draws an unusually large audience for an argument linking school funding to broader public-spending pressures.

Channel:

Wall Street Journal Opinion Story of October 11, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 81,884 views a day, 22 times a normal first day on this channel (3,689).

France’s Bonfire of Inanities

School funding is the starting point, but the welfare state is the target. In "France's Bonfire of Inanities," Wall Street Journal Opinion connects protests over education spending with earlier disputes over fuel duty, pensions and public services.

This is opinion commentary: its central argument is that protesters are defending a level of state provision France can no longer afford. The upload has approached 100,000 views, with an estimated first-day audience more than twenty times the channel's usual start for a regular video.

The unusually busy comments focus on the cost of public benefits and whether school funding adequately explains the protests. Those are arguments raised by viewers, not evidence of what brought demonstrators into the streets.

The channel also posted "France's Financial Woes Have Led to Protests and Strikes," a separate Potomac Watch segment in which Joe Sternberg discusses the country's financial pressures. It gives the same subject a podcast treatment alongside the more pointedly titled commentary.

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The facts

Channel: Wall Street Journal Opinion
Subscribers: 147,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
Channel views, last 7 days: 744,782
Channel views, pace per day: 39,209 (on a normal day: 76,833)
Video published: October 9, 2026
Video views so far: 99,520 (2 days online)
Video views, pace per day: 85,849

The numbers

The France commentary drew a much larger first-day audience than a typical regular upload on WSJ Opinion. Its comment section was also unusually busy.

the video's first day

usual first day here

3,689

this video

81,884

subscribers

147,000

▲ 1,000 in the last 7 days

total views

25,147,844

views per day

39,209