On Aug. 9, California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom made his latest pitch to the mob by proclaiming himself “an established insurgent.” It was vintage Newsom trying to be everything to everyone, part of the establishment and part of the revolution. Like a violent pacifist or a preservation arsonist, it makes no sense to anyone else. However, with the victory of radicals across the country, Newsom is trying to join other armchair revolutionaries in seeking to lead the far-left mob. He believes that he can use a class war that will spare him while destroying his enemies. Call it the Danton delusion.
In my book “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss the French Revolution and its decline into what the Framers called a mobocracy. What became known as “The Terror” was started not by the working class, but by educated lawyers, journalists and even aristocrats as part of the Jacobin movement. One of the central figures was a lawyer named Georges Jacques Danton, a gifted orator and writer.
Danton would become the justice minister and later a member of the infamous Committee of Public Safety. The more he facilitated the rage, the more he found himself captured by it. Achieving power at the head of a mob, Danton fed the bloodlust of revolution, sending thousands to the guillotine and allegedly masterminding atrocities such as the September Massacres. Danton secured power by calling others dangerous reactionaries, declaring, “The bell we are about to ring . . . sounds the charge on the enemies of our country.”
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Danton struggled to stay ahead of the mob by feeding victims into the grinder of a class war. Eventually, however, the mob had finished off the aristocrats, clergy and merchants. The most radical Jacobins, led by his ally Maximilien Robespierre, then turned on their fellow Jacobins, including Danton.
Before his fall, it was dawning on Danton that there would be no end to the killings. When one supporter excitedly told him of more executions of moderates as guilty of “factionalism,” Danton remarked, “Were all factious. If they deserve to be guillotined, we all deserve so. Those men in Paris will guillotine the entire Republic.”
And so they did. Danton himself would stand before the “national razor” on April 5, 1794.
Notably, the radicals today are also calling for purges of the Democratic Party of moderates and denouncing dissenters as part of “factionalism.” Yet, Newsom still hopes that he can use the mob for his own ambitions, ignoring Dantons warning, “Woe betide those who would provoke revolutions.”
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Newsom wants to be one of the red aristocrats of the new Democratic Party. By calling for radical changes to our constitutional system, he is hoping that the <a href="https://foxnews.com/category/politics/so
