“We got the guillotine, you better run.”
Those words could have easily been expressed at the turn of the nineteenth century as French Jacobins and other groups called for the heads of the wealthy and privileged classes.
Indeed, for some of us, it was a bizarre sense of déjà vu. As the scene unfolded with this chant and a full-sized guillotine in Portland, I was putting final touches on my forthcoming book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, will be released in 2026 as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It explores the American and French Revolutions and why one became the most stable democracy in the world and the other became the blood-soaked “Terror.”
The appearance of guillotines is becoming commonplace in protests by the left. From protests against Trump to those against Israel, the symbol of the Terror is being rolled out as a warning to those with opposing views: “We got the guillotine, you better run.”
It is the ultimate expression of an age of rage. There is no question that it is protected speech. However, it is part of what I have called “rage rhetoric,” and it is meant to inflame others. It suggests that the only solution to these issues is what the French called “the razor of the Republic.”
In the French Revolution, the irony is that those who turned the guillotine into the symbol of revolution were themselves beheaded on the same platforms. Robespierre and others would ultimately be dispatched in the same atmosphere of rage and revelry.
As my new book discusses, most revolutions are driven by establishment figures who seek to capitalize on the wave of popular rage to gain power. We are seeing that today with many Democratic leaders using rage rhetoric to appeal to the far extremes of their political bases.
Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger called on people to get ready to “take to the streets” because the political system is failing them. (This is the same Adam Kinzinger who previously denounced Trump and others for reckless rhetoric: “Look, violent rhetoric is wrong, and has no place. But MAGA pretending they didn’t light this fire is gaslighting to the 100th power.”).
California Governor Gavin Newsom declared, “I’m going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.” It follows other violent rhetoric from Democratic leaders.
One House member explained that there is a “sense of fear and despair and anger” among voters that “puts us in a different position where … we can’t keep following norms of decorum.” One House Democrat told Axios, “Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) posted a picture brandishing a baseball bat.
Yet another admitted that constituents have told them to prepare for “violence … to fight to protect our democracy.” Others reported that liberals are talking about the need “to storm the White House and stuff like that.”
One explained that “They’re angry beyond things.” Another said, “It’s like … the Roman coliseum. People just want more and more of this spectacle.”
Some are discussing triggering or staging violence. One member said, “What I have seen is a demand that we get ourselves arrested intentionally or allow ourselves to be victims of violence, and … a lot of times that’s coming from economically very secure white people.”
In one encounter, a lawmaker told Axios: “I actually said in a meeting, ‘When they light a fire, my thought is to grab an extinguisher’. And someone at the table said, ‘Have you tried gasoline?’”
Some have. Protesters are burning cars, dealerships, and even lawyers and reporters on the left are throwing Molotov cocktails at police. We have also seen a massive increase in attacks on ICE officers, who are now covering their faces to avoid doxxing or retaliation against themselves or their families.
In the end, today’s pseudo-revolutionaries are likely to find themselves tomorrow’s reactionaries. Leading mobs is rarely a safe place to be as more radical elements take hold of a movement. The result is an inexorable pattern that runs throughout history as revolution devours its own.
My comment will be laughed at but what we are seeing is a spiritual war of great enormity. The Kingdom of Darkness against The Kingdom of Light. We are watching prophesy unfolding before us in real time. This offers the question, are you on the Wide Road that takes you to the Wide Gate are the Narrow Road to the Narrow Gate. It matters in eternity!
The Narrow Gate
13 “You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. 14 But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it. Matthew 7:13-14 NLT
Georg Buchner wrote the play Danton’s Death in 1835. It still rings true today how the rage will start to cannibalize itself. The play should be revived, perhaps studied in High Schools and Colleges for the moral questions it offers for discussion.
Rabble:
I’ve been saying this for a while; eventually, the masters, who sicced their dogs on anything they deigned wrong, conditioning them to always attack, will run out of things to sicc, and be surprised when the dogs turn on each other, and eventually, on the masters themselves. We are starting to see it as the more moderate Democrats try to stay in power by leaning center, and being caught off guard by the rabid aggression of the left, a la Eric Adams.
The loser leftists touting decapitations would do well to exercise some caution. Madame Guillotine herself has no politics, only an appetite for necks. If the rule of law finally fails, and a system for this is created, it will be those with fewer arms who determine who is queued up for the national razor. The vast majority of the half-billion firearms in the hands of private US citizens are *NOT* owned by woke fools. FAFO
Accurate but clumsily phrased – should have been “it will be those with greater arms who determine who is queued up for the national razor. “
Free speech should end with the advocation of violence.
Tell that to the Founding Fathers.
No one is advocating violence, but many are predicting violence. It is common when government becomes to repressive. Yet no one knows the outcome. The American Revolution was a success for the people, the French Revolution not so much and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution was a disaster for the people.
Militant forms of communication are a sign of impending dysfunction in any organization. It degrades and inhibits constructive thinking. I’m OK with Turley’s position that govt. prosecution is a wrongheaded approach to enforcing civility. But, where he is much less convincing is willingness to give over public attention to the most outrageous, incivil gestures, as if militants have a right to drown out calmer, well-reasoned, respectful, dispassionate voices.
This article is a great example of cherrypicking exceedingly rare expressions that reach high on the “rage” totem pole . They don’t have numbers behind them, just alarmist sensationalism.
What if someone who brought a theatrical guillotine to a political rally were just ignored by journalists of character?
What if that militant showoff had to endure the humiliation of not stirring emotions?….of having to skulk back to the garage in silent embarrassment?
While watching the Senate’s grilling of Kennedy this week I was struck by the fact that all the questioners were very shrill, and that they almost always failed to formulate any factual questions. That rhetorical trick and tone matched my image of the Inquisition, in which virtually the only acceptable statements were conclusory accusations of heresy and lying about everything in general.
It was not a hearing or even a trial. It skipped that part and jumped straight to the sentencing. The Senate can no longer claim to be the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Brownstone Institute: The Plot to Get RFK
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-plot-to-get-rfk/
“On the eve before the US Senate reconvenes, a detailed secret trade-association memo plotting the removal of US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has leaked. It reads like a coup attempt against regulatory reform—and they are spending millions to make sure Kennedy is out of office by September.”
Rabble:
that’s how you know how scared they are of him, and how pissed they are that their normal vendetta attacks are ineffectual.
*. 300 South Korean illegals , Georgia Hyundai plant? The problem is there aren’t any Georgia Americans willing to work?
Chicago woman said illegals in Chicago are needed to do work because Chicago Americans are working in the social services jobs?
There’s your problem?
Turley,
Before you release that book, maybe you should listen to “Fat Cats, Bigga Fish” by The Coup.
They are literally chanting its chorus. The line is a provocative and metaphorical statement, not a literal threat, intended to represent the power of the oppressed to overcome their oppressors.
While I don’t agree with this rhetoric, it is certainly less provocative then the J6 “Hang, Mike Pence” riots. No metaphoric language there.
To write this article without properly contextualizing the radicalization of the rhetoric of both parties is lazy at best. Do better.
Name another day/protest from the right than J6…or kindly STFU. You leftists have rioted, looted, and burned hundreds of days in hundreds of towns for years…and bleat J6 like the dumbest bunch of sheep God ever spawned.
Functional adults are tired of the *Both sides do it* stupidity. Try being one and you may understand.
People on the left like the idiot you responded to are incapable of acting like functional adults. They are stupid little children in grown up bodies and they cling to their illusions like that J6 was some super-significant event, while the rest of the world has moved on.
Has anyone thoroughly investigated the possibility that it was some of the government plants who instigated the “Hang Mike Pence” chants?
Rabble:
semi-OT, but you’d think that the left would be celebrating Trump admin sinking drug boats before they hit the USA. Without the actions of the cartels, George Floyd would still be alive! All Trump is doing is preventing more Saint Floyds in the future!
“No metaphoric language there”??? You know as well as anyone that “Hang Mike Pence” was NOT a literal threat. Nobody there had the slightest intention of hanging Pence. They had no ability to do it and no intention of doing it. It was the same as “Lock her up” — an accusation of treason, a call for a trial to be held, not a threat.
None of them seems even to have had anything to do with the symbolic “gallows” that was erected OFF Capitol grounds by some unknown people. But that stage-prop “gallows” was a symbolic statement exactly like these guillotines.
Yes, Obviously J6 Protestors were absolutely going to Hang Kike Pence – on a Gallows barely strong enough to “hang” a small teddy bare that had a big sign on it – that the Media went out of its way NOT to photgraph that said “This is art”.
I doubt that the Left Wing nuts Guilotines brought to protests work either.
Overall I do NOT agree with Turley I do not think that violent political rhetorice leads to actual violence.
The people who commit political violence fall into three overlapping catagories.
Those actually seeking power – Like hitler.
True beleivers – like Hitlers supporters and Nut jobs,
by far the largest group are the nut jobs.
Most of these leave manifestos that are so confused that each side can usually blame the other.
I do not care if J6 protestors bring fake Gallows of left wing nuts being fake Guilotines.
I will be concerend when they bring real ones.
At the same time each of us is free to make judgements. I will defend left wingnuts right to express their anger with fake Guilotines. but that does not mean I do not think they are delusion.
Every American should have to read, in intricate detail, exactly how and why the French Revolution went off the rails. And I have hope that your upcoming book will do that. Too many only see the pretty, sexy side of democracy and not the ugly, dark side, which is why we are, as Ben Franklin advised, “a republic, if you can keep it”.
Aimeslee, That seems a remarkably good suggestion. So many revolutions go off the rails that a companion study might be why our revolution went so well. I suspect William of Orange and the example of his moderation had much to do with it together with the common law.
For that matter close study of the Russian Revolution is likely to be profitable. Early on they kept the mistakes of the French Revolution in mind with the hope of avoiding them. And yet….
While Kerensky was comparatively moderate he suffered from the delusion that he had “no enemies to the left,” while savages like Lenin were to his left, smiling but ready to strike.
Kerensky was lucky to die in exile, avoiding assassination.
But at times I wonder if we can truly learn anything from history. Certainly not at our universities in their current degraded state.
How does one read “in intricate detail?”
Read general histories of quality followed by first person accounts like that of Arthur Young and Madam de Stael’s personal chapter in her French Revolution and add Thomas Carlye’s superb but difficult allusive history. There are others.
The puzzling thing was that many were very smart people, many lawyers and some scientists like Carnot, and polymath soldiers like Napoleon.
And those who survived the Terror embraced an Emperor Napoleon who held more power than the dead and despised king.
It is a history at once horrific and mesmerizing and complex.
By not reading it wrong.
The guillotine was used because someone watched a Columbo episode about magicians.
While it is fiction, not history (although history written by the victors is frequently as fictional) Dickens “A Tale of Two Cities” gives a pretty accurate flavor. Unfortunately, his conclusion proved to be overly optimistic:
“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance [a lieutenant of Madame Defarge], the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
They will go by the way of the piece of crap Forest Gump knocked out for Jenny. If they are lucky.