Opinion

JONATHAN TURLEY: Newsom thinks he can control the far-left mob, but history disagrees

California governor trails fellow Democrats as radicals demand ever more extreme bona fides

By Jonathan Turley Fox News

Published August 16, 2026 7:00am EDT

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Newsom is branding himself an ‘insurgent’ despite a ‘railroad of failures’: Katie Zacharia

Trump media senior communications advisor Katie Zacharia discusses California Gov. Gavin Newsom calling himself an ‘established insurgent’ and the Trump administration’s crackdown on alleged fraud on ‘Fox News @ Night.’ 

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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........

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