Kamala Harris' Reign of Terror

How A Harris Win Could Ignite Factionalism Not Seen Since the Civil War

When Maximilien Robespierre sought to purge the “enemies” of the French Revolution in 1793, he was initially lauded by his peers and a large section of the French public. Robespierre legitimised violence against innocent people, expanding the powers of his Committee of Public Safety and executing those “suspected” of working against the Revolution.

For some time, the “Reign of Terror” was deemed necessary among the revolutionary public, fueled by a fear of internal rebellion and declining public safety. Leading with virtually unchecked authority, Robespierre was responsible for the deaths of as many as 40,000 people – but as his list of enemies grew larger, a backlash grew, and Robespierre was shouted down by his own men, arrested, and executed. Once the Reign of Terror came to an end, members of the National Convention worked to establish a more stable political order defined by moderation.  

In many ways, the 2024 presidential election could prove a modern equivalent of the Coup d'état of 9 Thermidor. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency in less than a week’s time, the United States may see the emergence of its own Reign of Terror; a wave of political factionalism and violence that the United States has not seen since the Civil War.

That’s not a prediction I’ve come to lightly, but one based on historical trends, polling data, and current socio-economic conditions. My work helping young people leave extremist political groups, my research and books, and my direct experience in radical politics have guided me to this conclusion.

I believe my argument is compelling when looked at through the lens of four key issues: the bad-faith tactics deployed against former President Donald Trump, the likelihood of a very narrow victory for Harris, the trend of young white men joining underground extremist groups, and general economic discontent.

The fall of Maximilien Robespierre serves as an example of the danger of rewarding extremism and bad-faith tactics in the pursuit of maintaining an emerging order. A Harris victory would prove to millions of Americans that deception can win elections and that bad-faith tactics in the extreme may still be rewarded. For young Americans, it may be the only major political election they have ever paid attention to, and for others, it may be the second election in their adult life where a candidate won the White House after falsely portraying their opponents as Nazis, violent criminals, and dangers to public safety. A Harris victory would not only reward bad-faith tactics in politics; it would legitimise progressive violence against conservatives, validate efforts to destroy the lives and livelihoods of political opponents, and normalise total character assassination in the form of what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls “targeted propaganda.”

This alone should be reason enough to vote for anybody other than the Democratic ticket this year. Do you think the country will see more or less radicalism if the radicals win this time around? I expect, of course, that we will see much more of it – and as we have seen increasingly extreme reactions to conservatives in public life in recent years, so will we see progressively more violent rhetoric. Vice President Harris herself has already labelled former President Donald Trump a fascist, while former First Lady Hillary Clinton explicitly called Trump and his supporters Nazis. In effect, Clinton and Harris have established a narrative that half of the American people are enemies ­– and revolutionaries, as history teaches us, do not treat enemies kindly.

A Harris victory would also be narrow. To so vehemently and enthusiastically demonise such a huge portion of the American public in such an extreme way when an election victory can only ever be very narrow requires hubris in the extreme. Luckily for Harris, the Democratic National Committee and the rest of her handlers are plenty audacious, despite the fact that the American public agrees on much more than they disagree. Time and time again, polls show that Republicans and Democrats agree more on even some of the most contentious issues. Americans largely believe in a moderate approach to abortion, they agree that the border should be strengthened, and they want safe streets. Pew polling data from this year also showed that 65% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans consider getting money out of politics a top priority for this upcoming election. American voters do see eye to eye on a lot, though bad-faith politics and media activism are driving Americans apart.

A narrow election victory is, in theory, a symptom of a divided country. It is a problem French revolutionaries, before the Reign of Terror, sought to solve with their absolutist view of how society should be run. In 2024, a narrow victory will, instead, be more reflective of absolutist politicians’ abilities to exploit, and in Harris’ case manipulate, the public. 

Bar the outbreak of a major war, a government hated by half of the country does not typically have the power to unite it – especially when enacting policies that objectively make the lives of legal citizens worse. Unless Harris and the ultra-progressive wing of the Democratic Party lose control of the reins and our media landscape shifts dramatically, the United States will be more divided by 2028 than it is now in 2024.

If nothing changes soon, there will be Gen Z boys who have only ever known a political environment in which it is socially acceptable, even rewarded, to malign and dehumanize white, straight men.

To Harris and progressive Democrats, virtue, without which terror is fatal, and terror, without which virtue is powerless. They rationalise terror as a necessary tool to defend their revolution, and it is this threat of terror that pushes their opponents, and in particular, the demographic groups they relentlessly target, to the brink.

Despite the assumptions of America’s counter-extremism authorities, far-right extremism is not born in a void; and because it is not born in a void, it is possible for us to seek and address the conditions that create it. Among those conditions is the persistent lambasting of a victim group. In my experience in British far-right politics in my youth, a theme among the other young men with whom I would associate was a sense of grievance. More than straight discontent, my peers were angry about real issues that affected us but which were routinely ignored by the politicians. Among them, the impact of large-scale immigration on working-class towns already short on jobs, a struggling economy and a rising cost of living, and even the systematic grooming and rape of young girls by majority-Muslim gangs. Ignoring these issues, and then going as far as smearing victims for political points, is a simple recipe for extremism. We have seen this kind of behaviour in the United States for at least the last 16 years now, and I have seen no compelling evidence that Harris plans to turn it around in the next four. Should her administration and friends in the media continue on their path of defending the indefensible while vilifying young white boys, it should not feign surprise when those young men are pushed into the arms of extremists on the internet.

The further somebody goes down that rabbit hole, the harder it is for them to get out. Young men from my youth fell into that hole after feeling the same grievances I did, and they were pushed further into it by the mobs of left-wing activists, “counter-extremist” groups, and journalists who publicly bullied them for inarticulately expressing their anger. Some committed suicide, and others ended up in prison. I, thankfully, slowly navigated out of it, but that experience is what allows me to recognise the role that the progressive left – whether well-meaning or not – has in radicalising people who might otherwise never have even been political.

When Harris and her supporters say white men are the problem, and when they label Trump supporters in general fascists, Nazis, and garbage, they, in a sense, prove the far right right. They may or may not realise it, but their smear tactics provide ammunition to genuine far-right extremists who seek to exploit this anger to advance grander conspiracies that demonise other groups of people. And, by continuing to neglect the political and social issues that make it easy for the far right to recruit, we can almost guarantee an explosion of new recruits for underground far-right communities online.

Among those issues is the economy. Progressives who theorise that economic conditions are the driving factor behind rising violence and crime rates in poor Black neighborhoods fail to recognise that this same dynamic applies to far-right radicalism. In 2009, the white nationalist British National Party won nearly 1 million votes in the European Parliament elections. It followed a dramatic increase in immigration and poor economic conditions in the wake of the 2008 crash. The brief groundswell of support for this radical party, of which I was involved as a teen, has long been attributed to general discontent over immigration – but the data actually showed that voters turned out for the party over economic conditions as much as they did immigration.

Just 19% of BNP voters at the time expressed confidence that their families would prosper in the years ahead, compared to 59% of Labour voters and 42% of Conservative voters. For almost half of BNP voters, immigration was not their primary concern.

In 2020, my research paper “Extremist Opportunism in the COVID Economy” warned that the economic implications of locking down the country and shutting down the economy would embolden extremists in the years that followed, providing ample opportunities to profit from grievances against the political elite. This has already come to pass, and with the average American household spending on average $11,400 more annually to maintain the same living standards as they had in 2021, the next president of the United States must grapple with the reality that poor economic conditions will further contribute to this country’s political division and anti-politics sentiment.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that a left-wing candidate can unite this country around common goals, but I have yet to see an honest attempt by the Harris campaign to reach out to the voters who are so frequently victimised by her party. Unless the Democrats end their war on enemies of the revolution, the United States could look like a very different place by 2028. Our current media and political landscape paints a clear picture of what a Harris administration would look like: a new kind of presidency unburdened by historical precedent and actively hostile towards the values that once held this country together like glue.

If the politics that motivated Thomas Crooks to shoot former President Donald Trump in the head re-enter the White House in January, it would be a narrow endorsement for an escalation of a soft Reign of Terror, which began in 2016 and peaked this year, to something far uglier.

Jack Buckby is a New-York based author and extremism expert originally from the United Kingdom.