In 1789, the French Revolution broke out with mobs ransacking cities and butchering anyone they could get their hands on. Parts of the world viewed this "revolution" with awe and wonder, while others saw it for the bloodthirsty mob that it was. One of the wisest observers was Edmund Burke, who said, "Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government."

The French government was powerless to stop the mob, and as a result, the mob butchered with impunity. It was a revolution born in blood, ending with Napoleon taking over and declaring himself emperor. While the American Revolution wasn't perfect, the results gave birth to the American Republic. The French Revolution brought more tyranny. The mobs did not rule in America.

One of the more essential tasks of a government is pushing back the mob, especially mobs that want to murder innocent people. Throughout American history, this hasn't always been true. Lynch mobs attacked Blacks, and mobs against other ethnicities flared up during wars and other events.

The Anti-Jew Mobs Are Here

We're witnessing mobs of the anti-Jew variety right now. The proof is easy to see. "Pro-Palestinian" or "Pro-Hamas" mobs are targeting Jewish students across university campuses in the United States. At Cornell, a man was arrested for threatening to kill Jews. John Podhoretz noted that the message to Jews was clear: hide.

A day after Jewish college kids found it necessary to barricade themselves inside a library in the center of Greenwich Village while a mob of repugnant terrorist lovers banged on the locked doors trying to get at them, the message is being broadcast that, on this Sabbath, Jews in Brooklyn had better remain at home. Stay inside. Lock the doors.

In the UK, police are tearing down posters of missing Jewish children because they're scared of the mobs "escalating further." And in France, mobs are running around marking homes where Jews live with the Star of David so they can find them later on.

Jews are being hunted, harassed, assaulted, and killed in the West. This isn't Gaza or areas under attack in Israel. These are Western nations who proclaim themselves safe havens for historically persecuted Jews. And the mob is being ginned up by evil people intent on killing Jews.

The Government Has A Duty To Act

The government must act because a society rocked by rampaging mobs cannot stand forever. Order must be restored for people to be free and flourish. When people fear to leave their own homes, the state is failing in a spectacular way.

Nietzsche said, "[T]he mob is the most ruthless of tyrants." We're witnessing the truth of that statement now, as mobs rise everywhere with the express purpose of doing everything from finding and intimidating Jews to outright killing them. A massive mob doesn't shut down an entire airport to "protest a flight from Israel."

The American Founders understood this. James Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that "The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man."

The great conservative writer Russell Kirk expressed the same when he said: "Libertarians (like anarchists and Marxists) generally believe that human nature is good, though damaged by certain social institutions. Conservatives, on the contrary, hold that "in Adam's fall we sinned all": human nature, though compounded of both good and evil, is irremediably flawed; so the perfection of society is impossible, all human beings being imperfect."

Conservatives Understand This Moment

Conservatives understand the dangers of this moment better than most because they have a more profound respect for human nature. The left believes humans are good, hence why they go to such lengths to justify what Palestinians and Hamas do to Jews. But the conservative understands that human nature dictates that some people are irredeemably evil, and society must protect itself from these groups.

Mobs are most pernicious of all because they intend to scare off authorities to inflect their passions on their targets. The mass demonstrations we're seeing across the world are mobs intent on eradicating Jews. There's a reason you can throw a rock and find right and left-wing radicals who espouse hatred towards Jews - it's a feature, not a bug. They may differ on other things, but they agree on this point.

The government must disperse these mobs. This isn't about free speech. If these were peaceful protests, societies could handle that. But we're well beyond that point. It's not a false intuition that Jews have right now - they are deeply unsafe from the mob. That's absolutely wrong, and the government needs to step in and correct it.

People who seek the destruction of Jews cannot hide behind bromides. They tell us who they are, and they create mobs to try and intimidate everyone else with their anti-Jew beliefs. The state needs to stop this now. We don't need another pogrom to inform us these mobs mean business. It shouldn't take more harmed or dead Jews to force the state to act.