Tea at Trianon: "A Middle Ages Dictatorship"

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 7, 2016

"A Middle Ages Dictatorship"

From Crisis:

When Wikileaks recently dumped the cache of emails featuring Clinton staffers and allies mocking Catholics, and plotting a revolutionary “Catholic Spring,” I was neither shocked nor outraged. Granted, it is a little irritating to discover that the agenda-makers on the left look at you as though you were something they had just fished out of a clogged drain, but I wasn’t shocked. I have always just assumed that, behind closed doors, this is pretty much how the conversation goes with the liberal left. Conservative Catholics are an inexplicably intractable barrier to their agendas, and the mystery of how such “severely backwards” folk can be a wrench in their progressive system must be a source of unending frustration to them.

I was not outraged because, as fellow American citizens, they have a constitutionally established right to be ignorant and bigoted right out loud, and to speak their mind freely, no matter how narrow and closed that mind might be. Besides, the overarching revelation here is really no revelation at all: the die-hard insiders on the political left are really as impenetrably self-referential, agenda-driven and obtuse as they have always seemed. And they see conservatives as mostly irredeemably unenlightened pawns of outdated belief systems.

As interesting as all the ridicule and manipulative scheming contained in those emails was, for me, the piece de resistance was the reply from John Halpin, a staffer at the Clinton-allied Center for American Progress, to an email from comrade-in-arms Jennifer Palmieri, now a Clinton campaign spokesman. (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

It is clear that prominent left-wingers and Democratic operatives think about the Catholic Church quite a lot—and they have some potent opinions on the subject. Last year we learned that George Soros dropped $600,000 on leftist Catholic front groups, trying to spin Pope Francis’ visit as a campaign tour for Hillary.

Last week it emerged that Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, agrees that Catholic terms of art such as “Thomistic thought” and “subsidiarity” are merely sophistical smoke screens for rich conservatives such as Rupert Murdoch, who are in search of a faith with “severely backward gender relations,” but too snobbish to join an evangelical church. (Read more.)