Marie Antoinette and the Stories We Prefer to Tell

Dauphin Louis-Charles or Louis XVII

 

Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine d'Autriche

Of course, Marie-Antoinette was never indifferent to the poverty of the people since some of her first recorded deeds as wife to the heir to the throne involved her efforts to relieve suffering. From Front Porch Republic:

The use of the dead Marie Antoinette as a republican icon is something that ought to be carefully considered. It is a willful simplification of the past in order to tell a gentler and more fun story to a modern nation. The French dislike of Marie Antoinette in the late 18th century is well documented and well deserved. Her lavish lifestyle and indifference to the poverty of the French people made her a public enemy when the revolutionary committee came to power. Her husband Louis XVI was executed for treason by guillotine, baptizing the revolution with the thrill of public blood. Marie and her children were imprisoned in the Concierge, initially together, and then forcibly separated. The revolutionary tribunal blamed her for the lavish expenditure of the royal court and for her ongoing communications with rival Austria. However, she was also accused and tried for a host of fabricated charges, including incest with her seven year old son (a false explanation for the wounds the boy suffered while in prison). The child signed an affidavit of this abuse by his mother after being visited in prison by radical members of the tribunal, certainly under pressure and possibly under compulsion. For these things, Marie was executed publicly at the guillotine. Her son spent three more years in prison, where he was tortured by his jailers and died of tuberculosis at age ten. He was not directly executed like his parents, but his death by abuse was a great convenience to the new republic, who feared that his royal blood might arouse sympathies in his powerful relatives across Europe.

The execution of Marie Antoinette and the treatment of her family is nothing for France to be proud of. Her punishment is the first evidence of a revolution run amok. The spirit of her trial was public vengeance and it can barely be considered a legal proceeding. Her child, age seven, was forced to testify under duress and in prison to incestuous rape by his mother. The effort put forth to bring this particular charge against Marie shows that the trial was not solely about her conduct of affairs of state, but rather about humiliating her publicly. Marie refused to answer the charge in the courtroom, saying it was beneath her dignity as a mother. Killing Marie was not an act of justice. It was extrajudicial public revenge and an act worthy of, if not outright condemnation, then at least very careful reconsideration. The imprisonment and death of her son is a clear example of cruelty and abuse to an innocent child for the sake of convenience and as an act of family retribution.

The Olympic torch traveled past the headless Marie and through a staging of Les Miserables’ famous barricades. The French opening ceremonies thematically tied all of these events together for the viewer. In their preferred story, Marie was justifiably killed by a righteous revolution, now remembered in heroic songs and glorified as a time of liberation for the people. Nobody should begrudge a nation’s desire to show the very best of their heritage and culture to the world. However, the conscious rewriting of an event and glorification of a national evil is troubling. A similar editing of national memory played out in the decades following the collapse of the Vichy government, France’s Nazi-collaborating wartime regime. (Read more.)

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The Communists Aren't Coming - They're Here

 From Tierney's Real News:

Those of you who have been following me for a long time know that I’ve written about the threat of Communism, Islamo-Communism and the Red-Green axis countless times over the years. It’s always been a covert threat - now they are actually planning invasion (by flooding our country with bioweapons and even positioning themselves close enough to use ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons to take us out.)

Many people think the fake MAGA influencers like Tucker, Alex Jones, Candace, MTG, etc. are on our side - NOPE. I contend they are all Godless Communists paid off by Putin (former KGB Soviet spy) and his Islamo-Communist cronies in the CCP and Iran. JFK warned us about false prophets - so did Jesus!

How do Godless Communists and atheist, demonic tyrants take over a country? They come in many disguises and they come as false prophets. They infiltrate and divide and pretend to be your friends.

They boil the frog slowly. The premise is that if you put a frog into boiling water - he will jump out. But if you put him in tepid water and heat it slowly - he will happily boil to death. He will not realize he is in danger until it’s too late. (Read more.)

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How the Phoenician Spoken and Written Language Shaped the Mediterranean

 From The Collector:

The Phoenicians were prolific merchants and explorers who traveled from their home in the Levant across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, planting colonies and trading outposts around the ancient world. Wherever the Phoenicians went, they took their language with them, and they were pioneers in this area too. They developed the first true alphabetic script. The useful tool was adopted by other cultures, including the ancient Greeks, who in turn influenced the ancient Latin alphabet, which is the basis of most modern Indo-European languages, including English.

The Phoenicians were Semitic-speaking people who primarily inhabited several coastal cities in the Levant, including Byblos, Tyre, Arvad, Berytus (Beirut), and Sidon. There was no Phoenician empire or unified state. Each city was an independent city-state. The Phoenicians never referred to themselves as “Phoenicians” in their own written texts but as members of their respective city-states.

The earliest recorded references to the Phoenicians date from the Late Bronze Age Egypt (c. 1500-1200 BC). The “Annals of Thutmose III” (c. 1479-1425 BC) mention Byblos extensively as a vassal of New Kingdom Egypt. The Egyptians called them “Asiatics.” Byblos was also mentioned in the “Amarna Letters” (1360-1332 BC) as an important city that was a source of contention between the Egyptians and Hittites. (Read more.)

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The Paris Temple

The former Temple enclosure in Paris

 The tower of the original Paris Temple was used as a prison during the French Revolution to house Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and their family. It was torn down by Napoleon in 1808 to discourage the pilgrims who were flocking to the site. From the BBC:

Their original estate has long since succumbed to the great march of history, but you can still visit the site on which it once stood on rue de Lobau, located just behind the Hôtel de Ville. Back in the day, surrounding the mansion were miles of uncultivated marshland. In order to make the land arable, the Knights Templar set about drying the marsh – a feat that they were able to fully achieve circa 1240. But though the wetlands have long since disappeared, the area is still referred to as ‘le Marais’ or ‘the Marsh’....

Surrounded by eight 10m-high crenelated walls reinforced by turrets and buttress, this gargantuan fortress once featured towers, a drawbridge, a gothic church, vast stables and homes for the knights. It was here that the Templars guarded mass portions of their treasure and created a powerful ‘state-within-a-state’ that was entirely sovereign from the kings of France.

While this system of sovereignty worked for a time, everything changed in 1303 when the Knights Templar were forced to move their base of operations from the Temple Mount to their European headquarters – the enclos du Temple – after Jerusalem was recaptured by Muslim armies.

The king of France at the time, Philip the Fair, deeply resented the Knights Templar’s powerful ‘state-within-a-state’ and resolved to bring the order down by any means necessary. King Philip’s reasoning for destroying the order is speculated to this day, though many scholars believe his motivations were financial. “Philip could use the silver coin he acquired from the Templars' treasury in Paris to improve the quality of the heavily debased French coinage,” explained Dr Helen Nicholson, author of The Knights Templar: A New History and professor of medieval history at Cardiff University. (Read more.)

From Paris Marais:

To the north east lay stretches of marshland, remnants of the ancient branch of the Seine that had once flowed down from the heights of Belleville, east of Paris. It took the hardy Templars barely a century to turn it into the market garden (marais) of the capital, emulating the monks of Saint Martin des Champs who had dried up the swamps on the western fringe of the future arrondissement a century earlier. Having redeemed the land, they moved to its north-eastern edge, where they built a fortified compound,  l'Enclos du Temple, which also served as their European headquarters.

Forget about Rennes-le-Château and other such fantasies - there was nothing mysterious about the Order. Rather, it was their sophisticated farming methods that enabled them to redeem the marshy land of the future Marais, and it was their acute business acumen that incited them to use their geographical dispersion to advantage and develop a kind of international deposit bank  which contributed to the continual increase of their wealth. This, and their independence, were jealously kept behind the crenellated walls of the Enclos du Temple, roughly on the site of today's rue du Temple, rue de Bretagne, rue de Picardie and rue Béranger, south of Place de la République. It was complete with watch towers and a drawbridge that led to the Temple' only gate (now corner of rue des Fontaines-du-Temple and rue du Temple). (Read more.)

Banner honoring Louis XVII who died in the Temple

More HERE.
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Election Integrity Fiasco in Maryland

From American Thinker:

Maryland election officials are facing a serious test of public trust after a vendor coding error reportedly caused some voters to receive incorrect mail-in ballots during the 2026 gubernatorial primary.  The error involved ballots mailed before May 14, 2026.

Maryland State Board of Elections (SBE) administrator Jared DeMarinis said at the May 28, 2026 state election board meeting that more than 563,000 voters were included in the affected mailing but that the “vendor could not accurately identify” which voters had received the wrong ballot.  DeMarinis further clarified that there were “over 447,000 voters” whose ballots may have been affected.  The board identified the error and attempted to correct it by sending out hundreds of thousands of replacement ballots.  President Trump commented on the matter shortly after the issue became public.

Kate Sullivan, director of the SecuretheVoteMD, a volunteer election integrity organization, believes that the election board likely chose a remedy that was not only unnecessarily chaotic, but legally questionable under Maryland law:

The State Board of Elections had a simple, legal solution sitting right in front of them. They should have complied with Maryland Election Law §11-303.2 — the “first ballot” rule, which requires them to verify the original ballots as they come in, count the correct ones, and cure the incorrect ones while there was still time.

That is exactly what the law requires. Instead, they flooded the system with replacement ballots, locked the originals in a vault until certification day, and issued guidance that overrides the “first ballot” statute entirely. One has to ask, when an election authority ignores an obvious lawful remedy and chooses a legally questionable path that potentially disenfranchises voters, it is no longer sufficient to call it a mistake. Marylanders deserve a full accounting of why this approach was chosen — and by whom.

Now SecuretheVoteMD is demanding that the Maryland State Board of Elections take five concrete steps before the November 3, 2026 general election to protect voters from disenfranchisement.  In sum, the organization is asking election officials to address key questions on the record: how the original erroneous ballots are being identified, what adjudication standard is being applied, how many original-batch ballots were received, how many were rejected, what notification process will be used for affected voters, and how the chain of custody was maintained from receipt through counting. (Read more.)

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The Textile Designers Behind Some of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s Most Memorable Interiors

 From Elle Decor:

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is remembered not only for her enduring influence on American style, but also for the homes she carefully shaped throughout her life. From the White House and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port to her Fifth Avenue apartment and homes she shared with Aristotle Onassis in Greece, Kennedy approached interiors with the same elegance that defined her public image.

Newly surfaced, never-before-published letters exchanged between Kennedy and textile designers D.D. and Leslie Tillett reveal the depth of that involvement. While Kennedy worked with celebrated decorators including Sister Parish, Stéphane Boudin, and Albert Hadley, the Tilletts became her trusted collaborators whose textiles appeared over and over again. Together, the letters offer a rare glimpse into the creative partnership behind some of Kennedy’s most significant interiors.

By the time Kennedy arrived at the White House in 1961, D.D. and Leslie Tillett were already fixtures in American decorating circles. Founded in the 1940s, Tillett Textiles built its reputation on hand-screened fabrics and a customized approach to design, attracting decorators such as Sister Parish and Albert Hadley, as well as clients like Bunny Mellon. It was through Parish and her White House renovation that the Tillets connected with Kennedy. (Read more.)

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The Red Cap of Hermetics

Louis XVI was mocked with the "Red Cap of Liberty" which was recently displayed at the Paris Olympics. From Daily Sabah:

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Louis XVI, the last king of France, was depicted in many paintings with a "Bonnet Rouge" (Red Cap) on his head. However, what is the story of this red cap with its long apex bent over to the front, and why was it placed the head of the French constitutional monarch before he was executed?

[...]

In ancient Rome, freed slaves were dressed in a white cap called a pileus. Brutus, who betrayed Caesar, chose this cap, which symbolizes freedom, as an expression of Rome's return to the republic, and engraved it on the coin he minted. But this fez, which looks like the white cap worn by Albanians today, actually had nothing to do with the red Phrygian cap.

With the American Revolution, the pileus became an omen of revolutionaries, anarchists, and republicans. It resurfaced with the protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 when Britain imposed a direct stamped paper tax on the British colonies in America.

In particular, a figure of British parliamentarian John Wilkes – nicknamed the "Devil," and known for his support of the American rebels – with this cap became very popular among the rebels known as the "Sons of Liberty."

French anarchists, who inherited this symbol from the American Revolution, preferred the Phrygian cap instead of the pileus. Thus, this red hermetic cap became the symbol of the French revolutionaries and freedom from 1789 onwards. For example, in a sculpture made by French artist Joseph Chinard in 1794, representing the revolution and the republic, a Phrygian cap was placed on the head of a woman in Roman attire. (Read more.)

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America Built USAID to Win the Cold War — It Turned on America Instead

 From Tierney's Real News:

While USAID has performed genuine humanitarian work, its core strategic role was as a tool for regime change and “color revolutions” abroad. It did this by systematically building interconnected networks of NGOs that create the preconditions and execution capability for political transitions aligned with Western liberalism.

DataRepublican outlined five interlocking pillars that, when funded together over years in a target country, create a self-reinforcing “political operating system:”

1. Media — Independent outlets, social media, journalism training, and funding to amplify Western-aligned narratives.

2. Legal infrastructure — Lawyers, rule-of-law programs, judicial reform to challenge governments legally and shape institutions.

3. Election monitoring and fraud — Observer training, voter rolls, and especially parallel vote tabulation (PVT) to contest official results with “independent” data.

4. Activist training — Youth leadership, civic engagement, protest organization, media comms, and “nonviolent” discipline training.

5. Governance data — Anti-corruption monitoring, budget transparency, FOIA-style tools to generate evidence for the other pillars.

“None of these looks like regime change in isolation. The system becomes visible only when you fund all five in the same country for a decade and the people running them all know each other.”

The 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia is the textbook case. Notably, in Latin America, after Trump cut USAID funding, right-wing candidates won in multiple countries — clear evidence of the network’s impact.

These same five pillars now operate inside the United States, funded by private foundations such as Open Society, Knight, MacArthur, and Arabella Advisors.

The language is softer — “civic engagement,” “democracy defense” — but the functions are identical. (Read more.)

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The Sainthood of Sarah Miles

 From Word on Fire:

As we read Greene’s novel, we discover that the new love pursuing Sarah is not a would-be adulterer but a hound of heaven. We learn that in a moment of desperation—namely, when she thought her beloved Bendrix dead in a bombing raid—Sarah uncharacteristically prays to God, offering that she will end her affair if only the Lord will spare her lover’s life. When the bloodied Bendrix appears in her doorway moments later, alive and unmaimed, Sarah finds herself in the startling position of trying to keep a promise to a God she didn’t know she believed in, unmoored from the only man she loves. Like so many of us, she finds herself navigating a sometimes confusing and uncertain call to holiness amid her own very human pain and weakness. 

And yet she slowly, imperfectly, allows God’s grace to work in her life, albeit in a state of earthly suffering. As Katy Carl tells us, “We find in Sarah that rarest of literary creatures: the believable saint—a character whose authentic holiness feels real to us, in part because we have also seen her at her lowest.” 

This notion—the believable saint—is much more than simply a literary rarity. It is, in fact, a common reality, one that Pope Francis made sure to draw our attention to. In Gaudete et Exsultate, he reminds us that the communion of saints may include more than those we venerate as a Church. It “may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones.” It may include “our next-door neighbours,” patiently persevering in raising their children, in working for their families. It may include a “middle-class of holiness,” saints that “may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” This, of course, proves to be the case with Sarah Miles, as the characters in our novel find themselves witnesses to inexplicable miracles linked to her intercession after her untimely death. Mrs. Sarah Bertram Miles, with all her faults and failings, still made it to the communion of saints. (Read more.)

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