Marie-Antoinette with a Portrait of Her Mother

Marie-Antoinette with a portrait of her mother Empress Maria Theresa, via Vive la Reine. The  portrait is being held by a female figure known as "Eugenia" or "Nobility" to whom the Queen of France is offering a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom. "Eugenia" is holding a shield with the Habsburg imperial eagle. The Queen is wearing a crown of roses. It is interesting that there is a legend of a St. Eugenia who disguised herself as a man in order to join a monastery, similar to the Pope Joan story. But I do not know if any connection with St. Eugenia is intended by the female personage garbed as a soldier. The print is dated 1780, the year of the death of the great Maria Theresa, who had to assume the responsibilities of a male ruler throughout her adult life.

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The Effort To Hide The Truth About A Stolen Election

 From AND Magazine:

Heather Honey runs an organization called Verity Vote in Pennsylvania. She is a walking encyclopedia of information on how elections are actually run in this country. In the aftermath of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Heather began to hear some very disturbing things. Put simply, she began to acquire information that in counties around the state, more votes had been counted than the number of voters who voted.

I’m not a math whiz, but I think we all understand that this is a big problem. Those two numbers – the number of people who voted and the number of votes cast – have to be the same.

Heather decided to dig in. As part of that effort, she contacted Lycoming County in northeast Pennsylvania and asked to review the CVR for the county. CVRs are spreadsheet-like digital records (raw data reports) generated by tabulator machines after ballots are scanned. They show how each ballot was interpreted (e.g., vote counts per candidate/race from each tabulator), without linking to individual voters. Access to this information is routine and typically granted informally.

The county told Heather to submit a formal right-to-know request. She did so.

The Office of the Secretary of State in Harrisburg intervened. How precisely that office was even advised of the request remains a little unclear. In any event, in response to what should have been a routine request for public information, the bureaucracy swung into action. The Secretary of State generated an opinion. The CVR for Lycoming County would not be made available. No CVR’s would be made available for any jurisdiction in Pennsylvania. Ever. (Read more.)

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‘Full of Grace’

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Open up the May issue of Washingtonian magazine, and you find a hagiographic article about Sarah McBride. McBride is the 35-year-old transgender representative from the state of Delaware, who went under the name Timothy Ryan McBride for the first 21 years of “her” life. The title of the Washingtonian profile is “Sarah, Full of Grace.”

The Washingtonian photographed McBride at the top of a lavish stairwell, a golden yellow lamp producing a saintly nimbus. The article summary reads:

The nation’s first openly trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, believes in kindness, tolerance, and reaching across the aisle. But in the face of vilification from the right—and some disappointment from the left—her faith his being tested.

In other words, the Washingtonian is comparing a person suffering from gender dysphoria, a man who insists on dressing like a woman and using women’s private spaces like bathrooms and showers, to the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Actually, they may be comparing McBride to Joan of Arc. Writer Sylvie McNamara describes how two weeks after being elected in 2024, McBride discovered that Republicans on Capitol Hill had passed a rule restricting bathroom use in the Capitol to those whose sex at birth matched the restroom they use. McBride complied with the rule, angering left-wing activists. “I think the thing I am proudest of is that in the face of a very concerted effort to try and derail me and turn me into a caricature, I have remained disciplined and focused and try to fight for a politics of grace.”

This is the second time in 2026 that McNamara has written about McBride for the Washingtonian. In January, she got together with McBride to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. “A freshman Democrat from Delaware—and the first out-trans member of Congress—she’s long been a proponent of ‘a politics of grace,’” McNamara then wrote of McBride, “of meeting differences with kindness and curiosity and giving people space to grow.” Then McBride said Republican leader Mike Johnson should be featured on Queer Eye.

The McBride canonization in Washingtonian is noteworthy because it reminds people that the media is not only out to lie, but to wage a spiritual war—and one that promotes evil. Sure, some people, even conservatives, might say, McBride and the bathroom issue are important, but the controversy doesn’t reach the level of, say, the war in Iran.

In fact, it does. As I once explained in an essay about the film The Exorcist, even more than geopolitical conflicts, human sexuality is a target for demonic exploitation. The point of the demonic in The Exorcist was not to levitate bodies or vomit on priests; it was to convince human beings that they are nothing but base, animalistic creatures unworthy of God’s love. To convince us of this, the demon in the film attacks people in vulgar, sexual terms, even to the point raping the victim, a young girl named Regan. The demon makes God’s beautiful design ugly, disfiguring the face of a beautiful young girl. The devil cannot create; it can only imitate and destroy. (Read more.)

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A Quirky Garden in Rural Wiltshire

 

 

From House and Garden:

How, as a landscape designer, do you let go of the disciplines you have adhered to for many years to create your own, less formal domain? This was the challenge faced by Catherine FitzGerald when she moved to a former Victorian brewery in rural Wiltshire in 2018 with her husband, actor Dominic West and their four children. Catherine’s masterplan for her own garden was to respond to the spirit of the place.

The previous owners had lovingly cared for the house and garden for over 50 years, but Catherine was keen to create something atmospheric among the quirky spaces that lay between the ancient cottage on the lane and the adjoining brewery building. Set in the middle of a Cotswold village dotted with old mills, she wanted it to look as if it had always been there: whimsical Arts and Crafts topiary, roses and clematis on hazel structures, giant cardoons – nothing too ‘imposed’. ‘I wanted it to be relaxed – a place of experimentation and change, where random plant associations and self-seeding could happen without it mattering,’ she says.

 With its thin, free-draining and brashy soil, it is a far cry from Catherine’s family home at Glin Castle, in County Limerick on the west coast of Ireland, where she grew up and has now taken over the garden. There, the soil is heavy clay and acidic, and the Gulf Stream climate is mild and damp. ‘It has been quite a tussle to grow some of the plants I love, such as the roses, in what was essentially once a brewery yard. The ground was hard and compacted, and needed lots of manure and compost to build it up.’ (Read more.)

 

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Supreme Court Delivers Major Blow to Left-Wing Lawfare

 From AMAC:

A Supreme Court decision that has largely flown under the radar could nonetheless prove to be a major victory for conservatives in the battle against left-wing lawfare and weaponized government in the years ahead.

On April 29, the Court handed down a unanimous ruling in First Choice Women’s Resource Center v. Davenport. At first glance, it appears to be largely technical in nature, but it could have significant downstream effects.

The case began in 2022 when then-New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, a Democrat, issued a “consumer alert,” warning about pregnancy resource centers. (The current Attorney General of New Jersey is Democrat Jennifer Davenport, hence why her name, not Platkin’s, is listed on the case.)

Sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers,” these pro-life nonprofits offer free resources for pregnant moms and families, including counseling, medical care, diapers, and clothes. In 2024 alone, such centers provided nearly $500 million in services to one million clients.

Despite the heroic and charitable work of these pro-life organizations, Democrats have long targeted them for giving women the resources and support to choose life instead of abortion.

Accordingly, Platkin’s “Reproductive Rights Strike Force” accused “groups like First Choice of seeking to prevent people from accessing reproductive health care by providing false or misleading abortion information,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the court’s opinion.

Platkin specifically demanded “28 categories of documents, including documents reflecting the names, phone numbers, addresses, and places of employment of all individuals who had made donations to First Choice by any means other than through one specific webpage.”

The case continued for several years as judges considered the technical legal question of whether the subpoenas were themselves injuries that allowed First Choice to sue. Eventually, the question ended up at the Supreme Court, where even left-wing justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson sided with the crisis pregnancy center. (Read more.)

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The Left’s History of Violence

 From Mark Judge at Splice Today:

Journalist Noah Rothman has a new book out. Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America charts the long and often untold history of the Left’s political violence in America. The book is especially timely in light of the recent, and third, assassination attempt on President Trump, and the mental derangement of the Democrats.

According to Rothman, “It is necessary to bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear in support of the observable fact that the American left—too often, fringe and mainstream alike—either refuse to confront or are disconcertingly comfortable with a certain level of domestic political violence. Indeed, its members will heartily protest the allegation that there is a rising tide of left-wing violence to speak of. They are inclined to ignore it, excuse it, explain it away, or marshal their own evidence in support of their belief that the American right is the font from which all political violence springs.”

Blood and Progress reminds readers that in 1995, community activist Barack Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted and Ayers wasn’t. Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and his fellow terrorists bombed the Pentagon as part of his anti-war activities. As journalist Bernie Quigley once put it, “Maybe we should begin to ask ourselves where we are going in our world today when a right-wing terrorist, resolute in his conviction to the very last, like Ayers, gets a quick and short ride to the death chamber and a shallow and forgotten grave, while bombers from the ’60s get tantalizing offers from Harvard, $100 million grants from Ambassador Walter Annenberg and dinner with [celebrity academic professors].”

I wish that Rothman had spent more time on Obama’s mentor, the card-carrying Communist Frank Marshall Davis—or “Old Frank” as Obama called him. There’s also nothing about Hasan Piker, the left’s new Marxist darling. A mix of Lenin, Paul Bunyan and Torquemada, Piker posed in a recent photograph on a train with a copy of What Is To Be Done? by Lenin. As Sam Tanenhaus notes in his biography of Whittaker Chambers, would-be revolutionaries often tout Lenin’s work while ignoring the violence in those same pages.

Lenin’s The Soviets at Work is a book that, as Tanenhaus notes, “is written in a prose of almost unrelieved brutality, a combination of insults (“Let the poodles of bourgeois society scream and bark”) and threats (“everyone who violates the labor discipline in any enterprise and in any business… should be discovered, tried and punished without mercy”).” Lenin’s analogies “are drawn almost exclusively from the battlefield” and “he is thrilled by the spectacle of violence. His favorite adjective is ‘merciless.’ Nor does Lenin conceal the authoritarian character of the government he is assembling. Democracy in the new world can be achieved, he explains, only ‘by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.’” (Read more.)

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Loverboy Chivalry vs Martial Chivalry

 

I love Arthurian legend, the basis for "courtly love" which the article refers to as "Arthurian" chivalry or "loverboy" chivalry. Courtly love was essentially invented by Eleanor of Aquitaine, inspired by the troubadour culture of the south of France, cultivated by her grandfather Duke William of Aquitaine. Queen Eleanor founded the "courts of love" in which great ladies would play lawyers and debate the highly romanticized and highly idealized matters of the behavior of their knighted admirers. It allowed women to hold forth upon matters of deportment and courtesy as well as discussing poems,songs and ballads. The bottom line was the respect and reverence which noble men were expected to show to noble ladies. It gave agency to women in an era of arranged marriages, when people did not marry for love. Women of all classes could be beaten by their husbands and mistreated in any number of ways. There was always the danger of both men and women finding love outside of marriage. Courtly culture acknowledged that such forbidden love happened but channeled it into chaste manifestations, because when actual adultery occurred it could lead to war, imprisonment or corporal punishment,  depending upon the rank of the lady and her husband. Not a Christian ideal but then many think it was influenced by the Cathars, as I explore in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From The Chivalry Guild Letters:

Carolingian chivalry is the essentially French version, and its mythos is the chansons de geste (“songs of great deeds”) involving Charlemagne and his paladins—the most famous of which is The Song of Roland. Carolingianism is about war and God. It is the chivalry, Gautier writes, of the “11th and 12th centuries—that of the crusades, that of our [epic poetry]. It will appear rude and barbarous to some people, but in truth is strong and healthy, and has formed for us the powerful race whose glory has filled the world.” Roland and company don’t have much time for the finer points of etiquette and don’t dedicate themselves to idealized romantic love; they are too busy fighting Saracens and protecting Christian civilization.

As for the more popular Arthurian or English chivalry, Gautier has less fond things to say. He writes:

The romance of the Round Table spread amongst us the taste for a less wild but also a less manly chivalry. The elegancies of love in them occupied the place formally reserved for the brutality of war and the spirit of adventure in them extinguished the spirit of the crusades. One will never know how much harm this cycle of the Round Table inflicted on us. It’s civilized us no doubt; but effeminated us. It took away from us our old aim, which was the tomb of Christ gained by blood in battle. For the austerities of the Supernatural it substituted the tinsel of the Marvelous. It is to this dangerous but charming literature that we owe for theatrical, the boastful, rash chivalry which proves so fatal during the Thirty Years’ War.

This kind of chivalry also gives birth to the satires of Cervantes and company, which aren’t making fun of paladins defending Christendom but instead the errant knights roaming the countryside looking for damsels to rescue. “And we must confess,” Gautier notes, “that some complaints of the great satirist are not without foundation.” (Read more.)

 

 From Becoming Noble:

Modern discourse offers only impoverished models for women. Feminism dismantled an older understanding of womanhood without replacing it with a sustainable alternative. It treats the household as a prison, motherhood as an obstacle to self-realisation, and the virtues historically cultivated by women as instruments of oppression. Ironically, in so doing, it foreclosed many of the domains by which women wielded substantial influence over civilization.

The reaction is equally impoverished despite its superficial conservatism. The trad-wife thing, to take the obvious example, is a performance of homemaking that lacks any serious theological or historical foundation. It reduces womanhood to a visual display of domestic labour, detached from the actual structures of authority, education, and spiritual responsibility that characterised the aristocratic household. At bottom, it is a reaction to feminism conducted on feminism’s own materialist terms.

The home-schooling mother model is a significant improvement but still shares a visceral and fatal error which precludes its wider adoption. These approaches treat the domestic as something small. None advances the majesty of the Christian aristocratic tradition: that the household is the foundational unit of civilisation, that its proper ordering is a matter of cosmic significance, and that the woman who presides over it wields a form of distinct and profound authority. (Read more.)

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All's Not So Quiet on Any Front

 From James Howard Kunstler:

Project Freedom. Cute move! Notice that it’s not Operation Freedom. That would frame it as a military move. The President is tactically framing this as a humanitarian action. Mr. Trump has advised Congress as of May 1 that hostilities with Iran (Operation Epic Fury) are terminated, at the 60-day limit of the War Powers Resolution. Commercial ships from countries not involved in the Iran / US dispute will now get escorted safely through the Strait of Hormuz by US naval vessels. (Later amended by CENTCOM, around 9a.m. Monday as being protected by US Navy vessels “in the vicinity.”)

Any attack on these ships by Iran would prompt a forceful response and trigger a re-wind of the clock on the War Powers Resolution (WPR), meaning, another sixty days to conduct military operations, such as the destruction of key bridges and electric power plants promised earlier. Iran’s leadership — whoever that is — thought it could juke Mr. Trump on the 60-day deadline by stalling negotiations while it reorganized its remaining missile launchers. Tactical fail. Incidentally, the Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the WPR’s constitutionality or enforced the 60-day limit.

Also, by the way, the “neutral and innocent bystanders” designation means that oil tankers from Kuwait, the Emirate states, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia will be given safe escorts out of the Persian Gulf. That will have two effects: 1) avert the “shutting-in” of their productive oil wells (and the prospective geological damage to the oil fields); and 2) alleviate the price pressure on oil generally with new supply reentering the global oil market. (Read more.)

 

From John Zmirak at Chronicles:

Conflict between popes and secular leaders has been a running theme of Western history since Constantine’s conversion. It’s all too tempting for my fellow Catholics today, surveying such incidents, to thoughtlessly side with the papacy in any conflict. But countless faithful believers over the centuries did not.

The Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperors against the grander claims of medieval popes, were equally Catholics in good standing; they simply regarded the pretensions of given popes as excessive, misguided, or wrong. The great theological poet Dante was technically a Guelph (the pro-papal party), but he wrote in De Monarchia that a strong, faithful emperor was equally crucial to the health of Christendom. Going back to the 10^th century, it took the Emperor Otto the Great invading Rome and deposing a corrupt pope to free the papacy from what historians call the “Pornocracy,” or “rule by harlots,” the dominion of local nobles who picked the popes, sometimes delegating that power to influential courtesans.

Sometimes God uses Caesar to rebuke or correct sinful heirs to St. Peter. I’d like to see the Trump administration act in that direction, relying on the faithful Catholics in its midst, such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, to explain to the public that it’s acting on behalf of Catholic laymen against corrupt and politicized clerics. While too many online Catholics are busy complaining about Jeffrey Epstein and his depraved network it’s easy to forget that the U.S. bishops in the past 40 years have enabled far more sex crimes than Epstein could have imagined. (Read more.)

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Preoccupation with Sexual Sin

 From Catholic Culture:

In the rising tide of sexual immorality—or in judging the pitiful state of the world—devout Catholics tend to remember the famous statement by Our Lady of Fatima that “More souls go to hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason” (July 13, 1917). Ever since that time, we have been citing this statement as an indication that more souls go to hell for sexual sins than for any other cause. But this is not necessarily what Our Lady meant, and we will certainly not achieve Heaven simply by avoiding these sins ourselves.

It is perhaps more likely that Mary had in mind the declaration of the Holy Spirit through St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. [Gal 5:19-21]

But there are a great many self-identified Christians who, in the midst of their sexual purity, indulge in the non-sexual sins in this list. (Most of us have done so.) Moreover, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul further warns his readers: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (3:5). For Paul, in effect, it seems that the sins of the flesh are all of those sins that arise from our wayward passions—that is, the sins that are triggered by unregenerate desires of every kind, which have not been conquered and transformed through our participation in the grace of God. In this sense, we might say that “sins of the flesh” are not simply sexual sins but rather all the sins we commit when we are not living in the Spirit, in accordance with the grace of Jesus Christ. (Read more.)

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