Tea at Trianon: Biden’s Attack On ‘White Man’s Culture’

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

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Biden’s Attack On ‘White Man’s Culture’

From The Federalist:

During a recent struggle session over his role in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Supreme Court hearings of 1991, prospective presidential candidate Joe Biden declared that the United States had a centuries-old embedded cultural problem with permissive violence against women. “It’s an English jurisprudential culture,” Biden explained this week, “a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.”

“English jurisprudential culture” is, of course, the foundation of American governance and our Constitutional rights. It’s unlikely any culture in history has brought more freedom and prosperity to more of humankind. Now, it’s true that the tenets of this culture have fallen into disfavor with the progressives who Biden is trying to woo. But does any educated person truly believe that “English jurisprudential culture” has been more prone towards misogyny than other societies?

How has Chinese jurisprudential cultureperformed for women over history? How about Indian jurisprudential culture? Or Russian jurisprudential culture? Or sub-Saharan African jurisprudential culture? How has Islamic jurisprudential culture worked out for women? The “English jurisprudential culture” of New Zealand was the first to grant all women the right to vote in 1893, followed over the next decades by an array of other English and formerly English colonies. Saudi Arabia granted women that same right only in 2011. Then again, the women of 1893 “English jurisprudential culture”—voting rights or not—were already leading freer and safer lives than most of the women who have to function under the deeply illiberal legal cultures of the Islamic world today.

Those who demand acts of contrition over “English jurisprudential culture,” seem to have a problem with ideals of blind justice and due process that stop us from sacrificing people to the whims of an aggrieved mob. Biden’s transgression against progressivism, as far as I can tell, was affirming to Thomas during the Hill hearings that, “from the beginning and at this moment, until the end, the presumption [of innocence] is with you.” It wasn’t true. (Read more.)

From the Conservative Review:

Wednesday on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin said that expected 2020 presidential candidate former VP Joe Biden is “humiliating himself.” Levin played recent audio of Biden lamenting that there were “a bunch of white guys” on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including himself as chairman, during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing, suggesting that the race and sex of these senators made it an unfair hearing for Thomas’ sexual harassment accuser, Anita Hill. “This plays in to the radical race theme of the hard Left,” Levin said. (Read more.)