Tea at Trianon: Current Elitist Threats to Our Republic

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

Sunday, September 15, 2019

Current Elitist Threats to Our Republic

From The Epoch Times:

Just as the machinations of Comey show the dangers of “the deep state,” so do the candid remarks of another powerful, unelected wannabe kingmaker: William Dudley, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In an amazingly brazen opinion column on Bloomberg.com on Aug. 27, Dudley floated the notion that the Fed might be justified in adopting policies designed to prevent the reelection of President Donald Trump.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve system is already regarded in many circles as the second-most powerful person in the country. That’s already a troubling anomaly in a country based on a democratically accountable representative government. To suggest that the Fed act to tilt the election of the most powerful person in the country—the president—toward the candidate of its preference is an egregious affront to our system of government.

All Americans need to be alert to what is going on around us, even though much of the actual plotting is taking place behind closed doors. Partisan and ideological zealots seek to ride roughshod over the constitution and laws that have kept Americans free for over 200 years. I’m not asserting that these are evil people. They simply are in the thrall of the three meta-errors that pervade progressivism: an unjustified faith in government competence, an exaggerated confidence in what human willpower can accomplish, and the self-delusions of good intentions. (Read more.)