Tea at Trianon: I Am Not a Woke American

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, August 3, 2020

I Am Not a Woke American

From Team Bongino:

Along similar lines, what so many working Americans don’t deserve is a collection of politicians that are so weak and spineless that they let mobs loot stores, burn police stations, and terrorize cities rather than allow the police to enforce law and order. There’s not a police force in America that couldn’t have shut down these riots in 2-3 days tops if the politicians let them. It’s fine to worry about police brutality, but a lack of police brutality when dealing with mobs and criminals running wild across the city is a bigger failing. Bad cops need to go, but what about the other side of the equation? We have career criminals acting like maniacs around the police, getting shot, and then we have people demanding that we give the benefit of the doubt to the criminal? If you are going to ask cops to put themselves in danger and deal with the worst people in our society on a daily basis, all while knowing that everyone from the politicians to the media are going to slant the truth to make them look like bad guys, then yes, they deserve the public’s support.

Some people don’t do that because our school system is broken. It teaches kids that everything that made America successful in the first place from the Founding Fathers on is bad. Our mainstream media is even worse. You can’t take anything you read about politics and culture in the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN at face value because pushing a woke narrative is more important than the truth. “News” isn’t about the facts anymore; it’s about pushing an ideology and everything else including the truth is secondary to that. Our culture has glorified victimhood to such an extent that people regularly fake hate crimes to get attention. Our social media giants are one giant hate factory that divides us and amplifies the worst human instincts we have. It’s a toxic soup that is eating through everything that made America a great country in the first place.

The Coronavirus hasn’t helped, but it has revealed how deeply dysfunctional our country has become. Woke politicians locked whole states down, whether areas were highly infected or had no one infected and they crippled our economy in the process. They also harassed people going to church, told people they couldn’t see their dying parents in the hospital and ruined small businesses. But then when the woke wanted to protest by the thousands, these same little tin gods gave it the thumbs up and called it, “science.” Wokeness has made everything political, even preventing a virus from killing people. (Read more.)