Tea at Trianon: We Have Met the Enemy, Part XVI

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

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

We Have Met the Enemy, Part XVI

From Steyn Online:

And then one evening, a few months later, everything changed. The heartsick couple happened to catch a TV show featuring a Johns Hopkins expert discussing the brand new science of "sex change". The expert's name? John Money.

Money was good on camera: smooth, supremely confident, clipped accent, and clever. He declared, as though it were a matter of unchallengeable fact, that modern science allowed him and his team to fully transform males into females, and vice versa. He even produced, right then and there, a dazzling blonde transexual named Diane who had once been a man named Richard. Diane purred that she was happier than ever before.

The Reimers watched with cautious hope. Maybe this amazing scientist could help their disfigured son. If he and his team could do surgeries to transform a male into a female, and vice versa, maybe he could help reconstruct their son's genitals. Failing that, if science could turn boys into girls as easily as John Money asserted...and their little boy could grow up to be a woman just as happy as the purring Diane was, and avoid a life of shame and loneliness as a defective male...why not consider that option, too? The professor had just said it was possible, after all—and he sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Janet sent a letter off to Professor John Money, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, the very next day.

Of course, the Reimers didn't know anything about Money other than what they'd just seen on TV. They didn't know that a young teacher named Milton Diamond had obliterated Money's claims about psychosexual malleability only the year before. They didn't know Money had deliberately hidden that fact during his television presentation. They didn't know Money's unflappable public persona masked a hateful, angry megalomaniac who regularly terrorized his underlings by screaming at them, sexually harassing them, throwing tantrums, and issuing credible career threats. They didn't know Money was a sexual psychopath bent on destroying all traditional sexual standards, and replacing them with some of the darkest sexual behaviors imaginable, including pedophilia. (Read more.)