Tea at Trianon: Rigged

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

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Rigged

From The Stream:

Yet contempt for Trump, in Liddle’s view, fails to justify what the columnist calls “a grotesque manipulation of democracy,” even if Trump was “unhinged,” with Liddle quoting one of the favorite phrases Trump’s detractors used.

“Was he?” Liddle asked. “I don’t know. He didn’t seem terribly hinged to me, but then Americans rarely do. But more unhinged than your average American — or Joe Biden?”

“Whatever the case, that election one year ago was plainly rigged. Not by fraudulent postal votes. But by an affluent elite conspiring, brutally at times, to ensure that the American public heard only one side of the story.”

Liddle cited three examples. One was Trump’s ejection from social media. Another was the squelching of any story, especially from the New York Post, alleging corruption on the part of either Joe Biden or his son, Hunter.

“We already knew, even as Biden was declaring victory, that Facebook and Twitter had cut off Donald Trump’s access to the electorate,” Liddle wrote. “He was deliberately rendered voiceless. Before then, they — and the national media — had smothered stories alleging the Biden family’s peddling of influence and Biden’s crackhead son and his dubious business interests in Ukraine. False news, we were informed. Nope, not all of it was false at all, it transpired.”

But the most damning evidence, Liddle argued, appeared in February, when Time magazine published its article on the election. Time’s Molly Ball described a “conspiracy” involving “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans,” including the AFL-CIO and the United States Chamber of Commerce, she wrote.

Those parties joined what Ball called “a loosely organized coalition of operatives” across the political spectrum who had been active for more than a year.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election,” Ball wrote. “They got states to change voting systems and laws, and helped secure hundreds of millions (of dollars) in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited millions of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.”

“They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.” (Read more.)