Tea at Trianon: Jackal and Hyde

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, September 12, 2022

Jackal and Hyde

From The Wine Press:

jackal | noun | ‘ja kǝl | 2b: a person who serves or collaborates with another, especially in the commission of base acts.
My fellow Americans and my brothers and sisters in Christ: We have a jackal in the White House.
My soul seethed tonight as Joe Biden, standing in front of a drenched-red Independence Hall as if to conjure images of Stalin’s reunion tour, once again warned our country of the most threatening enemy to our democracy: Me.
If only his barely coherent speeches employed a modicum of uniformity, I could perhaps decipher which name tag to don. But it is the subtle craftiness of the serpent to use sweeping, nondescript collectivist pejoratives to cast the widest and most indiscriminate net possible.
If you bookend the 2021 inaugural speech with today’s back-to-school brotherly love speech, our dollar store dictator can’t seem to consistently identify this perilous anti-constitutional assailant who looks and thinks like me.
In a succession of speeches, Ol’ Uncle Joe has entreated the nation to not see me as an individual but rather as a member of a sinful tribe of the most sordid ilk: White supremacists, Christian nationalists, domestic terrorists, right-wing extremists, vaccine-hesitant, semi-fascists, and deniers of both the election and the climate.
And tonight, Joltin’ Joe revealed the next card in his identitarian Rolodex: MAGA Republican.
Bless me, Father, for Biden told me I have sinned. It has been three speeches since my last confession.
Notice how Joe never takes the time to carefully clarify who these enemy combatants are. This is all part of the simulation because if he spoke in specifics, even his most hypnotized followers would realize they couldn’t fill a minor league ball field with these deplorables. (Hillary’s use of basket was aptly chosen based on seating capacity.)
This is why Biden’s collectivist rhetoric is so eerily disturbing and recklessly dangerous. Once a significant percentage of the citizenry can be labeled treacherous and inferior, the catastrophe of identitarian collectivism has taken root. Whether it be Soviet dissidents, Jewish vermin, Tutsi cockroaches, or MAGA Republicans, dehumanization and cultural extermination have been initiated.
The serpent always hopes you see the forest and not the trees. (Read more.)