Tea at Trianon: No, Democrats, These Are Not Your Kids

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

Saturday, June 24, 2023

No, Democrats, These Are Not Your Kids

From The Federalist:

Years ago, P.J. O’Rourke correctly described the purpose of Hillary Clinton’s detestable book on the same subject: “It takes a village to raise a child. The village is Washington. You are the child.” It’s no accident the head of the nation’s largest and most powerful teachers union praises op-eds with headlines like, “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” That’s also the position of the institutional left, including the president, who argues that American values are at risk if parents dare demand kids’ libraries exclude books describing incestual rape, celebrating gender dysphoria, and depicting 10-year-old boys having oral sex.

Marx also saw the traditional family as an antiquated unit. The first Soviet welfare ministers complained about the “narrow and petty” idea of the nuclear family in which reactionary bourgeois parents, selfishly wrapped up in their trivial anxieties, were “not capable of educating the ‘new person.’”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe Joe Biden is going to ship parents to Siberia. Nor am I suggesting that the president’s handlers are sitting around thinking about the Frankfurt School. (They arrived at a similar philosophical destination organically, I suspect.) What I’m saying is that the White House is teeming with wannabe authoritarians who believe the state would do a better job raising kids by filling their impressionable heads with corrosive, immoral ideas. And that the institutions to achieve that goal already exist.

Public schools, some of them excellent and many of them disastrous, are not voluntary, communal places. In most municipalities, parents have little choice, and their kids are in a captive audience. State-run schools, conceived to educate and forge patriotic, civic cohesion, have often become places of left-wing indoctrination — from “universal pre-k” until they go off to college, where credentialed halfwits and leftist ideologues who detest the “national ambitions” of a constitutional republic run the place.

You pay for all of it. But you also get to shut up.

It’s important to remember that totalitarian states do not stop citizens from participating in political life, they demand it. Everything one does in these societies is drenched in ideology. Sports. Movies. Academia. Books. Commerce. Morality. Family. Sex. Schools. Which very much sounds like the goal of contemporary leftism. (Read more.)

From UncoverDC:

The new book ban coordinator will provide new training programs for schools nationwide “on how book bans that target specific communities and create a hostile school environment may violate federal civil rights laws,” according to the press release. The book ban program is one of several announced in a June 8 press release that lays out the Biden-Harris administration’s “actions to protect LGBTQI+ communities.”

However, some important details on the nature of the referenced book bans are consistently missing from the press release. It is true parents are questioning the wisdom of including certain sexually explicit materials in classrooms and school libraries. However, the vast majority of those requests refer to books that include inappropriate sexual content for minor children.

In some cases, teachers put these sexually explicit materials on reading lists for children in the name of inclusivity. The press release also fails to mention that several Dr. Seuss books were pulled from publication during this same administration “because they contain racist and insensitive imagery.” No one in the Biden administration said a word about the removal of those well-loved childhood books when it was announced in March 2021. (Read more.)

Meanwhile, young girls are being raped in trans-friendly bathrooms. From The Blaze:

A 12-year-old girl alleged that she was raped in a middle school bathroom in October 2021, but the incident was not brought to light until the girl's mother discovered her diary entry about the attack, according to the Post Millennial.

In Rio Rancho, New Mexico, the young girl was washing her hands in what was described as a girls' restroom at the ASK Academy middle school. At that point a male came into the bathroom and allegedly walked over to the girl, pinned her against the counter, and wrestled her onto the floor. After allegedly hitting her head, he also reportedly held the girl down and raped her.

“I was raped. I was raped. I was raped. F***ing kill me," the girl, who is being referred to as Ray, reportedly wrote in her diary. The discovery of the passage by her mother, being referred to as Maggie, explained the shift in mood and mental health that her daughter had inexplicably been going through. (Read more.)