Tea at Trianon: SCOTUS Is Now the Thin Red, White, and Blue Line Holding Back Subhumanism and Tyranny

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, July 8, 2023

SCOTUS Is Now the Thin Red, White, and Blue Line Holding Back Subhumanism and Tyranny

From The Stream:

The Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and all its illegitimate spawn was of course the most crucial decision, freeing the states to protect preborn life from destruction. Of comparable importance is the courts’ decisions reaffirming the Second Amendment: If man has intrinsic dignity, he has the right to defend himself against both crime and tyranny. More recently, the Court has defended free speech and religious liberty against the LGBTQ bullies. And just last week it rejected the tribalist practice of affirmative action in college admissions.
In each case, the court’s majority reasserted the vision of man that suffuses our founding documents: of man as metaphysically dignified and morally responsible. That’s a far cry from the degraded picture of humanity that pervades the left, which for all its Transhumanist and Transgender fantasies, views us all as trousered apes who need to be organized and subjugated by elites, like ants or termites.
It’s no accident that the left wants to tear down all our statues, deface our monuments, and pretend that the U.S. began not in 1776 as a new hope for liberty, but in 1619 as a slaveowners’ conspiracy. In part, this effort to airbrush our past and retcon our founding is a simple grab for power. As my friend John Zmirak wrote:

The angry activists and elitists who drive the Democrat agenda … don’t want us to learn from history. Like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, they want to hit the “reset” button. To start the calendar again at Year Zero. To paint the past as a dark and appalling void from which we can learn absolutely nothing, except the pre-cooked and pre-packaged mini-lessons that our new masters distribute to us. They’ve read their George Orwell. They know that to control the past is to dominate the future.

They want to shove the past, the entire past, into the memory hole. To delete it. To leave the pedestals empty, the statues beheaded or wrecked, the inscriptions sandblasted and vacant. In that bleak empty space where history once stood, they’ll scrawl instead the crude and easily memorized slogans they would force us to live by.

But there’s even more to it than that. The left has a radically different anthropology — theory of human nature — than the one our founders treasured, and on which our country was built. Those founders were Christian humanists — most of them members of orthodox Christian churches. They believed that man was created with dignity and freedom. That he was indeed fallen and flawed, but had been redeemed and renewed. Precisely because he was only “a little lower than the angels,” man had by his nature certain fundamental rights. No government could rightly take them away. (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

Thursday morning, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts released a landmark decision, demanding Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill end anti-Asian racism in admissions, Yukong Mike Zhao, an immigrant from China, rushed to the steps of the Supreme Court, off First Street NE, as other Asian American immigrant parents descended on the capital to celebrate.
“Today marks a sweet but long-fought victory for the Asian community,” said Zhao, softly and passionately. All morning, WeChat and WhatsApp channels, popular with Asian Americans, had been exploding with messages in support of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the lawsuits, including a simple exclamation: “!!!”
Before Zhao could get much further, a young activist cupped her hands over her mouth to shout him down, yelling: “Stop trying to be model minorities!”

Behind Zhao, we watched stunned, supporting the retiree with cheers, but that heckling was just the first salvo in an afternoon of taunting, intimidation, and slurs that activists fighting the Supreme Court decision hurled.

Hours later, I left the Supreme Court, drenched in shock and sweat, with a very important revelation from the experience: the aggression we faced is a harbinger of things to come. The Biden administration and Democratic special interest groups and activists are deeply committed to fighting the decision, and I left certain of this: they will put in place a new campaign that will be akin to the “Massive Resistance” of the 1950s when Southern Democrats refused to accept another critical U.S. Supreme Court civil rights decision, Brown v. Board of Education, also upholding the 14^th Amendment and its guarantee of equality under the law, in that case ordering school boards to integrate public schools and end their racism against black students.
Later, I figured out who was behind the harassment we faced: a front group, “Defend Diversity,” whose website says it is “powered” by the NAACP National Legal Defense Fund, which had $174 million in revenue in its 2020 tax filing. The National Legal Defense Fund created the organization, referring to it on its website footer as one of its “LDF microsites,” essentially weaponizing youth to defend affirmative action. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU and other groups moved their press conference indoors to the Friends Committee on National Legislation because of the air quality.

The Harvard Crimson quoted a Harvard student, Nahla Owens, “of Defend Diversity,” explaining they didn’t want our parents to “speak for people,” saying: “Originally, this wasn’t supposed to happen because of the air quality, but we knew we just couldn’t stand aside and let SFFA speak for people who are supposed to be students applying and take that narrative.” Thus, they chased after us, most of us immigrants, with their cookie-cutter shirts, chants, and signs, which read, ironically, “We the People,” “Diversity Opportunity Justice” and “#DefendDiversity.” While we supported Students for Fair Admissions, or “SFFA,” we weren’t representing the group. We were immigrant parents and each one of us had become accidental activists, fighting anti-Asian racism. The NAACP’s National Legal Defense Fund didn’t return a request for comment. (Read more.)

From Trending Politics:

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a key injunction against the Biden administration, preventing officials from any further pressuring of Big Tech companies to mute or ban certain accounts in the future, a move that free speech advocates say will protect opinions at odds with government surveillance agencies.

The move, first reported by the Washington Post, came in response to lawsuits filed by Republican attorneys general who claimed federal officials overstepped their authority by contacting companies like Twitter and Facebook to shut down accounts and chat rooms dedicated to questioning the efficacy of Covid vaccines during the height of the pandemic. While a decision in the case is not yet final, court watchers expect Judge Terry A. Doughty to side with Republicans, ending over a decade of cooperative efforts in place between federal authorities and tech leaders who wield an outside ability to control public dialogue. In the injunction, which can be read here, lists the many limitations likely to be placed to federal authorities during their interactions with tech companies, including:
(1) meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms; (2) specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech; and (3) urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner social-media companies to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech.
Separately, Judge Doughty clarified that officials will be allowed to communicate with tech companies regarding accounts or posts which may be affiliated with criminal activity such as child pornography. For years the Federal Bureau of Investigation has relied on cooperation from websites and social media companies to identify pedophile networks. In addition, federal officials will be allowed to communicate about issues regarding national security threats, illegal political campaign activities, and cyber attacks.

The White House said the Justice Department is evaluating its options.
“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”
(Read more.)

From Conservative Brief:

The Daily Wire reports that Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an injunction that forbids administration officials from communicating with social media firms in what appears to be a major First Amendment win. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), a former state attorney general, filed the complaint, alleging that government officials made efforts to exert unwarranted influence over these platforms, which he said resulted in the stifling of view that diverged from the administration’s views. (Read more.)