Tea at Trianon: 2024—America’s Year of Living Dangerously

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

Friday, February 2, 2024

2024—America’s Year of Living Dangerously

From VDH:

We are now once again entering one of these dangerous moments, compounded by a weakening of the armed forces. During Biden’s tenure, the U.S. military has suffered historic shortfalls in recruitment, the disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan, a new DEI commissariat that wars on meritocratic promotions and assignments, the politicization of generals and admirals, the hyped but otherwise inane effort to root out mythical white supremacists and “domestic terrorist” bogeymen from the ranks, and the expulsion of some of our best soldiers for their reluctance to be vaccinated, many of them having developed natural immunity from prior infection. The Pentagon is short on ships and planes. U.S. weapons stocks are dangerously low, drained by the abandonment of billions of dollars of equipment to the Taliban, the resupply efforts to Ukraine and Israel, the failure of the Biden administration to fund the restocking of our munitions and to ramp up resupply production—and a $35 trillion national debt fed by $2 trillion annual deficits.
Add eight million illegal aliens who pranced over a nonexistent southern border, nearly uninhabitable big-city downtowns, an epidemic of violent crime, and a president who resuscitates mostly to blast half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists. Add it all up, and the world abroad agrees America is in a strange, self-inflicted decline and will not or cannot defend its interests, or for that matter itself. In particular, both enemies and neutrals have accordingly drawn a number of self-interested conclusions about the waning Biden administration and what may follow:
That Joe Biden, to their apparent delight, has in the last three years reversed the Trump deterrence policies and thus has green-lit their aggressions.
That given the ensuing chaos, they have further agreed that Biden’s growing unpopularity with the American people makes it likely that both he and his appeasement policies will be gone by January 2025.
That Donald Trump may well return to office. That would mean a much worse deal for Russia, China, Iran, and its terrorist satellites, and thus recognition that 2024 is a brief window of opportunity for aggression.
Putin remembers that Trump blasted 200 Russian mercenaries in Syria, got out of a bad missile deal with Moscow, upped sanctions on Russian oligarchs, flooded the world with cheap oil, destroying Russian oil export profits, sold once-canceled offensive weapons to Ukraine, and warned what would happen if Putin invaded Ukraine. Of the last four administrations, Trump’s was the only one that saw no Russian cross-border invasions.
China remembers that Trump slapped tariffs on its mercantilist market economy, accused China of birthing the COVID virus at its Wuhan virology lab, increased military spending, forced NATO to spend another $100 billion on munitions, and jawboned more alliance members into upping their military contributions. Beijing knew that to send a spy balloon across the continental United States between 2017-21 would have meant its destruction the minute it entered U.S. airspace. China did not serially threaten Taiwan during the Trump era—and may believe that this year could be the last chance in a decade to confront Taiwan.
Iran has concluded two things about 2024: 1) they do not wish to see another Trump presidency on the horizon that took out its top-ranking terrorist-general Qasem Soleimani, slapped sanctions on its oil, yanked the U.S. out of the flawed Iran Deal, declared the Iranian Houthi satellites a foreign terrorist organization, cut off all aid to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, moved the U.S. closer to Israel, and warned Hezbollah of consequences should it start a war with Israel; and 2) that the present Biden abdication will likely be short-lived and thus now may be the time to take advantage of a currently directionless global superpower that either will not or cannot deter Iranian aggression.
So what should we expect in 2024? Lacking a strong U.S. patron and sponsor, Israel will be subject to more international calls to leave Gaza, to negotiate with Hamas, and to give up the idea it can “destroy” Hamas. Hezbollah will likely up its daily barrage of missiles into Israel. Iran will become more overt in supplying Russia, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis with weapons. China will increase its threats to Taiwan and weigh carefully the costs-to-benefits of attacking the island. The common denominator? All our enemies are right now calculating how best to use their gift of the next 12 months from a non-compos-mentis president and his neo-socialist team that either believes the U.S. is at fault for much of the world’s pathologies or is too terrified to do anything about them. (Read more.)

Meanwhile, some Conservatives refuse to admit that Trump won in 2020. From Brian Cates at The Rise of New Media Newsletter:

For months now there have been people like Clay Travis and Steve Deace and several other big influential talking heads in Conservative, Inc. who’ve been insisting to anyone who still listens to them that Trump actually DOES NOT HAVE the widespread popular support that he appears to have; they’ve argued this is an ILLUSION and that Trump blew the 2020 election and lost it by campaigning ‘wrong’.
“See, Trump lost that ‘college educated suburban woman’ vote in 2020, and that’s why Joe Biden beat him fair and square. So to win in 2024, what Trump needs to do….”
Hold it.
Let me stop you right there.
When Clay Travis and Steve Deace and several others simultaneously began advancing this argument about how Trump ‘lost’ the 2020 election, I made this response: Trump bettered his 2016 vote total by almost 8.25 million votes. He did not ‘lose’ the 2020 election, and its infuriating to see top influencers spouting this crap, especially in light of all the election fraud evidence that has surfaced over the past three years. (Read more.)