How Marie Antoinette's Legacy Was Sullied

From History:

Few women in history have inspired as many myths as Marie-Antoinette, the last queen of France, typically portrayed as the embodiment of excess and debauchery. Many of those myths are based on the vicious and often pornographic Revolutionary propaganda that poured from French printing presses in the last days of the 18th century. The effect of this propaganda has meant that for centuries she was falsely blamed for the downfall of the monarchy.

Antoinette’s supposed crimes against both France and nature itself often took the form of songs, and her beheading on October 16, 1793 inspired a slew of execution ballads, known in French as complaintes. Execution ballads were a popular genre of news song throughout early modern Europe, cheaply printed songs set to a familiar tune. They all recounted the crimes of the condemned, with some in the first-person voice of the criminal, singing of their remorse at their evil actions, and their fear of execution.

Often execution ballads showed compassion for the criminal who was presented as repentant, but for the despised queen these ballads reveled in delight at her beheading for high treason. Ballads were sold on busy streets, marketplaces and bridges by ballad sellers, and then re-performed in taverns, cafés, theaters and at home by all classes of society. Thus, all could participate in the communal tarnishing of her reputation. (Read more.)

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Trump Calls for Pelosi to Be Prosecuted for Insider Trading

 From The Dan Bongino Show:

According to the New York Post:

Trump said Thursday he believes Rep. Nancy Pelosi “should be prosecuted” over her husband’s Visa stock trades ahead of a Justice Department lawsuit against the credit card giant. 

“Nancy Pelosi has a little problem because her husband sold their Visa stock – they had a lot of Visa stock – one day before it was announced that Visa is being sued by the Department of Justice,” the GOP nominee said during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York.

The former House speaker’s husband, Paul Pelosi, unloaded 2,000 shares of Visa stock worth between $500,000 and $1 million on July 1, financial disclosures show. On Tuesday, less than three months after the massive transaction, Visa was hit with a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the company illegally monopolized the debit card market.

Trump said of the timing; “Think of that. Nancy Pelosi sold vast amounts of Visa stock one day before the big lawsuit that we all read about a few days ago. You think it was luck? I don’t.”

(Read more.)

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Federal Judge Blocks Biden’s Socialist Student Loan Agenda

 From Right Flank:

For years, everyday Americans have found themselves struggling to pay the bills and make ends meet. Childcare, jobs, and opportunities to get ahead are in very short supply right now. Much of this can be attributed to the failures of the Biden administration, namely their passing bad bills that led to inflation spiking. 

Naturally, the White House wants people to believe a different version of events. They insist that running up the national debt was needed to improve the economy and create more jobs for the American people. In reality, the only thing that Biden’s failed policies have done is engender opportunities for more chaos and destruction. (Read more.)

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Church Windows

"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven!"

Depictions in stained glass of the martyrdoms of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette at the Church of La Boissière-de-Montaigu in the Vendée. We know that in reality the Queen wore white, and had no woman with her. Via Le Boudoir de Marie-Antoinette.

Marie-Antoinette ascends the scaffold

And below is portrayed the Royal Family in the Temple prison in Paris. Of course, the crown and scepter were not there, but they are symbols of the royal duties and responsibilities that Louis never forgot.

Louis XVI, Louis XVII, Marie-Antoinette, Madame Royale, and Madame Elisabeth

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Trump Distributes Supplies to Those Affected by Hurricane Helene

 From Legal Insurrection:

Oh, look. Former President Donald Trump is the first on the scene of a disaster. Not President Joe Biden. Not VP Kamala Harris. Trump is in Valdosta, GA, to meet with officials, distribute relief supplies, and address the media. (Read more.)

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The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

 From First Things:

The primary battleground is online, but censorship spills over into the retail book trade. Amazon, which controls more than half of the retail book industry in this country, famously decided to ban First Things author Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. It does, however, sell Let Harry Become Sally, Kelly Novak’s response. This is a trend. The bookshop I own sells new and used books on multiple platforms, including Amazon, and Amazon’s book bans have grown more frequent. This year, I have received twenty-four emails from Amazon informing me that they had removed listings of mine deemed “restricted content.” Some of these were absurdist computer ineptitude: I couldn’t sell an “Orchids in Bloom” journal because I had failed to designate it as a “seed or plant.” I can only conjecture that Hobbitus Ille, a Latin translation of The Hobbit, “violated community standards” due to the questionable quality of the Latin. Other bans are overtly political: Shame and Attachment Loss: The Practical Work of Reparative Therapy (a “gay conversion therapy” book); Hitler’s Table Talk; The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan; Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party; Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded; Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington; Islam Dismantled: The Mental Illness of Prophet Muhammad; and the antisemitic screed The Plot Against the Church.

These books are largely unsavory, and none are titles I would go out of my way to stock in my store. We used book dealers often acquire books by chance. But I am willing to bother with them if they are otherwise inaccessible. As the Freedom to Read Statement says: “Freedom is no freedom if it is accorded only to the accepted and the inoffensive.” In other words, I oppose book bans and am a supporter of banned books. “It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.” (Read more.)

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