Tea at Trianon: Charlie Kirk and the Left’s Memory Police

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

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Charlie Kirk and the Left’s Memory Police

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

In her 1994 novel The Memory Police (published in English in 2019), Japanese novelist Yoko Ogawa creates a world in which memories are forbidden. When a group of people begin to lose their memories and attachment to objects and concepts, a military force called the Memory Police enforces the loss of memories. The Memory Police beat those who claim that yes, yesterday a book was in fact on the kitchen table.
It’s a great concept, and one that is analogous to the situation in America and the West over the last hundred years. One of the reasons the left is apoplectic these days is that they can no longer police our thoughts and memories. (We are taking advantage of this leveling of the playing field by holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival, celebrating pro-freedom films that the left wants us to forget.)
Think about it. Liberals told us that there wasn’t any repression or famine in the old Soviet Union. They insisted that there were no communist spies in the American government after World War II. They told us that the peace, culture, and family life in the 1950s never really existed. They told us our soldiers in Vietnam were evil, and that anonymous sex with hundreds of partners was not the cause of sexual diseases. They called Brett Kavanaugh a gang rapist - and still do. They lied about Charlie Kirk or are attempting to. Liberals are our Memory Police, and have been for decades.
On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a major story and now it isn’t - in fact, George Floyd is getting more coverage at this point. The Memory Police are doing their job. (Read more.)

From Coulombe's Company:

As Bishop Robert Barron said in his eulogy, Kirk died as he lived: with a microphone in his hand. Kirk was, to the end, a debater: patient, persistent, unwilling to meet words with anything but words. He embodied free and open debate; he did not censor others, nor did he shy away from issues of consequence. His own position was remarkably moderate: nothing he believed was not mainstream not so long ago. He was not smarmy or smug. Unlike, say, Ben Shapiro, he did not make a sport of “owning SJWs with facts and logic”. Nor did he farm resentment or peddle in what many on the online right term “outrage porn”. He eschewed violence; neither did he mock those with whom he disagreed. If he had a guiding belief (beyond his personal faith), it was that people could arrive at the truth through courageous, honest, civil discourse. This trust drove his life’s work. For that, he was murdered.
Understand this. Kirk believed that man could apprehend the truth through reason and memory, understanding and imagination. He believed that there was a truth to reach. Kirk was articulating a view that has undergirded Christian, Western civilisation (and, until fairly recently, its fractured successors) for millennia. In this vision – but not necessarily in those of the successors – there is an objective moral order and an order of meaning, both subsisting in the Creator, Who is their source and guarantor. As creatures, as children of this Creator – above all, as brothers redeemed by the scandal of the Creator upon the Cross – we are beholden to that order. We must submit to it, body and soul. Apart from it, talk of progress or improvement or law or justice makes no sense. Acknowledging this truth is the sine qua non of debate; the rest is detail (important detail, maybe, but nonetheless secondary). Yet, by the time Kirk came on the scene, this most basic truth had been driven underground.
What remained of this vision in mainstream discourse was flotsam and driftwood. “Common-sense”, perhaps, was the most intact heir. Yet even this had been unmoored from any referent beyond the political requirements of the day. Thus: common-sense gun control, common-sense school curriculum reform, common-sense COVID-19 church shutdowns, common-sense abortion of babies with Down’s syndrome, common-sense euthanasia.
We shall not now explore how this came to be. That tale is complex and long and sad, and quite beyond the scope of this essay. (Read more.)