Tea at Trianon: Charlie Kirk and the Price of Courage

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

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Charlie Kirk and the Price of Courage

From Daniel McCarthy at Modern Age Journal:

Last week, an assassin’s bullet took the life of the most effective campus conservative communicator since William F. Buckley Jr. Charlie Kirk was a man of immense talent and immense courage. He was someone who was courageous not only in risking his life for his beliefs but also in a simpler moral sense. He was someone who was willing to put his views to the test, someone who was willing to enter into a good-faith dialogue with students on campuses across America. He was willing to talk to people who disagreed with him and to work through their differences to communicate where he was coming from, what his deepest convictions were, what his faith as a Christian told him to say, and what he thought as an individual who had considered the political difficulties of our country. Even in the face of students who had radically different views from his, radically opposed views, Charlie Kirk was always of good cheer and was willing to enter into a dialogue.
A gunman took him away. A gunman silenced his voice, but the gunman is not able to silence the discussions that Charlie Kirk began. It is impossible to kill ideas with bullets. But unfortunately, there are other ways to constrain ideas and even to kill them, other ways to silence debate on America’s campuses. And the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder is in danger of doing the very things that the assassin could not do. The danger is that you will have university administrations completing the work of Charlie Kirk’s assassin. This happens because of the ideology of safety.

Already, in fact, even a decade before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, colleges and universities across America were using safety as an excuse for excluding conservative voices from campus. They were claiming that if you wanted to bring a conservative speaker to your school, you would have to pay exorbitant security fees or buy insurance against any kind of protests or violent eruptions while a conservative was visiting your campus. In fact, I actually experienced this myself. Several years ago, a small Catholic college in Texas, a student group at this small Catholic college, invited me to come and give a speech about varieties of conservatism. (Read more.)