Tea at Trianon: The End of Illusion: On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Way Forward

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

Monday, September 15, 2025

The End of Illusion: On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Way Forward

From The Harvard Salient:

Those who knew Charlie will tell you what the cameras too often obscured. He could be theatrical, florid, and exasperating in the delightfully modern register of political showmanship. He could also be unexpectedly, almost annoyingly, moderate: a man who prized argument over obliteration, outreach over insularity, whose modus operandi was to cross campus thresholds and address anyone curious enough to ask a question. He exhorted a generation, plainly and insistently, to love God, love their family, and love their country. That was enough to get him killed.
Let us be unsentimental about the nature of the enemy. Leftism is not merely a rival policy set or an alternate party program. Leftism is a mental illness. There is no risk in naming the condition plainly when the symptoms are so evident: systematic hatred for inherited institutions, a taste for moral monstrosity, and a bloodlust that sanctifies obliteration—of traditions, of customs, of human life—as signs of progress. If you are on the Right and have been told this language is excessive, look instead at the evidence of behavior: celebration when opponents are deplatformed, undone—or worse—killed. They hate you. They want you dead. To say it this way is necessary, for it is in the flowery meadows of euphemism that rot truly spreads. (Read more.)

From Culturcidal:

Yet Charlie Kirk would have unhesitatingly told you he wasn’t a fascist and that he rejected fascist ideology. In fact, no rational, objective person could consider conservatives to be fascists. Just the fact that the vast majority of conservatives would consider a perfect government to be one several orders of magnitude smaller and weaker than the current one is definitive proof we’re not fascists.
So, where did Tyler Robinson get the idea that Charlie Kirk was a fascist? He undoubtedly heard liberals, including the most prominent liberals in America, repeat that lie endlessly for years. A lie that, in the mind of a liberal college student, justified murder.
Of course, if most liberals in America at least had some compassion for a father who was murdered in front of his own daughter for trying to talk to liberals instead of acting like demonic sociopaths who gloried in his murder, the environment today would be a lot different. (Read more.)