Tea at Trianon: Columbia Journalism Dean Celebrates Man Who Beat, “Tortured” Women

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, October 3, 2025

Columbia Journalism Dean Celebrates Man Who Beat, “Tortured” Women

From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

What separates Bill Cosby and David Carr from Brett Kavanaugh is that Bill Cosby and David Carr actually assaulted women, while the flimsy allegations against Kavanaugh were a political hit job with no basis in reality. But David Carr, as a prominent member of the media establishment, was never held responsible by the journalists who heaped praise on him at his death in 2015. Many of these same journalists defamed Kavanaugh and have never apologized for it. Whatever lessons about facts and accuracy that Cobb purportedly learned form Carr were apparently forgotten by the time Cobb landed on his perch at the New Yorker, which ran libelous Kavanaugh stories that even The New York Times would not touch.

Even today, Carr is deified by the same media that defamed Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. In 2019, Terry Gross, the host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program rebroadcast an interview with “Fresh Air Favorite David Carr.” Gross has no time for journalists like me, who were accused during the Kavanaugh hit job and who are innocent. Erik Wemple, a journalist who also worked with Carr at the City Paper, is now a media critic at The New York Times. In a journalism symposium last year during which Carr was lauded, Wemple demanded that the media start learning to apologize when they get things wrong. Yet Wemple never brought up Carr’s violent past. (Read more.)