Tea at Trianon: Surviving the Left’s Shame Storm

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 17, 2025

Surviving the Left’s Shame Storm

The Left-wing campaigns against innocent people have destroyed many lives. From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

My own shame storm was on a considerably larger scale than the one Rittelmeyer describes, though I’m sure hers was no less keenly felt. In 2018, I became briefly famous for my involvement in the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Kavanaugh, a high school friend, was falsely accused of sexual assault by a women named Christine Blasey Ford. Ford claimed I was in the room when the alleged assault took place in 1982 when we were in high school. My world was turned upside down. Reporters told lie after lie about me. People stared at me in public or, uninvited, felt entitled to walk up and talk to me about my private life. My entire past was examined, and I was declared a villain. Protestors on Capitol Hill demanded I be subpoenaed and that every inch of my life—whether it was my past drinking, dating life, and writing—be exposed so that I and Brett be made to feel shame (and, of course, that he would thereby not be confirmed to the Court).

Intense shame is a difficult thing to navigate. Kavanaugh and I had been raised in an Irish Catholic community that recognizes shame as a sometimes powerful and healthy thing. After all, shame is part of a well-formed conscience and it is invoked to prevent you from hurting others. Yet a person’s life is not meant to be ruled by shame—especially a false shame.

During one of the worse parts of the Kavanaugh nightmare my friend and book editor Adam Bellow called me. “So,” he said, “how does it feel to have the entire liberal world projecting their shadow onto you?” He was using Jungian terminology, and it fit—as is so often the case with the left, when they are guilty of crimes I would never even imagine, they were shaming me for the “crime” of enjoying crime fiction and attractive women. (Read more.)