Tea at Trianon: Why Smart People Fall for the Biggest Lies

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, November 16, 2025

Why Smart People Fall for the Biggest Lies

From The Vigilant Fox:

Modern education doesn’t make you smarter. It makes you easier to control. It’s why so many “smart” people can’t see what’s right in front of them.
It’s why so many told you to “shut up” and take the vaccine.
And things are this way for a reason. In 1903, a man by the name of John D. Rockefeller set out to redesign the American education system—not to create thinkers, but to manufacture obedient workers who would never question authority.
As Mattias Desmet says bluntly: “Our education and our training at school maybe teaches us more to think like everybody else than to think for ourselves.”
Once you read this, you’ll never think about school (or intelligence) the same way again.
Intelligence used to be understood as something very multidimensional. It included emotional, physical, intuitive, creative, and spiritual components.
Today? Only one thing matters. Intellectual intelligence—the kind that scores well on tests and follows the rules without asking questions.
This incredibly narrow focus has created an epidemic of smart fools—people who can solve equations but can’t see the reality around them or question what doesn’t make sense. (Read more.)