Tea at Trianon: America’s Woke Revolution

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

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

America’s Woke Revolution

From Chronicles:

s Burns’s new and arguably most ambitious documentary, which continues a 44-year career of sweeping, colorfully narrated, and lavishly illustrated treatments of vital swaths of American history and culture, something that can unite Americans? Many felt that way about his magnum opus, The Civil War (1990), which, long before the South and its heroes were condemned to racialized damnatio memoriae, humanized both Yankees and Confederates. It was a painstakingly rendered history that offered a moving and informed account of our country’s most challenging episode in a format that commanded near-universal appeal and won nearly unanimous praise.
Alas, in the intervening years, Burns, much like the formerly government-funded broadcaster that has reliably featured his work ever since, has succumbed to what Elon Musk has called “the woke mind virus.” Evidence of Burns’s politicization appeared as early as his lengthy 1994 series Baseball, which might have convinced some viewers that our erstwhile national sport was merely an open-air canvas for racial conflict and labor activism.

Some of Burns’s subsequent efforts leaned less on ideology—it is hard to ruin Jazz (2001) and National Parks (2009)—but the Age of Trump has clearly had a bad effect on the celebrated filmmaker. His jarring The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), which recounts Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s failure to confront Nazi mass murder during World War II, invidiously ends with a film montage including President Trump calling for border security and, inexplicably, footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstration at the Capitol.

In a CNN interview around the time of that film’s release, moreover, Burns deplored Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s chartered flight of a few dozen illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard—a self-proclaimed “sanctuary island.” He called it a worrisome exercise taken straight from what he called the “authoritarian playbook” and raised concerns about the end of democracy. In a curiously mixed metaphor for such an accomplished maker of historical nonfiction films, he later described other DeSantis policies as part of “a Soviet system or the way that Nazis would build a Potemkin village.” (Read more.)