Tea at Trianon: Color Revolution: Thune and Johnson Built the Runway for a One Party State

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, April 22, 2026

Color Revolution: Thune and Johnson Built the Runway for a One Party State

From Amuse on X:

On April 17, 2026, the veteran Democrat strategist James Carville and the longtime journalist Al Hunt sat down for their Politicon podcast and described, on the record, the architecture of a one party American state. A listener had asked a hypothetical. Hunt answered that the first order of business after a 2027 Democrat Congress would be to “hold Trump as accountable as they possibly can.” Carville went further. On day one of unified Democrat control, he said, “they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. Fuck it. Eat our dust.” Then came the sentence that should be read aloud in every Republican campaign office in the country. “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
That sentence is the thesis of this essay. Everything that follows is commentary on it.
Consider first what an ordinary political promise looks like. A candidate announces a program, explains its tradeoffs, and asks voters to ratify it. The ratification is the mandate, and the mandate is the moral basis on which the program moves. Carville has proposed the opposite. He is instructing Democrat candidates to run on grievance, on tariffs, on the cost of eggs, on the 2026 slogan he has suggested, “We demand a repeal,” and then to execute, in office, a structural program the candidates deliberately concealed from the voters. An intelligent reader may ask whether this is really so different from ordinary political surprise. Politicians disappoint voters all the time. The difference is scale. What Carville described is not a broken campaign promise. It is a coordinated remaking of the constitutional order, executed behind a campaign designed to prevent voters from weighing in on it. The deception is not incidental to the program. It is the program’s operating assumption.
Now consider what the program is. Nine pillars can be extracted from Democrat statements on the record, and each one, considered in isolation, would be a generational fight. Considered together, they are a color revolution.
The first pillar is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Hunt’s phrase, “hold Trump as accountable as they possibly can,” has a specific vehicle behind it. In October 2020, Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, called for a post Trump commission that would name every official, politician, executive, and media figure whose conduct “enabled this catastrophe.” Senator Elizabeth Warren has floated a version. In February 2026, John Kenneth White of Catholic University published a column in The Hill invoking Nelson Mandela’s 1995 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the explicit model. Readers are told the South African TRC was a neutral reconciliation mechanism. It was not. It was a state commission empowered to establish an officially sanctioned national narrative, and that narrative became the moral scaffolding for black economic empowerment laws that the South African Institute of Race Relations, the Tax Foundation, and the Cato Institute have all documented as a codified regime of race based discrimination. A 1998 study by South Africa’s own Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation found that most surveyed victims believed the TRC had failed to produce reconciliation but instead solidified government control of the ‘truth’ and the narrative. That is the template. An American TRC would haul sitting Republican officials, conservative judges, and possibly Supreme Court Justices before televised hearings to extract confessions or condemnations, codify those moments into a federal record of Republican wrongdoing, and use that record as the permission structure for the prosecutions, the statutes, and the purges that follow. The goal is not truth. The goal is compliance. (Read more.)