Tea at Trianon: Spying and Lying

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

Monday, July 20, 2026

Spying and Lying

From Sharyl's Substack:

The news that Special Counsel Jack Smith spied on Congress and then lied about it should be of no surprise.
It’s far from the first time something like that has happened.
And since nobody has been held accountable in the past in any meaningful way, why would anybody expect the behavior to stop? Why wouldn’t the abuses expand?
The same could be said after the forensically proven government spying on me and my family. I was an investigative correspondent at CBS News at the time. The Department of Justice has defended the improper spying against me, in court. under Obama, Trump, and Biden—rather than holding the guilty parties accountable.
Let’s look at an early scandal that left the guilty officials unscathed and foreshadowed more to come.
In March 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper gave false information under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked him directly: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper replied: “No, sir… Not wittingly.”
This was untrue. We didn’t know it at the time but the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly collecting massive amounts of telephone metadata, records of who called whom, when, and for how long, on tens of millions of Americans through the Section 215 program, along with other bulk surveillance programs. (Read more.)