Tea at Trianon: Counterrevolution: Thirty Years of the Conservative Press

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, August 2, 2026

Counterrevolution: Thirty Years of the Conservative Press

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Conservative media has been engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the left for so long that sometimes we forget to pull the lens back and fully appreciate how much we have leveled the playing field. Thirty years ago, if a conservative got destroyed in the media, the only recourse was to submit a letter to the editor of the local Stasi press outlet, where it would be ignored or edited and buried in the paper a week later. Now conservative journalists can actually dismantle lies and even collapse things like a book launch by a major publisher for leftist journalists.
Part of what got me thinking about this was reading an advanced copy of the great new book by Victor Davis Hanson, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement. The book doesn’t come out for a month, and I will have a fuller review then, but in terms of its overall message and how it diagnoses the media, it is a bull’s-eye. Hanson argues that Trump has been the most effective counterforce to the slow crawl of “progressive” politics over the last century - and that kneecapping the media was a crucial part of that. (Read more.)