Tea at Trianon: Ferguson at Twelve: The Lie That Divided a Nation

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

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Ferguson at Twelve: The Lie That Divided a Nation

From Man of Steele:

Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary.
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who had been with Brown prior to the shooting, told the world that Brown had his hands up in the air and said, don’t shoot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan spread across the world like wildfire as the Twitter hashtag maps documented. Al Sharpton yelled the slogan and that a surrendering black teenager had been shot by a white cop. Black shot by white. Black white. And it traveled from Canfield Drive to the Congress to the NFL to corporations and to campuses across America. It became, to use my father’s phrase, a poetic truth, the kind of lie that a nation believes not because the evidence supports it but because it confirms what many Americans suspected of their nation. (Read more.)