Tea at Trianon: How Ireland Became a Woke Theme Park

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

Thursday, August 6, 2026

How Ireland Became a Woke Theme Park

From Jack Cashill:

Arriving in Shannon Airport in western Ireland last week, we were greeted by a gaggle of protestors unhappy with American foreign policy. Not the most robust of allies, Ireland has nonetheless been allowing American military aircraft to refuel at Shannon. So upset was one 91-year-old activist with the war in Iran that she walked all the way across Ireland to have her protest heard. The media declared her a hero.
The “we,” in question was my extended family and close friends, all 40 of us. Before our bus driver, a good fellow and superior tour guide, could venture an opinion on the protest, I cautioned him that two-thirds of us had voted for Donald Trump. That acknowledgment surprised him. The Irish know few self-declared Republicans. Twenty years ago, for instance, a colleague of my wife’s at the university in Galway took me to lunch. because he had never met a “Bush man,” even a tepid one like me.
Even more so abroad than at home, liberal Americans are eager to stake out their positions publicly. Today, in a newly woke country like Ireland, they hope to assure their foreign hosts they were neither racist nor reactionary enough to have elected Donald Trump president. (Read more.)