Tea at Trianon: Jason Arday and Jesus the Vulnerable God

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

Friday, August 21, 2026

Jason Arday and Jesus the Vulnerable God

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Jason Arday was an academic at Cambridge who got exposed for lying about his past and plagiarizing his papers. Some conservatives are blaming Arday’s death on DEI, while the left says he was undone by racism. While it is important that frauds get called to account, it’s also possible to recognize that the “shame storm” of modern witch hunts can also be too much for some people to bear — and that sometimes the shame storm is out of proportion to the actual crime. (Some shame storms are also entirely created by the media.)
While everyone has been dissecting Arday’s academic career and past, I kept thinking of him in those last moments when he decided to take his own life. When he fell terrified and abandoned. He deserved the blowback from his actions, but did not deserve to die. There is a way through these valleys, although suicidal ideation is a hard cross to bear. And the frenzy of commentary following Arday's death is a little too gleeful. Perhaps the wisdom of Pat Buchanan should apply here: “When God puts his hand on a man, I take mine off.”
The journalist Helen Andrews called the phenomenon of the media swarming a target a “shame storm.” In 2019 Andrews was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating: “Everyone at work was supportive, but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.” (Read more.)