Tea at Trianon: No Winged Hussars This Time

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, September 14, 2026

No Winged Hussars This Time

From Unlicensed Punditry:

It is 2026 and the Ottoman Empire is still at the gates, only now, there are people who don’t care because they have no concept of what living in an Ottoman civilization (or under the Taliban’s interpretation of sharia law) looks like.
We should not believe it wasn’t this way before 9/11 because there have always been haters of this nation, not because it didn’t give them of its bounty, but because, in their opinion, it didn’t give them enough.
9/11 changed that – albeit temporarily.
For a while, the bitchers, whiners and anti-Americans were too afraid to be exposed as making common cause with 7^th Century savages who figured out how to use the very freedoms against us that the anti-Americans take for granted. They saw the anger that average Americans rightly focused on Islamic terrorists – and they also saw the fear in those who were not confident enough in America’s goodness to stand up.
That soon faded and America’s ADHD returned. Not only did the anger wane, it became tiresome, but the fear subsided as well. Twenty-five years ago, there were no marches to “free Palestine”, a state and a people who do not exist and protest featuring open hatred of Israel, a state and people who do exist.
Over the span of just a few years, we not only forgot who the enemy was, we hold seminars to protect Muslims from “Islamophobia” and openly import them while actively denying Islam’s role in the murder of thousands of people here in America and abroad. We even elect the radical among them to office.
The tolerance we have for Mamdani, Omar, El Sayed, Rashida Tlaib, and other agitators has eclipsed our outrage that we were attacked on our home soil on 9/11, that outrage has become performative. (Read more.)