Tea at Trianon: America’s Long History of Removing Threats

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, October 11, 2026

America’s Long History of Removing Threats

From Tierney's Real News:

Since the beginning of the Republic, American presidents of both parties have barred, expelled, or fenced off foreigners and foreign powers they judged a danger to the country’s security, sovereignty, or constitutional order.
They did it to anarchists after a president was murdered. They did it to Communists for most of the Cold War. They did it to Iranian visa holders during the hostage crisis. They did it with warships when the Barbary Muslim pirates seized American sailors, and again when the Soviet Communists put missiles in Cuba - ninety miles from Florida.
That record is the premise of this newsletter: a sovereign nation gets to decide who enters and on what terms, and America has used that power against ideological and security threats again and again. Don’t let anyone tell you the idea that America has a right to decide who gets to enter and live here is unthinkable, un-American, or bigoted. That is a lie, it is amnesia and it is a mistake.
I’m going to tell you the history of America removing past threats (including Muslim and Communist threats) in sequential order including the presidential record, two cases where force rather than visas did the job, what immigration looked like before 1965, what changed that year, how Communism was fought in law, how Islam began and grew and became a threat to the West, and what lawful options exist for keeping Sharia out of American law. (Read more.)