Tea at Trianon: The Iran Victory Hiding in Plain Sight

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, October 9, 2026

The Iran Victory Hiding in Plain Sight

From The Enterprise:

Picture a man on a Tehran rooftop on the night of January 8. He has a Starlink dish wrapped in a blanket, one of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 terminals that activists believe were smuggled into Iran, and he knows that a law passed late last year can send him to prison for 10 years for owning it, or to the gallows if a judge decides to call it espionage. Below him, the streets are full. By the following night, according to Iranian health officials who spoke to Western media and hospital tallies compiled by the surgeon Amir Parasta, as many as 100,000 of his countrymen may be dead. The regime cut the internet before the shooting started, and it did so on purpose.
President Trump understood what that blackout meant. On January 11th, he said he would work with Elon Musk to get Iranians back online, and two days later SpaceX waived its fees inside Iran. Then came February 28th, the strikes, and a second blackout that ran 88 days, with connectivity falling to roughly 1% by early March. Since then Iran has been through a ceasefire, a memorandum signed on June 17, attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and renewed hostilities on July 7. Most voters in Ohio or Arizona see strikes and a blockade. They see very little of the Iranian people, and in 27 days they vote.
Iranian American organizations have drafted four measures that would change that picture, and each one passes a single demanding test. The President can direct it now, under authority he already holds, without waiting on Congress, new appropriations, foreign capitals, or corporate goodwill. Congress, which voted in both chambers in June to direct a withdrawal from the conflict, is in no mood to help. The measures are modest on paper. I suspect they would matter more to ordinary Iranians than anything else Mr. Trump could do between now and Election Day. (Read more.)