

The quote in the original french version is, at least iirc, let them eat brioche, so cake isn’t even a good translation. More something like “let them eat sweet bread”.
But translating brioche as cake instead makes the quote sound even more tone deaf and outrageous.






That’s pretty much universally the view on freedom and rights that today’s neo conservatives have.
They cry states rights and freedom when someone else wants to ban them from doing anything at all, but the instant someone else is doing something they don’t like, they suddenly make up moral panics to justify federally banning those things.
That is to say, conservatives by and large don’t have any principles beyond being selfish and hateful towards minoritied. Everything else, including fundamental freedoms and human rights is negotiable so long as it doesn’t negatively affect them OR negatively affects the people they hate more than them. They just use terms like freedom or rights to virtue signal when it suits them, but are just as happy to drop the pretence the millisecond doing so becomes beneficial to their goals.
A good example is the free speech screeching of conservatives in the heyday of fact checking, Vs. Their tortured justifications and dismissals of Trump’s blatant attacks on free speech and press today.
Or alternatively, many TERFs and their open willingness to draw support, and work together with misogynistic conservative groups and even straight up open Neo Nazis, just because those groups also hate trans people, all whilst turning around and claiming with a straight face that they’re doing this for women.