Tea at Trianon: Minneapolis: America's Destruction Lab

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

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Minneapolis: America's Destruction Lab

From Candeloro's Substack:

To understand the fire, meet the arsonist.
Saul Alinsky wasn’t merely a “community organizer” — that label functioned as cover for an architect of modern political guerrilla warfare. In Rules for Radicals, he laid out a worldview that now plays out on American streets: morality is disposable; the only real objective is POWER.
Minneapolis isn’t an accident. It’s the manual in operation.
Forget “spontaneous outrage.” What you’re watching is calibrated social engineering: a provocation, a verdict delivered before the investigation, emotional hysteria replacing evidence. The goal is to force institutions to violate their own rules under the banner of “compassion.” Once they yield, the violation becomes precedent. When they resist, the pressure escalates. Compromise doesn’t resolve it — it accelerates it.
Look at the post-2020 policing climate: in many major cities, proactive enforcement pulled back — not because crime vanished, but because the political cost of doing the job exploded. Officers don’t act from duty; they operate under the threat of professional annihilation. Exactly as Alinsky prescribed: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.”
And who runs this laboratory?
Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor — the same figure Kamala Harris tapped as her running mate in 2024. During the George Floyd unrest, Walz signed an order activating the National Guard on May 28, 2020 — yet the core criticism was never “did he sign a paper,” but whether the response matched the speed and scale of the collapse on the ground.
Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’ mayor, provided the city’s most revealing image: publicly kneeling and weeping at George Floyd’s casket while precincts burned and civic authority disintegrated.
This wasn’t mere incompetence.
It looked like managed permissiveness — a posture where the state hesitates just long enough for chaos to rewrite the rules. (Read more.)