Tea at Trianon: Mamdani’s Red Guards Take Shape

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

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Mamdani’s Red Guards Take Shape

From AND Magazine:

We reported some time ago on New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to create a “Department of Community Safety.” This is the initiative that gets characterized misleadingly as simply a plan to replace cops with social workers. It is much more than that. It is much more frightening than that. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the leftist vision of abolishing the police and substituting for them a cadre of individuals who will be empowered to forge the new society Mamdani and his Marxist supporters envision.
The first step in this effort has been the creation of something called the Office of Community Safety. It has an initial budget of a quarter of a billion dollars. Mamdani established the office in a March 19 executive order. The Office of Community Safety is intended as a precursor to a larger Department of Community Safety, which would have a total yearly budget of $1.1 billion, with more than $600 million coming from undefined “transfers of existing programs.” (Read more.)