Tea at Trianon: How Comrade Mamdani Will Appropriate Private Real Estate In New York City

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

Thursday, May 28, 2026

How Comrade Mamdani Will Appropriate Private Real Estate In New York City

From AND Magazine:

Lest you think this is an exaggeration, here are some quotes by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s point person on housing:
“Private property, including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
“Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” ·
“For centuries, we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good, and we are going to, in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity, will require that we think about it differently... Families, especially White families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.”
Cea hasn’t stopped at simply identifying the problem, however. She has been remarkably up front about exactly how to destroy the horrible capitalist, racist, cisgendered edifice she so detests.
“But investment in enforcement is not in itself enough,” Weaver wrote. The city, as the New York Post put it in an editorial, can then pass “laws that cause real-estate values to collapse.”
You need to understand that in Weaver’s world, the city’s “lack of a profit motive” is a great advantage. The city can ignore considerations of profit and loss and use its taxing and regulatory powers to drive out private actors. It can destroy private landlords and then seize control of their assets when they are forced to flee the market.
“With its multibillion-dollar capital budget, the city has the capacity to act as a non-speculative market actor: purchasing buildings where the landlord is no longer interested in ownership.”
“We need to combine the power to enforce housing standards and the power to finance and acquire rental housing — two capacities the city already has.”(Read more.)