Tea at Trianon: Zohran Mamdani's Five Government Grocery Stores

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

Saturday, August 8, 2026

Zohran Mamdani's Five Government Grocery Stores

From The Enterprise:

Consider a model home. A builder puts up 200 houses in a new subdivision and finishes exactly one of them to perfection, with good countertops, landscaping, furniture staged by a professional, and lightbulbs all matching. Nothing about that house is fake. You can walk through it, open the cabinets, stand in the shower. The deception, if there is one, lies entirely in the inference the builder wants you to draw, namely that the other 199 houses will be like this one. The model home is real and unrepresentative at the same time, and those two properties are not in tension. They are the whole point.
New York City is building five model homes and calling them grocery stores. Conservatives should understand this before the ribbon is cut, because most of us are preparing to fight the wrong battle. The standard right-of-center prediction is that municipal groceries will produce surly clerks, bare shelves, rotting produce, and a quiet bankruptcy two years in. That prediction is reasonable if you look at Baldwin, Florida, which absorbed its town grocery in 2019 and gave up in 2024, or at Kansas City, which spent roughly $17 million on Sun Fresh Market and watched it close in August of 2025 after stretches of empty shelving and security problems. Those cases are instructive. They are also, I think, about to become a trap.
David Friedberg said as much on the All-In Podcast, and the remark deserves more attention than it received. His warning was that the stores would not fail in the visible way conservatives expect, and would instead “create an incredible success story for socialism,” complete with flattering coverage, contented employees, and demands that other cities copy the model. He was right, and the reason he was right is written into the city’s own procurement documents. New York has studied the American failure cases and designed around every one of them. (Read more.)