Tag: politics

3 Reasons Why Zohran Mamdani’s City-Run Grocery Stores Will Fail

New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says City Hall needs to get into the grocery business because New Yorkers are being “priced out” of private supermarkets. If elected, Mamdani says he’ll spend $60 million on opening one government-run grocery store in each of the five boroughs that would deliver healthier produce at lower prices. Here’s why that’s a terrible idea.

1. Mamdani-Marts Can’t Compete With Discount Grocery Chains

Mamdani says that New Yorkers should think of city-run grocery stores as a “public option” that would deliver cheaper food by saving on rent and taxes. And they wouldn’t need to make a profit.

Except profit margins for grocery stores are typically below 2 percent, and private grocers keep costs down by utilizing complex supply chains and economies of scale that Mamdani’s stores won’t have access to.

“The grocery business is really tough,” says Scott Lincicome, who is the vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute. Private grocery stores provide “a vast variety of fresh frozen produce and other goods that everybody wants all the time, which is actually really difficult to do, particularly at reasonably low prices.” In Kansas City, a government-run grocery store scheme lost nearly $900,000 just last year. 

Lincicome says that if New York politicians want to give their constituents access to cheaper groceries, they could allow Walmart in the Big Apple. But New York politicians have used zoning regulations to keep the nation’s largest and most affordable supermarket from opening a store anywhere in the five boroughs. 

“Walmart is the absolute leader in supply chain efficiencies,” Lincicome told Reason. It “does this via a truly global network of warehouses and trucks and airplanes and all of these amazing things that shave off fractions of a penny off of every transaction.” The idea that New York “could somehow try to replicate Walmart’s global supply chain and entire business model is just laughable.”

2. New York Has Fewer “Food Deserts” Than Any Other City 

Mamdani says his grocery stores will help address the problem of neighborhoods lacking easy access to fresh food. But Lincicome cites a recent study showing that “ranked the Big Apple the No. 1 U.S. metro area in terms of residents’ ‘equitable access’ to a local supermarket.”

“You can basically walk almost everywhere in New York City in 10 minutes and find a grocery store,” he told Reason.

Lincicome cites multiple studies (1, 2, 3) showing that new grocery stores don’t improve food access. But this is old news: In 2012, Reason covered three earlier studies that exploded the myth that adding neighborhood supermarkets improves the diets of their surrounding communities.

3. It’s a waste of money

Mamdani said that he is going to pay for his grocery stores by “redirecting” $140 million worth of city funding that is already being spent subsidizing corporate grocers. As the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney was the first to notice, that number is based on a misreading of a city website. The city subsidizes some private grocery stores at a cost of about $3.3 million per year.. As some Bronx residents told Fox News‘ Kennedy in a new video published by Reason, the city should focus instead on helping the homeless, dealing with “rats the size of cats,” and cleaning “all of the needles on the street.”

Direct assistance is a more cost-effective and less destructive way to support low-income households than government-run supermarkets, and it’s something the federal government already does in abundance. Through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, 1.79 million New Yorkers—20 percent of the city’s population—receive help purchasing groceries each month.

As one New Yorker told Kennedy in Reason‘s latest video, “you’re focusing on the wrong things, Mamdani.”

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Why It’s Impossible For Public Schools To Be ‘Neutral’ About Politics And Religion

Robert Pondiscio had a superb piece recently that’s circulating widely, both on the left and the right. In it, he points out that many public school teachers are trained to see themselves as agents of societal change. The examples he gives are almost exclusively liberal or left-wing: teachers as “change agents” challenging alleged “systems of oppression” to “transform society,” commit to “diversity,” and adopting a “social justice orientation” that turns the classroom into a “platform for identity.” He also chides as equally-misguided recent Republican responses attempting to, as he sees it, fight fire with fire.

Besides the most fundamental and correct point of his piece — that humility is a necessary virtue for teachers — Pondiscio suggests that teachers (and policymakers) should aim above all for neutrality. But, I’d argue, this is mistaken. Properly understood, public schools are not, cannot, and, in fact, should not be neutral.

A Brief History Lesson

In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention was drafting a new form of government in Philadelphia. At the same time, the original U.S. Congress was still governing, and on the 13 of July they passed the Northwest Ordinance to govern much of what is now the American Great Lakes region. Besides facilitating the orderly transfer of federal lands to American farmer-settlers and outlawing slavery, the Northwest Ordinance established that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

To support the education of American children, the Northwest Ordinance built upon the Land Ordinance of 1785 which had guaranteed a plot of land in each township to be set aside “for the maintenance of public schools.” Public education dated back to colonial New England, but this marked a national prioritization of the institution. Indeed, the Land Ordinance made public education “go national.” Since then, public schooling has been as American as apple pie. We have the American founders to thank.

Why did they do this?

To teach those things (in this case, “religion, morality, and knowledge”) “necessary to good government.”

Pondiscio rightly echoes this purpose for public education, arguing that teachers are “not to change society but to sustain it,” and “to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends [emphasis added].” Teachers must acknowledge “that their authority rests not on self-expression, but on self-restraint [emphasis added].” Indeed, as Pondiscio says, “Public schools are not platforms. They are civic institutions.” Public schools are the government and teachers are “state actors.”

Which brings us back to the present purpose of America’s public schools: to provide education that is necessary for citizens to have a “good government,” to “sustain” society, to “transmit” that “upon which self-government depends.” In other words, the very raison d’être of America’s public schools is to support the government, i.e., the government established by the U.S. Constitution and the principles and civic norms upon which it rests.

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Zohran Mamdani Brandished Handgun in Music Video—Then Called To Ban Them

As the rapper formerly known as Young Cardamom, Zohran Mamdani donned fatigues and brandished a handgun in a music video for a song glorifying militant violence. As a politician, the socialist has called for a ban on “all guns” to remedy the “scourge of gun violence.”

The video for the 2016 song “Wabula Naawe” is “set in the Luwero Triangle in 1981 during the days leading up to the Ugandan Bush War,” our Jon Levine reports. It “opens with a spray of gunfire” before depicting “armed militants shooting firearms from the back of a truck—to the words ‘let’s get together and settle this thing once and forever.’ It later portrays a man being shot in the head at point-blank range as Mamdani raps lyrics like, ‘I’ll finish you like food on a plate,’ ‘You are about to run like a chicken,’ and, ‘You’ll pray for death.’”

“Mamdani has taken a more critical stance on firearms since entering politics,” writes Levine. As a state assemblyman, he called to “ban all guns” and voted for a bill placing restrictions on firearms marketing. He has since pledged to spearhead a “nationwide ban on assault rifles.”

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Ted Cruz EXPLODES on Rogue Activist Judge Boasberg — Demands Immediate IMPEACHMENT After Secret Subpoena of Senators’ Private Phone Records and Barring AT&T from Notifying Them

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, erupted Wednesday in a fiery press conference, calling for the immediate impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, after revelations that the activist judge signed an order secretly authorizing the seizure of his private phone records and other GOP records while blocking AT&T from notifying them.

Cruz revealed during the press conference that the Biden DOJ, under the direction of former special counsel Jack Smith, had targeted him and eight other Republican senators in a blatant fishing expedition.

The subpoenas, issued as part of the sham “Arctic Frost” investigation tied to President Trump’s rightful challenge of the 2020 election fraud, sought cellphone data that Cruz insists is protected under the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution.

Ted Cruz:
“The Biden Justice Department signed off on issuing subpoenas for the phone records of at least nine U.S. senators. Twenty percent of the Republicans in the United States Senate were the target of this fishing expedition. They did so in complete contravention of the Constitution—of separation of powers, of the Speech and Debate Clause, of free speech, of basic rights of privacy.

This is an executive who believes it is justified in spying on their opponents in the legislature because they’ve convinced themselves the ends justify the means.

I want to talk to you about one of those subpoenas. One of those subpoenas went from Jack Smith to AT&T, seeking my cell phone communications. It went to AT&T, and I actually want to commend AT&T for doing the right thing. AT&T is based in Texas. AT&T looked at that subpoena, and they went to their legal counsel and said, “What should we do with this subpoena?” And their legal counsel said, “You cannot comply because this is protected by the Speech and Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

And so AT&T declined to comply—did not hand over my cell phone records. Now, one might ask: ordinarily, a phone company being asked to hand over the phone records of a sitting senator would notify that senator.”

Judge Boasberg, notorious for his leftist activism and nationwide injunctions against President Trump’s America First agenda, slapped a gag order on AT&T, barring the company from alerting Cruz and others to the subpoena for at least a year.

In his order, Boasberg ludicrously claimed there were “reasonable grounds” to believe disclosure would lead to “destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation.

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Study Reveals Taxpayer Funds Meant to End Homelessness Are Being Used to Fund the Radical Left’s Agenda

A new study has exposed waste and abuse in the industry that is meant to ‘end’ homelessness. It revealed that taxpayer dollars that have been earmarked for this problem have been funneled to radical left wing causes for political reasons.

It actually makes perfect sense. There are lots of people who make a ton of money fighting homelessness. Why would they want the problem to be solved? That would mean an end to their industry.

This is a reminder that progressives do not actually care about the homeless. They see them as a means to an end. A way to fund their preferred political causes.

FOX News reports:

A new study just exposed the corruption behind America’s homelessness crisis

A groundbreaking investigation, “Infiltrated” – backed by more than 50 pages of documentation from the Capital Research Center in cooperation with Discovery Institute – pulls back the curtain on a vast system of corruption. It reveals how billions in taxpayer funds intended to lift people out of homelessness have instead bankrolled radical activism and anti-American political agendas, betraying both the taxpayers who fund it and the homeless they were meant to help…

It exposes how radical networks have quietly embedded themselves within leading homelessness nonprofits, sharing infrastructure, donors and ideology.

What began as a movement rooted in compassion has metastasized into what can only be described as a Homelessness Industrial Complex – a sprawling web of nonprofits, bureaucrats and activists feeding off the very crisis they claim to solve.

They’ve built an empire of corruption draped in “evidence-based” slogans that shield politics, protect paychecks and betray the vulnerable.

The report lays it bare: these networks posture as defenders of America’s homeless, yet in truth, they have become their greatest exploiters, dependent on failure to sustain power.

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Newsom Brutally Fact-Checked Over Latest Anti-Trump Sales Pitch

California Governor Gavin Newsom is running for President in 2028. That much is obvious.

What doesn’t make sense to us, however, is that Newsom seems to be working under the impression he’ll be running against President Trump in three years, not some other yet-unnamed Republican. He’s tried — in cringe-inducing fashion — to emulate President Trump’s brash style, and constantly attacks the president as if he’ll be running for reelection in 2028.

We won’t disabuse Newsom of that idea; any time he spends wasting energy and resources on attacking President Trump only helps whoever the actual nominee is. 

That being said, Newsom is not above lying to achieve his political ends, and he’s back doing that and attacking President Trump in the same X post.

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Leftists Are Pushing for Global Speech Censorship

The Democratic Party, and the global Left in general, spent the last five years crying about “mis/disinformation” and the need for more oversight of social media platforms and the Internet in general. It is anathema to the people who think they are our moral and intellectual superiors that we might say, write, or think things with which they disagree.

In moves that would make George Orwell turn over in his grave, the Biden administration tried to force the “Disinformation Governance Board” on America. Turns out that board was born after a 2022 speech given by former President Barack Obama at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center — a speech that pushed for broad censorship of the Internet.

Michael Shellenberger is now sounding the alarm that global censorship is coming unless we stop it.

The entire post is long, but we’ll highlight the most salient (and alarming) points:

But now, foreign governments, including Europe, the UK, Brazil, Australia, and others are demanding censorship, including of the American people. The risk is that US tech companies will find it significantly less expensive to have a single global censorship regime and just go along with foreign censorship requests. Facebook complied with Biden administration demands to censor because it needed Biden’s help in dealing with European censorship officials. And the Brazilian government forced Elon Musk to continue censoring the Brazilian people after it froze Starlink’s assets.

And Public has discovered that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which is led by Obama’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is at the heart of a new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.

On September 24, the Cyber Policy Center hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his “Project Liberty Institute,” (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”

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Zohran Mamdani’s Mother Says He Is ‘Not an American at All’ in Resurfaced Interview

Zohran Mamdani’s mother, in a resurfaced interview with the Hindustan Times from 2013, said her son is “not an American at all.” She also used terminology that many view as derogatory to the United States.

“He is a total desi,” filmmaker Mira Nair said about her son while he was attending Bowdoin College. “Completely. We are not firangs at all. He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.”

In Hindi and Urdu, the word “firang” refers to foreigners, particularly Westerners. But Mehek Cooke, an attorney born in India who now works as a consultant for the GOP, told Fox News the term is not “some harmless cultural term,” but rather a “slur.”

“It’s the word used back in India to mock outsiders, to say you don’t belong,” Cooke said. “Using it here about your own child raised in the United States carries the same tone as calling someone a derogatory word — or worse. It’s flippant, divisive, and dripping with contempt for the very country that gave your family a better life.”

“When Mamdani’s mother says her son was ‘never a firang and only desi,’ it’s a rejection of America. It’s ungrateful, disrespectful, and frankly repulsive to live in this country since age seven, receive every freedom, education, and opportunity America offers, and still deny being American,” she concluded.

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Don Lemon Attacks “MAGA Ladies” Over Looks, Uses ‘Trans’ as an Insult Against Megyn Kelly

Don Lemon is under fire for attacking conservative media personality Megyn Kelly by using ‘trans’ as an insult.

During a recent episode of his “Clip Farmers” podcast, he and his co-hosts, in a segment that looks like a frat-house reject reunion, discussed the appearance of “MAGA ladies” and began attacking conservative women for their looks rather than their character and substance.

Lemon’s co-host John Cotter asked, “Is Megyn Kelly ‘chopped’?”

Lemon replied, “I don’t know what that means.  I’ve heard it, but I don’t know what that means.  What does ‘chopped’ mean?”

Cotter answered, “She’s gonna get mad at me, dude, I don’t know if I want this heat.”

Lemon asked again, “What does ‘chopped’ mean?”

Cotter responded, “‘Chopped’ means not hot.”

Lemon answered with a cruel smirk, “Yeah. She’s chopped,” after which the three men cackled over insulting women for their looks.

Lemon continued, “I don’t know, the whole ‘MAGA’ look….”

Co-host Chris Miglioranzi gleefully joined the attack on conservative women, adding, “It’s all the MAGA ladies!”

“It’s too much,” Lemon added.

Cotter continued, “Kinda looks like a Barbie doll covered in WD40.”

And then Lemon dropped a very un-PC, and arguably transphobic, insult, “I think she looks trans.”

After an awkward moment that left his two co-hosts in stunned silence, Cotter said quickly, “Let’s end on that note.”

Lemon, instead, doubled down, adding, “I think she looks clockable.”

‘Clockable,’ when referring to a trans person, means that someone can “clock” (recognize or identify) their biological sex rather than the gender they present.

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Senate Votes 52-48 to Nuke Trump’s Tariffs on Brazil — These Five RINOs Voted with the Democrats

The Senate on Tuesday voted 52-48 to nuke President Trump’s 50% tariffs on Brazil.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will not hold a vote on the measure, so the Senate’s vote was a waste of time.

President Trump would never sign the measure into law anyway.

Five RINO Republicans voted with the Democrats to repeal the tariffs on incoming materials:

  • Rand Paul (KY)
  • Thom Tillis (NC)
  • Susan Collins (ME)
  • Lisa Murkowski (AK)
  • Mitch McConnell (KY)

Earlier this year, the Senate voted to nuke President Trump’s Canadian tariffs.

RINOs Murkowski, Collins, McConnell, and Rand Paul voted to repeal those tariffs.

President Trump is currently in the Supreme Court fighting to keep his tariffs in place after a court said Trump exceeded his authority.

Last month, the US Supreme Court agreed to fast-track President Trump’s tariff case.

In May, the Court of International Trade in New York said President Trump exceeded his authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA).

The DOJ immediately appealed the federal appeals court’s ruling on Trump’s tariffs.

President Trump ripped the judges over the summer.

“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong,” Trump said in August.

The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else.”

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