Reading · Kentucky Fried Christian

“The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.” Ecclesiastes 10:2

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” Matthew 25:41

We1 said last week we weren’t done yet with the New York Commune (NYC).

Because what would the ‘warmth of collectivism’ be, without government-run grocery stores?

At a media conference on July 27, Mayor Mamdani announced that NYC’s getting into the retail grocery business.

And as is true with mostly everything with the criminally corrupt left, it wasn’t without an abundant share of sensationalized fantasies delivered as sophistically rationalized lies, gaslighting and pie-in-the-sky promises to the greedy and gullible.

Promises that can only be delivered at the expense of the wholesale destruction of the ‘rugged individualists’ who dare do something so ‘socially toxic’ as paying taxes or running a family-owned supermarket.

Because to whet the whistles of the greedy and gullible, Mamdani announced the NYC-run grocery stores would be offering product at an across-the-board 30% discount of the retail price in private sector supermarkets: both corporate grocery chains, who can absorb the dent in their bottom lines this represents as easily as an elephant hide takes a mosquito bite…

And the mom-’n-pop supermarkets who can’t, and who’ll lose so much going up against that, they’ll be forced out of existence.

All right in line with the neo-communist revolutionary playbook: tax the rich to gently tap their wealth (so they’re not inclined to mobilize it against you); destroy the middle class to heartlessly eliminate theirs, and; artificially induce the universal impoverishment that leaves a majority of the populace with nowhere left to turn for anything.

In the case of sustenance it can afford, with nowhere left to turn except to Big Mommy’s Bolshevik Bodega.

And as is true with mostly everything with the criminally corrupt left, this latest pie-in-the-sky promise comes fully loaded with irrationality, injustice, implausibility and all the sustainability of a house of cards in a hurricane.

As a Fox News article points out, in economic and financial reality, the grocery industry generally operates on a razor-thin profit margin of 2%.

“And that’s with competent management, which New York City government is decidedly not famous for,” Fox contributors to the article, Peter St. Onge and E.J. Antoni, add.

What that means is every dollar the NYC-grocery stores make, is already coming in at a 30% loss because of the discount.

The industry-standard 2% profit margin recovers $0.02 of that loss.

Guess who covers the rest?

That’s right.

The NYC taxpayer, who’ll be on the hook for covering $0.28 of every dollar to subsidize the promised discount.

“When the smoke clears, New Yorkers get a couple years of cheap bananas, tens of millions of dollars in new debt and real companies fleeing, so residents have to take two trains and a bus to get to a real grocery store,” Onge and Antoni conclude.

To which they also add some brutal, fact-based truth:

“In fact, this is exactly what’s happened in dozens of government grocery experiments across the country, from Kansas City—which lost $18 million on a grocery that sold rotting food—to Chicago— which blew $26 million running seven stores into the ground. But socialism will work this time if Comrade Mamdani smiles hard enough.”

That’s just the beginning of all the nightmares in this nightmare scenario.

Before we wade through how the scenes of that scenario can likely play themselves out in reality-to-come, let’s take a quick look at how they’ve played themselves out in reality-past.

Before being born-again in the spirit, in the part of my life in which I was a political scientist, I spent most of 1990 in still-Soviet Moscow (with a few side-trips to my ancestral homeland, Ukraine), studying the Russian language to improve my research and communications skills in my speciality, which happened to be Soviet and East European politics and history.

I got a real up close, personal and memories-of-a-lifetime look at government-run everything-and-everywhere, including the experience of shopping in government-run grocery stores that’s really indescribable to anybody who hasn’t ever had the pleasure.

You just really have to have seen this to believe it.

At that time, Soviet grocery stores were part of a network of government-run food provision outlets that included general grocers, as well as specialty stores devoted to single products (like a Bread Store, a Buns Store, a Sugar Store, a Milk Store, and my personal favorite, the Juices, Cheeses and Sausages Store).

That’s the way all Soviet socialist reality was categorized and divided, like line-items in a budget ledger.

Including humans.

There were always gray-drab delivery trucks lumbering through the streets, their canvas bed-frames simply marked in stencilled letters “Bread,” “Buns,” “Sugar,” or “Milk.”

And then one day I saw a truck marked “People.”

Back to the grocery stores: they were always empty of shoppers, because few Soviets in their right minds shopped in any of them, as I was to finally find out a very hard way.

Because the charm of the government-run grocery store network in Soviet socialism included no daytime lighting, empty shelves, here-and-there a lonely, rusty can of some expired mystery product or a dusty box of crumbled noodles, and the ubiquitous shot-putter grandma in the powder-blue smock sporting a head kerchief, black wool stockings, a mouth full of gold teeth, who’d be standing behind an empty counter in an empty store to bark, “What the hell do you want?” as soon as you walked in the door.

It was like that because the Soviet socialist economic model—that took 70+ years to develop to these lofty heights—was a completely bankrupt failure, that only existed as a prop to maintain the illusion of a working society under socialism.

It was the facade of the Potemkin Village applied to an entire economic system.

And it was propped up only by the wholesale criminality under which the real economy of the Soviet Union actually operated behind the cover of its official infrastructures.

State enterprises under Soviet socialism (including grocery stores), were official farces that acted as fronts and covers for the criminal corruption according to which everything was really done (and could only be done) under the idiotically absurd framework of command economics, Five-Year-Plans, official quotas and artificially inflated statistics.

In short, people employed by the government economy all—and I really mean all—pretended to work, while their employers pretended to pay them.

Work, production statistics, expenses, income, existed only in the reports sent to State and Party bosses, who knew it was all horse-feathers anyways.

Nothing was being officially done and nobody was being officially paid, because the government had no money with which to pay anybody officially.

So how did it all—and everybody in it—work?

Wholesale, universal, rampant, systemic crime.

In the official Soviet economy, nobody did any work; because nobody got paid; because nothing was being done; because there was nothing with which to do anything; because there was no money with which to officially do it.

But, when Boris Bossevich, head of the official Moscow government-run construction enterprise, got his official yearly allotment of concrete, say, the first thing Boris did was phone around to other Bossevich’s heading other government-run enterprises, to either illegally sell them the concrete, or trade it with somebody who needed the concrete, while Boris needed the hammers that somebody had either stolen or gotten from somebody else in a trade, or bought illegally themselves.

Workers didn’t get paid, because they were naturally expected to be somehow criming their way through it all.

That’s essentially how the Soviet economy managed to survive for 70+ years of its existence.

Nothing was done officially, legally and properly.

Everything was accomplished unofficially, illegally and corruptly.

Glowing reports of economic boom to official regulating bodies were completely fabricated, and passed all the way up the line to the very top, with everybody at every level aware of the fraud, but everybody at every level also getting a sizeable cut of the criminal proceeds of the real action hidden by the fabricated fraud, so that everything could be officially accounted for and impressive, while everybody was making out like bandits in the process, doing everything under the table, as it was called in Russian slang, ‘na l’yevo.’

“On the left.”

And that’s why all the government grocery stores were all always empty.

Because whatever product they officially carried, was usually sold or traded before it could even get out of the warehouse and onto a store shelf.

Ot straight up stolen from the warehouse, or in transit to the store, and resold on the black market.

Which is another reason nobody in their right minds ever shopped at a government-run grocery.

Nothing was available for sale in any of them, because it was all being stolen and resold on the black market at every open air market, of which every Soviet city had at least one, with most having several or many.

Markets where all the real economic action took place; where you could get anything from watermelons to whisky to weapons arsenals, and anything in between.

When I went to visit my family in Western Ukraine during the Easter Break, I told my cousin about the time back in the imperial capital, when—still wet behind the ears at socialisming—desperately hungry, I bought one of those lonely, rusty cans of mystery fish at a government-run grocery.

Which immediately led to food poisoning and a couple days of explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting.

My cousin rotfl’d and said, “What did you expect? Everybody knows not to shop at a government grocery store!”

Yeah, well, I didn’t then.

But I did after that.

Then one day we’re driving around town and we see people scrambling to join a queue up at a store that was already a block long.

“See that?” my cousin said. “Somebody must’ve spread the rumor they’re delivering sugar to the store today. That’s why they’re all lining up.”

And that’s the way every socialist economy has always worked.

And that’s the way people in every socialist economy have always been forced to live just to survive:

Like animals and criminals.

While the people in command and control of the government and the economy play the socialist charade, tout their socialist paper accomplishments, and get unrestrictedly stinking, filthy rich robbing the official economy blind, splitting up the fat pie amongst themselves and letting everybody else survive or die and go to hell for all they care.

Because the official economy was a non-existent, fabricated fantasy back in the USSR, the ruble (the official Soviet currency), wasn’t worth the paper it was used to wipe your rear end with.

Foreign currency was the only money that talked at every level.

But that was officially illegal for any Soviet citizen to possess.

So the only way to make the money that was illegal for anybody to posses—but without which nobody could do or get anything—was illegally.

Which contributed to the systemic stealing, fraud, criminality and corruption.

Armed with pocketfuls of illegal cash, Soviet citizens who were nimble enough to make a lot of foreign currency somehow and weren’t stupid enough to shop at a government-run grocery store, shopped at the foreign currency ones that were officially illegal, but that operated openly and freely to meet the demand, and were well secured by gobs of protection money paid to all the right well-placed State and Party hacks.

They were guarded by armed security at the doors. You could only get in with a foreign passport, or a Soviet passport filled with a wad of US dollars for the guards letting you in.

Inside, the stores were like a grocery Garden of Eden—filled with colorful and copious foreign grocery product—compared to the dismal, dim and dreary, empty government-run hell-holes.

So, both in general and specifically where government-run grocery stores are concerned, that’s the socialist economic reality:

Empty stores, people pretending to work, people pretending to pay them, everybody stealing, people lining up for hours or even days on mere rumors of product showing up at a store, and the whole society, culture and economy just one, giant, permanent crime scene.

Starting to sound familiar?

So given that as the reality of the socialist economic model, the reality of the socialist economic reality, and the reality of the socialist government-run grocery store, what can we expect from Mayor Mamdani’s NYC government-run grocery gambit?

Specifically, we can’t say precisely yet, because this is a new time, a new place, a different society and culture and a far different (even if starting to look and work the same way in many respects wherever there’s a blue state or city, or Canada), economic model and reality.

Remember first: the people bringing us these government-run grocery stores are—in ideological and moral consciousness—the same as the people who brought the world the government-run grocery stores and economic system I just finished describing.

They’re also the same people who brought us the Covid experience; “Trust the Science!”; “Two weeks to flatten the curve” for over two years; masks when sitting down down but not while standing up; masks while standing up but not when sitting down; masks while having sex; six-feet apart; one-way arrows in grocery aisles; lockdowns; watching grandma and grandpa die alone and terrified behind glass partitions; arrests for walking on empty beaches or deserted parks; “No vaccine? No travel! No admittance! No employment! No medical treatment! No right to be alive!”; “Climate Change causes forests to spontaneously combust!”; “Mostly peaceful protests...”

They’re the same people who angrily pound desks with their shoes, insisting voter ID is fascism because Shabauf and Latiqua, Ernesto and Selena, Abdul and Aliyah, and married women, are too stupid to know how to get their own ID...

But then do this:

Clay Travis@ClayTravis

New York City will require IDs to prove you live in the city in order to shop in the city owned grocery stores. So you need an ID to shop in the city’s stores, but it would be racist to require an ID to vote. Perfection.

2:53 PM · Aug 3, 2026 · 3.53M Views

2.01K Replies · 14.5K Reposts · 63.9K Likes

Okay?

So what’s to stop people from fraudulently buying groceries at MamdaniMart at a 30% discount, and then reselling them? Either in their own stores, or out of the trunks of their cars?

Seems ID to prevent fraud works for groceries, but not for voting.

They’re the people who’ve been trying every scheme imaginable to hoist mandatory Digital ID on all of us, to force us into a universal, digital panopticon surveillance and punishment, command and control, slave state.

How long before they say: “You can’t afford food from anywhere else? No cheap government-run groceries without Digital ID!”

They’re the people who insisted Covid vaccines were safe and effective, when in fact they’ve directly caused millions of deaths, and even more millions of debilitating injuries, worldwide, with more Americans being killed by the Covid vaccines than WWI, WWII and Viet Nam combined.

Who’s going to trust those same people to provide safe food product?

How do we know what they’re going to be putting in the food they’ll be selling in those government-run groceries?

What if you’re Jewish in Mamdani’s “From the River to the Sea!” NYC, and are forced to buy groceries from a MamdaniMart?

Will you be welcome with open arms?

Or treated like you just walked into Gaza wearing a kippah looking to buy some lox and bagel?

What incentive will employees at MamdaniMart have to deliver good customer service or efficient work of any kind, when they know they’ll be getting paid regardless of their performance or the store’s liquidity, because of taxpayer subsidies?

How long before those employees figure out a system for turning stolen grocery product into cold, hard cash of their own?

Speaking of subsidies, when those dry up for good, or at least for temporary periods, what does MamdaniMart use for the cash to pay for product with which to stock their shelves?

And then how long before the same lines we used to see outside grocery stores during Covid, return again outside every MamdaniMart, with people who can’t afford to go anywhere else simply waiting for a chance to get inside and snatch up whatever there may be to snatch up, whether they want it, need it, can resell it, or not?

On the surface and under rational scrutiny, this NYC government-run grocery pipe dream makes about as much sense as a broom closet on the bank of a river.

But like we said last week with Mamdani’s equally nonsensical Pied-à-Terre tax, the rationale for it isn’t in the rational, but in the irrational.

And evil.

When we take everything the communist-inclined say or do as part of their campaign to destroy the Western world from within—by weakening its foundations, institutions and demographics to the point of unsustainable instability and impoverishment—then MamdaniMart makes perfect sense.

Tax enough people into enough impoverishment that forces them to survive on whatever crumbs you throw them.

Offer them those desperately needed crumbs in attractive sounding outlets that have all the proven economic viability and sustainability of a steam bath in hell.

Then hold them hostage and do whatever you want to them while they rely on you as their sole source for sustenance.

Like a fat cat playing with a skinny mouse before devouring it for dinner.

That’s the true spirit of socialism/communism, in all its consciousness and action, that’ll be lurking in the dark aisles of the NYC government-run grocery store.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Scoundrels use wicked methods,
they make up evil schemes
to destroy the poor with lies,
even when the plea of the needy is just.”
Isaiah 32:7

“The salvation of the righteous comes from the Lord;
he is their stronghold in time of trouble.
The Lord helps them and delivers them;
he delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
because they take refuge in him.”
Psalm 37:39-40

(Photo Credits: Gene Kaye/Google AI; ReadingThePictures.org; Anatoly Sapronenkov/AFP/Getty Images; The Gospel Coalition via Pinterest.)

"N'yet, N'yet Soviet... Soviet Grocery! N'yet! N'yet!"

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