New York City has a mayoral election later this year, and the two leading candidates right now are former governor Andrew Cuomo and a state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani.  The latter has gained traction in the polls by promising to build city-run grocery stores that “will operate without profit motive” in order to combat “the outrageous price of groceries.”  Leave it to the residents of Gotham to pin their hopes on either the guy who turned nursing homes into COVID death traps or a proud communist who is blithely unaware of the Soviet Union’s history with breadlines.  

In response to Mamdani’s plan for government-run grocery stores, John Catsimatidis — the über-successful owner of New York’s Gristedes and D’Agostino food chains — has offered the mayoral candidate one of his supermarkets to test his ideas in practice.  The offer comes with one stipulation: The city must eat all shoplifting costs.  

Mamdani does not appear eager to accept Catsimatidis’s proposal.  After all, New York City is in the middle of a shoplifting crisis today, and mayoral-wannabe Mamdani wants to replace traditional policing with a “Department of Community Safety” that empowers “dedicated outreach workers” to handle “the failures of our social safety net.” 

Something tells me that Mamdani’s vision for New York will turn grocery shopping into even more of a nightmare.  His city-run stores will become magnets for mass theft, and responding community “outreach workers” will be more concerned with criminals’ “preferred pronouns” than stopping armed robberies.  Shelves will be empty.  Food prices will go up.  New York City’s budget problems will get exponentially worse.  It’s all entirely predictable, but plenty of Democrats will vote for this government-engineered catastrophe anyway.

Chalk this up to Democrats’ persistent unwillingness to live within the outer perimeters of reality.  When they see grocery prices rise, they blame “greedy” business owners.  When those business owners explain that out-of-control shoplifting is a major cost responsible for price increases, Democrats insist that insurance covers such losses.  When business owners explain that insurance rates have spiked as a result, Democrats blame “greedy” insurance companies.  For a political party obsessed with diagnosing the “root causes” of every societal problem, the Democrat party sure is incapable of connecting the dots between runaway crime and business closures.

Over the last decade, a huge number of retail stores have closed up shop in Democrat strongholds such as San Francisco.  Well known corporate chains cannot turn a profit in districts where residents steal from them regularly.  Businesses have gone to preposterous extremes in an effort to keep store locations open — including locking all of their products behind see-through cases that require customers to seek an employee’s assistance in retrieving something as mundane as a toothbrush or a bar of soap.  Even with such glaring absurdities in effect — where stores are shaming customers by telling them that they can’t be trusted — the cost of doing business in Democrat enclaves is just too high.  

When city council meetings are held to discuss the growing “food deserts” affecting residents’ well-being, Democrat politicians inveigh against “corporate greed” and treat shoplifting — if it is even discussed — as a “social justice” issue that should be “morally” excused.  It’s never the thief’s or robber’s fault — even when a store worker or bystander is hurt or killed during the commission of serious crimes.  It’s society’s fault.  It’s white supremacy’s fault.  It’s America’s fault for “stealing” land from Native Americans and once tolerating the institution of slavery.  Personal responsibility takes a backseat to perpetual victimhood.  Perpetual victimhood drives a stake through the heart of personal morality.

I am heavily invested in individual liberty and equally opposed to government tyranny.  They are intrinsically linked moral issues.  I cannot strive to be a moral person unless I am free enough to make choices and act accordingly.  When government agents insert themselves into my life by claiming the prerogative to define what is right and wrong, they not only steal my liberty but also steal my moral agency.  They shoplift my freedoms but blame me for their crimes.

Proponents of Big Government mock freedom-minded people for constantly “whining” about “muh freedom,” but loss of liberty always leads to moral unaccountability.  When officials act like kings and treat government policies as if they were mandates from Heaven, then obedient human beings become soulless chattel incapable of moral growth.  Eventually, a society’s sense of right and wrong becomes so degraded that violent shoplifters are treated as “heroes,” while their victims are treated as “villains.”  Government officials become so outlandishly evil that they celebrate criminals, gang members, and even assassins.  

At some point, moral members of society must say, “Enough!”  Allowing government agents to impose their twisted version of “morality” has produced monstrous results.  

For the first time in human history, a significant number of Westerners are struggling to acknowledge their biological sex.  Children are encouraged to treat fantasies as reality.  Pop-science celebrities pretend that a brand-new “gender spectrum” was discovered just this century.  Every day, some “expert” on television claims that men and women are physically interchangeable and exhibit identical thresholds of physical strength.  It’s insanity run amok, except Democrats treat these psychoses as sacred tenets of a new “woke” religion.  Citizen-disciples can’t question the gospel of the sexually confused.  Those who do risk the ire of “social justice” loons willing to destroy property and assault the unconverted in defense of their “woke” faith.

I tend to view government policy through the lens of a couple American frontiersmen meeting unexpectedly in the middle of an untamed forest.  Many of our social customs developed over thousands of years as common-sense ways for strangers to avoid misunderstanding and potential bloodshed.  Shaking hands, for instance, is a habit that emerged from the practice of sword-wielding men extending their dominant arms without weapons as a demonstration of peaceful intent.  With this premise in mind, consider such men encountering an indoctrinated “wokester” in the woods who impertinently insists that he be addressed as a she or they.  The idea that one free man could dictate to another free man how best to use his brain and vision would instantly invite conflict.  A sexually confused individual is not entitled to impose his delusions on everyone he meets.  When governments nonetheless put their stamp of approval on the he/she’s behavior and treat the man with common sense as a villain, they encourage misunderstanding and social conflict.  

Ultimately, conflict is what Democrats desire.  Marxism feeds on separating a population into distinct groups and turning those groups against one another.  Workers and business owners must never be allowed to find common ground.  Black and white Americans must never be allowed to forget the color of their skin.  Christians must never be allowed to shape public policy.  Parents must never be allowed to parent their children without intrusions from the State.  Property owners must never be allowed to live free from the harassment of regulators and tax authorities.  Gone are the handshake and its demonstration of peaceful intentions.  Democrats always keep one fist high in the air while using their other hand to poke Americans in the eye.

Government-engineered madness destroys society.  Destroyed societies lose all proper sense of right and wrong.  Enslaved minds forfeit the capacity for moral growth.  Immoral people commit crimes and blame the victims.  Immoral governments respond to rampant crime by replacing closed businesses with city-run stores.  Government grocery stores produce breadlines.  This is the cycle of communism, and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral aspirations in Gotham reflect where all Democrat-run cities will soon be.

Did you know that NYC’s “Gotham” moniker comes from an English folk tale about a town that pretended to be crazy in order to avoid an expensive visit from the king?  Mamdani’s political viability proves that New York’s definitely not pretending.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/democrats_trade_morality_for_madness.html