The Dictatorship
Zohran Mamdani’s modest grocery proposal has sparked a right-wing panic for no reason
The Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City Zohran Mamdanihas commanded a share of the nation’s attention that few candidates for local office will ever achieve. Many of the controversies swirling around him have at least centered on issues that always inspire heated debate, like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Since his victory in the primary, though, a surprising number of denunciations of Mamdani by conservatives and libertarians have centered around … grocery stores.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John Catsimatidis (who owns the grocery store chains Gristedes and D’Agostino’s) warned that Mamdani’s policies on grocery sales amount to “radical socialism” and, if implemented, “would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” The same analogy was pursued by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. “Forget the old-school communist talk about socializing the means of production,” McCardle wrote. “Mamdani wants to socialize the means of consumption.”
A surprising number of denunciations of Mamdani by conservatives and libertarians have centered around … grocery stores.
Judging by these reactions, you’d think that Mamdani had, at the very least, proposed expropriating every privately owned supermarket and bodega in the city and placing them under control of a People’s Commissariat of Food Supply. You might even wonder if he’d gone further and proposed sending the NYPD to conquer some rural areas of upstate New York and forcibly collectivize agriculture there.
In reality, he’s proposed a very modest experiment. He doesn’t want to touch a single privately owned store. Instead, he wants to start five new city-owned grocery stores, one in each of the five boroughs, designed to provide a public option for grocery shopping in the areas within those boroughs with the fewest private options (where grocery prices at those few stores that do operate tend to be very high).
If this sounds like an extreme proposal, it shouldn’t. There are 17 states around the country with public monopolies on liquor stores. One of these is the most otherwise libertarian state in the union, New Hampshire, whose state motto is “Live Free or Die.” If the 80 state-owned liquor stores in New Hampshire don’t inspire hysterical analogies to the Soviet Union, despite the lack of private competitors, introducing a grand total of five private groceries to New York City (whose population is almost eight times the total population of New Hampshire) shouldn’t either.
Billy Binion, a writer for the libertarian magazine Reason, argues that this is an analogy that should make us more skeptical of the idea, rather than less. After the end of Prohibition, he points out, some politicians in these states supported moving state monopolies on liquor stores because they “wanted drinking to be difficult and expensive after alcohol was legalized again.” As such, the analogy to food sales “isn’t exactly reassuring.”
But there’s a world of difference between why some prohibitionist dead-enders might have supported a policy in the 1930s and why it remains popular in the 2020s.
The difference between prevailing attitudes in different states also matters. Are we really supposed to believe that voters and politicians in “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire continue to support the state monopoly because they wish Prohibition would come back and, failing that, they want a nanny state to do everything it can to discourage drinking?
If so, the policy has been a truly spectacular failure. States are clustered together closely in that part of the country, and people from around the region often drive to New Hampshire for the sole purpose of stocking up on cheap liquor at the state liquor stores. Anyone who’s ever driven into the state will remember the giant billboards directing people to those stores. In fact, NPR reported several years ago that latter-day bootleggers are sometimes caught buying up hundreds of bottles of cheap New Hampshire liquor to resell in other states. Far from being a hotbed of neo-prohibitionism, New Hampshire keeps its liquor store policy in place precisely because it brings much-needed revenue to a state that’s notoriously reluctant to raise funds through taxation.
It’s a quirk of culture and history that publicly owned liquor stores are so much more common in capitalist countries than publicly owned stores selling milk and eggs, but on a basic logistical level, a city-owned grocery store in Queens would be much more like a state-owned liquor store in New Hampshire than it would be like a Soviet grocery store. Aside from John Catsimatidis and Megan McCardle, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the reason shelves were so often empty at Soviet stores was because the stores themselves didn’t know how to order needed goods from suppliers or stock the shelves, rather than the problems with making sure the actual production of goods was coordinated with fine-grained consumer preferences in a system where every aspect of the economy was centrally planned.
Perhaps, given the smaller profit margins in stores selling perishable groceries than stores selling beer, wine and hard liquor, though, Mamdani’s proposed experiment with a tiny number of municipal grocery stores would be a failure and it would have to be abandoned. There’s no way to be certain before it’s tried.
New Hampshire keeps its liquor store policy because it brings much-needed revenue to a state that’s notoriously reluctant to raise funds through taxation.
What I can’t get over, though, is the massive contradiction at the heart of the right-wing panic about his proposal. If the shelves would be empty since no public employee could ever navigate the delicate logistical hurdles, why on earth would anyone shop there rather than finding a private alternative? But if so, how are we supposed to understand the claim in the Wall Street Journal op-ed that Mamdani wants to “replace” private with public grocery stores? Is the problem that any city-owned grocery stores would be horrendously inefficient, such that we’d see empty shelves to the Leningrad in 1970? Or is it that they’ll be so wildly successful that the initial experiment with five stores will mushroom and all private competitors will eventually be put out of business?
Neither criticism is especially compelling on its own. But if critics want to make any sense at all, they have to pick.
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast.
The Dictatorship
Federal court rules against new global tariffs Trump imposed
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal court ruled Thursday against the new global tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed after a stinging loss at the Supreme Court.
A split three-judge panel of the Court of International Trade in New York found the 10% global tariffs were illegal after small businesses sued.
The court ruled 2-1 that Trump overstepped the tariff power that Congress had allowed the president under the law. The tariffs are “invalid″ and “unauthorized by law,” the majority wrote.
The third judge on the panel found the law allows the president more leeway on tariffs.
If the administration appeals Thursday’s decision, as expected, it would first turn to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, based in Washington, and then, potentially, the Supreme Court.
At issue are temporary 10% worldwide tariffs the Trump administration imposed after the Supreme Court in February struck down even broader double-digit tariffs the president had imposed last year on almost every country on Earth. The new tariffs, invoked under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, were set to expire July 24.
The court’s decision directly blocked the collection of tariffs from three plaintiffs — the state of Washington and two businesses, spice company Burlap & Barrel and toy company Basic Fun! “It’s not clear’’ whether other businesses would have to continue to pay the tariffs, said Jeffrey Schwab, director of litigation at the libertarian Liberty Justice Center, which represented the two companies.
“We fought back today and we won, and we’re extremely excited,” Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun!, told reporters Thursday.
The ruling marked another legal setback for the Trump administration, which has attempted to shield the U.S. economy behind a wall of import taxes. Last year, Trump invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to declare the nation’s longstanding trade deficit a national emergency, justifying sweeping global tariffs.
The Supreme Court ruled Feb. 28 that IEEPA did not authorize the tariffs. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to establish taxes, including tariffs, though lawmakers can delegate tariff power to the president.
Dave Townsend, a trade lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney, said the ruling will open the door for more companies to request that the tariffs be thrown out and that any payments they’ve made be refunded.
“Other importers likely will now ask for a broader remedy that applies to more companies,” Townsend said, though he cautioned the case could also reach the Supreme Court.
Trump is already taking steps to replace the tariffs that were struck down by the Supreme Court in January. The administration is conducting two investigations that could end in more tariffs.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is looking into whether 16 U.S. trading partners — including China, the European Union and Japan — are overproducing goods, driving down prices and putting U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage. It is also investigating whether 60 economies — from Nigeria to Norway and accounting for 99% of U.S. imports — do enough to prohibit the trade in products created by forced labor.
The Dictatorship
Trump says EU has until July 4 to approve trade deal
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said in a Thursday social media post that goods from the European Union would face higher tariff rates if the 27-member bloc fails to approve last year’s trade framework by July 4.
The announcement appeared to be a deadline extension after the president said last Friday that EU autos would face a higher 25% tariff starting this week. Trump made the updated announcement after what he described as a “great call” with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Still, the U.S. president was displeased that the European Parliament had yet to finalize the trade arrangement reached last year, which was further complicated in February by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Trump lacked the legal authority to declare an economic emergency to impose the initial tariffs used to pressure the EU into talks.
“A promise was made that the EU would deliver their side of the Deal and, as per Agreement, cut their Tariffs to ZERO!” Trump posted. “I agreed to give her until our Country’s 250th Birthday or, unfortunately, their Tariffs would immediately jump to much higher levels.”
It was unclear from the post whether Trump was implying that the tariff rates would jump on all EU goods or the increase would only apply to autos.
His latest statement indicates he might be backing away from his earlier threat on EU autos by giving the European Parliament several more weeks to approve the agreement.
Under the original terms of the framework, the U.S. would charge a 15% tax on most goods imported from the EU.
But since the Supreme Court ruling, the administration has levied a 10% tariff while investigating trade imbalances and national security issues, aiming to put in new tariffs to make up for lost revenues.
The Dictatorship
In the wake of the Virginia ruling, where does the national redistricting arms race stand?
In Virginia, a majority of the House of Delegates voted to approve a new congressional district map that was designed to help Democrats add as many as four seats in the U.S. House. A majority of the state Senate agreed, as did the commonwealth’s popularly elected governor. The issue then went to the people of Virginia, and a majority of voters backed the redistricting initiative, too.
A majority of the Virginia Supreme Court, however, rejected the plan anyway. MS NOW reported:
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved congressional redistricting plan, ruling that Democrats violated constitutional procedures when placing the referendum on the ballot for last month’s special election. […]
In its 4-3 decision, the court on Friday found that the process used to place the amendment on the ballot did not comply with Virginia’s constitutional rules governing how such proposals must be approved by the legislature before being presented to voters. As a result, the justices upheld a lower court ruling that blocks the amendment from being certified and implemented.
For Democratic efforts on the national level, the ruling is an unexpected gut punch, especially given the fact that after Virginia voters approved the overhauled map last month, it appeared that Democrats would be able to keep pace with the GOP as part of the broader redistricting fight.
What’s more, the state Supreme Court ruling comes on the heels of a similarly brutal blow after Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices gutted the Voting Rights Act, which opened the door even further to an intensified Republican effort to erase majority-Black congressional districts in the South.
Given all of this, it’s easy to imagine many Americans responding to the head-spinning developments with a simple question: “So where do things stand now?”
Before we dig in on that, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the absurdity of the circumstances. For generations, states redrew congressional district lines after the decennial census. There were limited exceptions, but in nearly all of those instances, mid-decade redistricting only happened when courts told states that their maps were unlawful and needed to be redone.
The idea that politicians would simply choose to start redrawing maps, in the middle of a decade, in pursuit of partisan advantages, was practically unheard of.
Last year, however, Donald Trump, fearing the results of the 2026 midterm elections and the possible accountability that would result from Democratic victories, decided that the American model needed to be discarded. It was time, the president said, to pursue what one White House official described as a campaign of “maximum warfare” in which Republican officials in key states would embrace gerrymandering without regard for fairness, norms, traditions or propriety.
The goal was simple: Deliver Republican victories in congressional races long before Americans had a chance to cast their ballots.
The result was an arms race that’s still going on — and here’s where things stand.

Texas: Republicans in the Lone Star State got the ball rolling last summer, acting at Trump’s behest and approving a map designed to give Republicans five additional U.S. House seats. It touched off the national arms race.
California: Responding to Texas, Democratic officials in the Golden State, as well as the state’s voters, approved a map of their own designed to give Democrats five additional U.S. House seats.
Missouri: In September, state Republicans approved a map designed to give the GOP one additional seat.
North Carolina: In October, state Republicans approved a map designed to give Republicans one additional seat.
Ohio: While the redistricting effort in the Buckeye State wasn’t as brazen as it was elsewhere, Ohio’s new map diluted two Democratic-held districts, creating GOP pickup opportunities.
Utah: A state court approved a new map that will likely give Democrats one additional seat.
Florida: Just this week, Republicans completed the process on a new map designed to give Republicans as many as four additional seats.
Tennessee: Also this week, Republicans approved a new map designed to give Republicans one additional seat, taking advantage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling.
Louisiana: While the newly redrawn map in the Pelican State hasn’t been formally unveiled, it will reportedly add one additional Republican seat.
Alabama: Republicans are currently moving forward with plans for a map that would give Republicans two more seats.
It’s important to emphasize that some of these maps are currently facing legal challenges, while others are still taking shape. Most of these maps would take effect during this year’s election cycle, but there’s still some uncertainty surrounding the implementation date in some states.
Nevertheless, the Virginia map that enjoyed popular public support was prepared to help mitigate an unprecedented Republican abuse. The state Supreme Court in the commonwealth appears to have removed that option.
After Virginia voters had their say, many GOP officials questioned whether the entire gerrymandering gambit had been a waste of time and effort. In the aftermath of two highly controversial court rulings, Republicans are suddenly feeling a lot better about the whole scheme.
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