CNN always wants to say left-wing radicals are less radical than you think, according to "some experts." They're never going to perform that trick for conservatives. CNN reporter Nathaniel Meyersohn attempted to mainstream socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s demented push for government-owned grocery stores.
As if anyone needed another reason to make like a banana and split from the decrepit Big Apple.
Meyersohn celebrated Mamdani’s lunatic “plan to create a network of city-owned grocery stores” in a June 30 so-called news item. Meyersohn gaslighted readers by claiming Mamdani’s state-run supermarket was “less radical than critics portray,” according to “experts” he found to make his point.
The CNN reporter acknowledged that the proposal was being “blasted as a ‘Soviet’ style disaster-in-waiting,’ ‘farcical’ and ‘economically delusional,’” but he then took a detour straight into the logical toilet. “But Mamdani is drawing on government-owned and subsidized models that already exist in the United States,” Meyersohn chirped.
Same energy: Government rationing is just the spider’s ankles! Just ask Venezuela or Cuba! CNN’s post of Meyersohn’s story on X is in the middle of getting ratioed straight to hell.
Zohran Mamdani, the favorite to become New York City's next mayor after winning the Democratic primary, has a contentious plan to create a network of city-owned grocery stores. But it's less radical than critics portray, some food policy and grocery industry experts say.…
— CNN (@CNN) June 30, 2025
Meyersohn’s logic reads even dumber when one digs into the details. Meyersohn cited “the Defense Department’s commissaries for military personnel, public retail markets that lease space to farmers and chefs,” and other city-owned stores as examples to downplay Mamdani’s off-the-rails-extremism. But as Real Clear Investigations Senior Writer Mark Hemingway summarized in an X post ripping Meyersohn, “The argument here is that because the military has commissaries on foreign bases and other left-wing local governments are planning to open their own grocery stores, it's not a ‘radical’ idea. This is ridiculous.”
No kidding. This is literally the definition of a bandwagon fallacy.
Meyersohn trotted out the argument that “[i]n some New York City neighborhoods, more than 30% of people are food insecure” to justify Mamdani’s pseudo-altruistic plan to “offer groceries at lower prices to customers with limited access to supermarkets.”
What Meyersohn glossed over was that Mamdani’s proposals will undoubtedly involve spiking taxes on the already high-tax burdened locality under the exhausted, communist-style aura of redistributing wealth from the rich to help the poor. As The New York Times conceded when laying out Mamdani’s crackpot economic agenda, “Budget analysts have said that increasing taxes could burden the New York economy by making the city less attractive to employers.”
In fact, New York as a state ranks dead last (No. 50) on the Tax Foundation’s index for state tax competitiveness. In addition, the Foundation found in 2022 that New York ranked #1 for having the highest state-local tax burden out of any other state in the nation, “with 15.9 percent of net product in the state going to state and local taxes.”
On another note, wouldn’t a government-owned grocery store also hurt competition? Well yes, Meyerson conceded, but readers wouldn’t know it until the 10th paragraph:
Industry representatives say government-owned stores will compete with private businesses and unfairly disadvantage grocers, local bodegas and other stores in New York. If government stores drive out other food retailers, it would also hurt the problem it’s trying to solve.
That’s not all. In the 11th paragraph, Meyerson buried a quote from Food Industry Alliance CEO Michael Durant, who rebuked Mamdani’s proposal: “‘This proposal seemingly could use taxes paid by business, and use that money to compete against said business, which is an alarming precedent to set.’” Or we already have that precedent: private media companies paying for "public" TV and radio stations that compete against them for audience.
But sure, let’s just tacitly endorse another freebies-and-handouts idea from an admitted socialist that will involve making NYC’s tax burden even worse, right Meyersohn? This is the equivalent of putting a loaf of bread in someone’s hand, telling them it’s free, while having someone else steal their wallet from their back pocket.
Meyersohn even undercut his own attempt to make Mamdani’s proposal seem mainstream by admitting that the mayoral candidate hasn’t exactly laid out all the details of his plan:
Mamdani has not released all the details of his plan yet, and it’s not clear what role New York City would play in the opening or operation of grocery stores. Would it build stores? Lease them out to a private company or a non-profit? Would the employees be on the city’s payroll?
This begs the question: How would Meyerson know if Mamdani is simply co-opting other lefty models of municipal-run grocery stores already existing in the U.S. if he doesn’t even know the specifics of his agenda?
That seems contradictory, but whatever, It’s CNN we’re talking about, anyway.
