This November, in a number of swing states or states that are normally red, Democrats are going to ask you to vote blue because they’ve nominated what they term “moderates.” […]

The post Another One: Illegal Charged With Rape, Kidnapping After Spanberger Made VA Sanctuary State, Lib Judge Released Him appeared first on The Western Journal.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani intends to keep one of his most controversial campaign promises: city-owned grocery stores.

In his 100-day address on Sunday, he announced the city’s first socialist supermarket will be up and running in East Harlem in 2027. The only thing slower than Mr. Mamdani opening the store next year will be the checkout line once it finally opens—and that’s assuming the shelves aren’t empty.

The mayor plans to manage five government-run stores by the end of his first term, one located in each of New York City’s five boroughs, that will be run for no profit with the objective of keeping prices artificially low for a select basket of staples (e.g. bread, milk, eggs). Addressing food affordability in an already expensive city is important, but this “solution” is central planning dressed up as compassion.

Rather than addressing the web of city regulations, labor costs above national averages, and high real estate expenses that inflate prices for small grocers, the mayor suggests government intervention. This could harm small businesses by crowding them out.

Private grocery stores operate on thin profit margins of only 1 to 3% while simultaneously navigating labor costs and theft. Owners are not “greedy capitalists,” despite what communists might say. The incentive to maximize profits actually facilitates competition and naturally drives prices down. When a public option enters the market with artificially low prices and no barriers to entry, mom-and-pop shops get pushed out.

In a free market system, private grocers outperform public options. When asked about the private sector’s natural advantage over his socialist marts, Mamdani stated, “I look forward to the competition. May the most affordable grocery store win.” However, the city will be funneling tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into stores that do not pay rent or property taxes—hardly fair competition.

Taxpayer-funded stores will distort the market and create surges in demand that the government is ill-equipped to handle. The lesson here is that the productive private sector outperforms the unproductive public sector. For example, take the notoriously slow and cost-inefficient government-run postal service or Department of Motor Vehicles; now, imagine the government in charge of food supply.

Not only would shoppers face long lines and stores face food shortages, but the city will have spent tens of millions of dollars that it cannot afford. Estimated costs are projected at $30 million for the first grocery market, nearly half of the mayor’s original $70 million budget for five.

As valuations for these Marxist marts keep rising, so does the burden to taxpayers—this at a time where New York City has a $7 billion budget gap over the next two years and nearly $100 billion in total debt.

The reality is that nothing is truly free in a socialist system. Everything is paid through higher taxes, larger deficits, or hidden costs passed to consumers. Such reckless spending is never prudent, especially on policies that fail in both principle and practice.

Cities like Erie, Kansas or Baldwin, Florida left taxpayers on the hook for inefficient, government-run grocery stores that created scarcity and failed to alleviate food unaffordability. Each municipal government found the public store too difficult and too costly for taxpayers to operate.

The Soviet Union infamously nationalized food production and distribution as a part of its centralized economy—to the detriment of its citizenry. Shortages, empty shelves, rationing, and bread lines were unfortunate outcomes of the failed socialist experiment. Compare that to the American grocery experience of full shelves and food variety, all made possible by free markets.

Despite the obvious dichotomy between pro-growth free enterprise and restrictive nationalization, Mayor Mamdani still believes his government-owned bodegas can do business better. Soviet Russia, Communist China, and Socialist Cuba followed the same script, promising affordability through central planning but delivering scarcity, corruption, and poverty.

New Yorkers are about to learn the hard way what millions already discovered in the last century: socialist “solutions” to everyday problems fail spectacularly.

Private grocers already feed millions of New Yorkers daily without government interference. Mayor Mamdani’s city-run stores would distort the market and impose higher costs on taxpayers, leaving residents worse off.

If a government-owned grocery store does open in the Big Apple in 2027, New Yorkers will experience the real costs of “free” socialist proposals: they charge residents once in taxes and once at the register.

The post Mamdani’s First Marxist Mart Expected to Open Next Year appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Late last night (midnight) the House members were called back to session in order to vote on a procedural rule to facilitate a negotiated FISA(702) extension.  The advancement vote failed to pass the House (200-220) collapsing the bill, which is not a bad outcome all things considered. House Republican leaders posted a compromise FISA amendment […]

The post Late Night House FISA Shenanigans Results in a Two-Week Extension, But No Agreement on Reauthorization Bill appeared first on The Last Refuge.

Note: The information provided here or in any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, […]

The post Banks Have Been Charging You Up to 25% Interest for Years – Here's One Way to Make Them Stop appeared first on The Western Journal.

Todd Lyons, the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is stepping down, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced Thursday. “Director Lyons has been a great leader of ICE […]

The post Acting ICE Director Leaving the Agency for the Private Sector appeared first on The Western Journal.

Dystopian novels are not predictions but projections: they imagine what the world will become if a current trend continues uninterrupted. The difference between prediction and projection is vital but often overlooked. The former is a call to fatalism, the latter a call to action.

In a sense, dystopian novels are both optimistic and conservative. They are optimistic in that they do not hold the future they describe to be inevitable and unavoidable. They are conservative in that they imagine a world very much worse than our own, and therefore are an encouragement to political virtues such as prudence and realism. They remind us that, short of extermination camps or other complete disasters, we always have something to lose as well as to gain and that progress often has a dark—even a very dark—side. Perfection is not of this world.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

The plot is simple. A huge armada of rotting hulks, bearing a million impoverished and half-starved Bengalis desperate to reach Europe, which they suppose to be a land flowing with milk and honey, sets out from Calcutta and eventually reaches the south coast of France. The local population flees before this invasion, no official efforts having been made to repel it. French society collapses; the success of the armada spells the downfall of Europe, and the whole of the West, as a civilization.

***

This is a new and excellent translation by Ethan Rundell of the 2011 edition of Raspail’s novel, published by Vauban Books (whose name is a reference to the great 17th-century defensive military engineer and architect, the Marquis de Vauban). It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the re-translation and re-publication of the book are conceived by both its publisher and translator as an act of civilizational defense against the dangers of which Raspail warned.

In the book’s preface, Nathan Pinkoski compares it to both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I don’t think it can be put in their class. It is very badly written, too long, verbose, and frequently boring. There is always a danger that a roman à thèse will become more thèse than roman, and this is precisely what happened with Raspail’s book. Quite often, one feels on reading it as if one had been cornered at a cocktail party by a fanatic determined to get his point across who will not let you go until he has succeeded in doing so. One is buttonholed, cajoled, harangued by the narrator (who never makes his role quite clear), or by the characters, who stand for ideas rather than emerge as real human beings. The Camp of the Saints is a fictionalized essay, whose ideas could have been expressed in 20 or 30 pages.

***

From the first, the book was attacked as racist and even white supremacist. Its author spent a lot of his life describing and sympathizing deeply with remote non-white populations, so the charge against him personally cannot stick. But it is not difficult to understand why his book should have been attacked in this fashion. The desperate emigrants are dirty, foul-smelling, superstitious, concupiscent, fatalistic, heathen, unthinking, and without apparent scruple. They are not individuals, they are a mass, a vast herd, like wildebeest during their transhumance in the Serengeti. They are more biological phenomena than human beings. If I were Bengali, I would not much care to have had my compatriots depicted in this way.

But Raspail is an equal-opportunity deprecator, and his true target is the French intelligentsia and, by extension, that of the whole Western world, which he depicts as cowardly, sentimental, opportunistic, dishonest, shallow, vain, and self-satisfied. Although the intellectual class is supposed to live by ideas, it has its herd instincts, and it is of some historic interest to read how far Raspail thought political correctness and wokeness (which, of course, he did not name as such) had ravaged intellectual life as early as 1973.

Read the rest here.

The post We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches appeared first on The American Mind.

Hoo, boy, did the legacy media really have President Donald Trump and his policies dead to rights this time. On Thursday, readers began seeing photos of meals being served to […]

The post USA Today Posts Pictures of Gross Supposed Navy Meals, but Forgot Vets Would Fact Check Them - and It's Brutal appeared first on The Western Journal.

For the third time in this iteration of the Donald Trump administration, we’ve had a series of astroturfed “No Kings” protests. The good news is that they worked. Friday will […]

The post Philly Mayor Who Spoke at 'No Kings' Rally Acts Like Monarch: 'How Dare You Tell Me' How Much of Your Money City Should Take? appeared first on The Western Journal.

LOS ANGELES -- Singer D4vd has been arrested on suspicion of killing a 14-year-old girl whose decomposed body was found seven months ago in his apparently abandoned Tesla, authorities said Thursday, while his lawyers declared his innocence.

The post Singer D4vd Arrested on Suspicion of Murder of 14-Year-Old Celeste Rivas Hernandez appeared first on Breitbart.

Starmer's spin doctors argue he is ignorant and not in command of his own government, rather than admit he has been "deliberately dishonest".

The post ‘The Government Doesn’t Run The Government’: Starmer Insists He Won’t Resign Over Mandelson-Epstein Scandal appeared first on Breitbart.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons submitted a letter of resignation to the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday. The announcement followed his testimony before the House Appropriation Committee's Subcommittee on Homeland Security regarding the ICE budget, where he announced the bust of Chinese illegal aliens allegedly involved in the largest gift card fraud scheme in history.

The post ICE Director Lyons Resigns Hours After Announcing Largest Chinese Illegal Alien Gift Card Fraud in History appeared first on Breitbart.

If the rising cost of living, global instability, and market volatility have you questioning how secure your savings really are, now is the time to get informed.

The post Iran’s Oil Crisis Is Fueling Inflation, Major Banks Say Gold Is Next appeared first on Breitbart.