Venezuela nationalized its grocery stores and 82 percent of its people now live in poverty.
Now New York's socialist mayor wants to bring that model to America – and Joe Rogan just torched the whole idea on live air.
What Rogan said next made Zohran Mamdani's government grocery store dream look like a checkers player picking a fight with a chess grandmaster.
Rogan Breaks It Down to One Brutal Truth
Rogan didn't need a PhD or a policy white paper.
He summed up democratic socialism in a single sentence: once you hand everything to the state, the state has the guns, you have nothing, and they tell you what to do.
That's not a theory.
That's every country that has ever tried this.
Rogan's guest was Steve Hilton, the California Republican gubernatorial candidate who grew up in Hungary under Soviet communist rule.
Hilton didn't theorize about government grocery stores.
https://twitter.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/2088418917920231541?s=20
He lived with them.
"I literally went to them in Hungary," Hilton said. "It was a communist state. There were only state-run grocery stores. I saw them. There's one, like, at the end of the block where my grandma lived, and I would go there in the morning to get whatever it was – and it's just terrible."
That's the witness testimony Mamdani has never had to face from someone who actually stood in those lines.
The Socialist Surge Democrats Refuse to Admit Is Happening
This conversation didn't happen in a vacuum.
Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates have now won 35 primary elections in 2026 – ousting sitting incumbents and reshaping the Democrat Party's congressional delegation in real time.
Brad Lander crushed incumbent Representative Dan Goldman in New York by 32 points.
Darializa Avila Chevalier – a community organizer who once called the 9/11 attacks "inevitable" due to American foreign policy – ousted the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Abdul El-Sayed won the Democrat Senate nomination in Michigan.
Mamdani himself, New York's first DSA mayor, is now acting as the movement's kingmaker – pouring resources into down-ballot races and remaking the Democrat Party's face heading into November.
And the establishment Democrats who tried to stop him?
They lost.
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Rogan put his finger on exactly why this surge is happening – and it isn't because young people have suddenly discovered Marx.
"It's not natural that people are sitting around reading Marx and going, 'What a great idea, let's implement this,'" Rogan said. "This is all coming out of social media. One hundred percent."
Manufactured outrage. Algorithmic radicalization.
A generation that has never seen what happens when the state controls the food supply.
That's the pipeline.
Every Country That Tried This Ended Up in the Same Place
Hilton's Hungarian grocery store memory isn't nostalgia.
It's a pattern.
Soviet government stores in the 1960s and 1970s featured empty shelves – citizens waited hours for a loaf of bread.
Venezuela nationalized its grocery industry under Hugo Chávez and watched its economy shrink by roughly 80 percent. Today, more than 82 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty – up from 33 percent when Maduro took power.
Cuba, the country a sitting DSA congressman recently held up as his party's model, has bled roughly ten percent of its entire population in flight over just two years – more than one million people choosing the ocean over the state.
The Left has no answer for any of this.
They don't point to a country where it worked.
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They just insist this time will be different.
That's not a policy argument.
That's arrogance.
And it's coming to a city near you, because 35 candidates who think exactly the way Mamdani thinks just won Democratic primaries across America.
Rogan said they're playing checkers with other people's lives.
He's right.
The Venezuelans who watched Chávez promise affordability and deliver starvation were playing checkers too – right up until the military showed up with guns and told them the store was closed.
Mamdani wants to open one just like it in New York.
Your move.
Sources:
- Ashleigh Fields, "Joe Rogan on democratic socialists' ideology: 'It sucks,'" The Hill, August 20, 2026.
- Vivek Saxena, "Joe Rogan has a brutal prediction for what happens when socialists get their way," BizPacReview, August 20, 2026.
- Staff, "Big win for socialists and Mamdani in Democratic primaries," Washington Examiner, June 24, 2026.
- Staff, "Over 30 socialists have won primaries this year," Washington Examiner, June 25, 2026.
- Ike Brannon, "Failures in socialism: Mamdani should heed Venezuela's cautionary tale," The Hill, January 9, 2026.
- Staff, "Socialism Has Destroyed Venezuela," Heritage Foundation, August 2, 2017.
- Staff, "Meet the far-left insurgents waging war on the Democratic establishment in 2026 midterms," Fox News, July 13, 2026.