New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wasted no time on Saturday during an MSNBC interview to use the coronavirus as an excuse for pushing a communist-style takeover of private industries by the federal government.

De Blasio told host Joy Reid that the COVID-19 pandemic makes a good "case for a nationalization, literally, a nationalization of crucial factories and industries that can produce the medical supplies to prepare this country for what we need."

The failed presidential candidate then called for the federal government to seize control of the hand sanitizer industry.

"Every company that can make hand sanitizer should be on a 24-hour shift and the distribution should go to the places that needed most," he told Reid who appeared to agree with him.

Not de Blasio's first statist rodeo

Of course, this is not the first time that de Blasio has floated statist fantasies.

As Politico reported in June 2019, during his ill-fated presidential campaign, the New York City mayor said he favored abolishing private health insurance. In a heated exchange with former Rep. Beto O'Rourke at the debate, de Blasio made the case for eliminating the private insurance industry, which he argued "is not working" for Americans.

"Wait, wait, wait. Congressman O'Rourke, Congressman O'Rourke, private insurance is not working for tens of millions of Americans," de Blasio, who now endorses democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, said at the time, as he spoke over the former Texas representative. "When you talk about the co-pays, the deductibles, the premiums, the out-of-pocket expenses. It's not working. How can you defend a system that's not working?"

As TheBlaze reported, de Blasio also said last year that gender reassignment surgeries "absolutely" should be covered by taxpayer dollars through Medicare for All. The New York City mayor even promised to get the federal government involved in the sports industry by threatening to use an executive order to force U.S. national teams to pay female athletes the same as male athletes, regardless of performance or ticket sales.

Quoted communist Che Guevara in 2019

The New York City mayor has made no effort to hide his crypto-Marxist sympathies. On the campaign trail last year, de Blasio infamously quoted communist revolutionary Che Guevara during a speech at Miami International Airport.

"¡Hasta la victoria, siempre!" he said, echoing Guevara's famous rallying cry. De Blasio, who studied Latin American history, later claimed he had no idea where the quote came from.

Additionally, in the 1980s, de Blasio was a supporter, fundraiser, and advocate for the Cuban-backed Sandinista government of dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

"But he returned with something else entirely," the New York Times wrote in 2013 about de Blasio's trip to the Central American country, "a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government."