food

Zohran Mamdani’s Grocery Stores – A Tour de Force of Psychopathic Manipulation

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Ceci and Ghillie, Living it up, Truckee River, Reno

One of the most positively insane manipulations the American public has been subjected to in the past year has to be newly elected New York City mayor’s follow-through on a campaign promise to start city-run grocery stores in the five boroughs of NYC. He’s promised five (I’m assuming one per borough) with the notion that the reason, in a land swimming in EBT cards, that the reason people in ostensible NYC food deserts are going hungry is because some failure of capitalism.

The intent of the campaign, of course, is to get people to focus on the whole notion of state-run grocery stores as a viable solution to NYC’s retailing dilemmas. And Mamdani’s been hamming it up — with various press announcements, and him holding up bananas as some secret, exotic fruit that, if reduced in price by 30%, might redeem his ostensibly stunted view of everything that’s wrong with NYC. Here’s a photo from the New York Daily News.

He’s insisted that all staples will be discounted 30% because all the thousands of other grocery stores and bodegas in NYC are raking it in and starving people on that 30% figure. And that somehow, if he opens FIVE stores in the vast expanse of NYC’s retail landscape, that’s going to make any difference at all.

There are the basic facts of NYC — more than half of its denizens are overweight or obese, though this is somewhat less than the national average. And, also not surprisingly, most of those people are poor or lower income. Affluent people aren’t nearly as fat. But honestly, I digress.

What is amazing about this campaign is NOT that they are going to build/remodel/whatever five spots across the massive urban landscape that is NYC. Nor the extremely likely catastrophe of those five stores quickly failing, as they have done in every similar experiment like this. It’s the fact that Mamdani successfully kidnapped the national attention to talk about this ridiculous nonsense. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would know that five stores are a minuscule drop in the bucket of NYC’s retail landscape. But instead, what one gets across the media blogosphere is are endless discussions on communism and failing grocery stores, as well as detailed descriptions of why such a scheme can’t work. No one’s even talking about the fact that if you really wanted to get people reacting, you’d cut off their supply of Nacho Cheese Doritos and Monster drinks. Everyone’s fat, bloated and poor.

Instead, you get endless scheming from the pundit class positing that people will come into said grocery stores and RESELL the bananas that are going for 30% off. Like they’re some kind of designer tennis shoes. You can’t really counterfeit a banana (I don’t think) so these Very Intelligent people are telling us that the best case scenario for any banana grifter is to buy those bananas, take them out and put them on a blanket on 125th Street, and jack up the price 25% so they don’t have to compete with the local bodegas, whom I guarantee sell produce like that on extremely tight margins.

In short — if there even was a real financial angle, it would have to focus on turning Harlem into an open air fruit market, by the wild invasion of Africans looking to make a buck on the back of the local African-Americans. Who, once again, are likely already fat, and could give a shit about paying an extra dollar for their bananas, especially because they already have EBT cards, and can buy bananas to their hearts’ content. What’s wild isn’t just the idea. What’s wild is that the whole scheme is highlighting how easily the pundit class can be distracted, and how THEY believe playing along with Mamdami’s game gives them an opportunity to appear virtuous to the masses.

To be clear — it’s ALL insane, and most importantly, it’s ALL ungrounded. There’s no reality in any of it. But if you can do the space alien thing, which, of course, I am known for, it’s an amazing point of interest to watch people who claim to be smart produce words that have drifted so far from reality that you’ve got to wonder if they ever think through anything at all.

Of course, they don’t, which is why when someone who is an actual position of power — and Mamdani most certainly is — is pulling such a baseline ruse. I’ve written about how psychopaths have been using the whole issue of hunger as a weapon here — or really, the PROJECTION of hunger as a tool to hire phonies in NGOs to distribute raised funds to their crony class that then provides the larger base to really rip the pig off. The real banditry in a big city like NYC is always behind-the-scenes, and having never served in municipal government myself, would require a residency to understand the need for a media/pundit virtue-fest like this to really execute the true Long Con. Which is going on, of course.

But that doesn’t involve sending an intern to a printer to make a 30% off a banana sticker. With a little imagination and place-taking empathy, you can imagine the conversation whoever is the propaganda psychopath and the intern that had to take place. “This would be a lot more convincing if we had a sticker on those bananas with a QR code. That would look super-official!” And then, if you really wanted to lose your mind, imagine that same flack walking out of the office, smugly believing in a job well done. And convinced their $150K salary they were likely making was deserved. WELL deserved.

Mamdani’s bananas, complete with sticker

Your tax dollars at work.

I honestly don’t know how to get people to stop falling for these obvious psychopathic manipulations — trust me again that people will fight over this, and it will cause the usual cascade of gaslighting, and relational disruption, while distracting from something real. But it’s such a simple play in showing how scaling really does matter in understanding how people DON’T understand things, well, I had to write about it. Which is kind of meaning that Mamdani pulled me into the stupidity vortex as well. It reminded me of “don’t notice the gorilla in the background because the woman in the foreground has a great rack” deception that gets played on us all the time.

But here we are.

For those wanting an even deeper dive in how psychopaths use mental models, this piece is more complex, but evergreen.

Psychopathic Manipulation — A Case Study

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 6 Comments

Sunset, along US 95 in the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho

As I write this, a huge breaking wave is coming on to politics across blue states in the US. Nick Shirley, a 23 year old Youtube Influencer, posted a 42 minute video profiling nonexistent day care centers ostensibly run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, MN. The video is great in that it is so facile — Nick and an activist named David merely matched disbursement records with visits to the actual day care sites, and witnessed no activity. The link is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8AulCA1aOQ

Estimates of the fraud run into the tens of billions of dollars. But how does this happen? We’ll talk about a different, deep historic timeline — food and clean water charities around both the US and the world. And nope — this is not some “fact finding” kind of piece. My goal is to describe the dynamics of how people get taken in by psychopaths.

Consider the controversy around the current SNAP program in the United States. SNAP, hooked with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card, is how people enrolled in government food aid, can buy food from all sorts of food providers, and is just a renaming of the food stamp program. Eligibility is not hard to prove — almost anyone with a little bit of determination can get food aid. When I have students in financial distress, I often send them to sign up for the program.

But the program goes way back — to the Great Depression. Originally, food aid was founded in 1934 as a tool to help farmers get rid of agricultural surplus, but then evolved into the Food Stamp program that reached some form of functional maturity during the Great Society years of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 shifted from surplus reduction to hunger prevention. And though that shift did occur, it still leaned into agricultural surplus. My grandmother, who had been poor most of her life (she was a character) would always be first in line when the semi truck of excess “government cheese” showed up in town. It was actually really good.

In 2008, food stamps were rebranded through the SNAP act, and the paper stamps were replaced with electronic debit cards. The program was expanded once again during the COVID years of 2020-2022, and included emergency allotments, as well as online grocery purchases.

The point of these programs was to eradicate hunger — and now one gets into the arena of manipulation. We are still bombarded constantly with charities talking about hunger relief. At some level, one can at least believe the story of hunger overseas — we aren’t there, though studies have shown that the majority force of hunger around the world is war. But in the United States, we still hold food drives and such. How does hunger still occur?

Or does it?

If you are advocating for any program, clearly one of the easiest is hunger eradication. Hunger, and especially, the IDEA of hunger has been a standard memetic cudgel as long as authoritarian governments have been in existence. And as the history shows, it is one of the oldest government programs in continuous existence. If someone confronts you on your charity, no one wants to be the one arguing FOR hunger. In fact, the strength of the virtue of the mental model associated with hunger is so powerful, there’s few humans in the United States who will argue for any reduction in these programs.

And the minute you have that level of mental model solidity, you have a tool for program growth — as well as an attractant for psychopaths looking to run a grift using hunger as the primary issue. Recent attempts by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to even reduce the items allowable to be purchased using EBT cards – namely soda pop and candy- have caused a firestorm. As of January 1, 2026, only 18 states will eliminate purchases of these items with SNAP benefits.

Further, in our day of decentralized media, the reduction in purchase range by SNAP has spawned hundreds of videos of people complaining about the changes. Obese people are on social media, complaining how their reduction of benefits will mean they can no longer get their nails done, or buy other luxuries. Reduction in SNAP benefits and the effects on other items purchased have not been formally studied — but dips in the luxury tennis shoe market indicate potential linkages.

And grocers are concerned — these are the legitimate ones — that reductions in SNAP benefits will cut into their profits. None of them want to comment on any of this — Walmart’s SNAP sales are around 1/4 of its grocery sales. But individuals abusing SNAP benefits as a crime is hard to prove.

More easy to look at another program in the current spotlight for fraud associated with food aid programs — the Feeding our Future program in Minnesota. Same memetic structure.

Federal prosecutors allege that between 2020–2022, FOF and affiliated operators:

  • Claimed to serve tens of thousands of children per day at hundreds of sites that did not exist or barely operated.
  • Submitted fabricated meal counts, invoices, and attendance logs.
  • Used shell companies to launder reimbursement money.
  • Spent funds on luxury homes, cars, jewelry, travel, and overseas transfers.

The thing that is interesting about this is how poorly covered by the media AND government it is. Psychopathic manipulation of taboos — in this case, anything with helping ostensibly alleviating hunger– is off-limits. There’s a record of scant media coverage on all of these going back decades. Yet only in the current political turmoil do we actually get a sense that these types of things that spawn massive corruption are in play. And in the case of Feeding our Future, it’s chock-a-block full of Somali operators on the front end. Who, of course, happen to be Black. So now you have both the immigrant AND racial angle. Hunger, immigrants, Blacks. A psychopathic model trifecta.

How can we understand this from a systems perspective? Psychopaths co-opt a mental model about a societal problem (often one buried deep within the human psyche) , launch a dollar harvesting/diversion scheme around that scheme, and then, if the scheme is discovered, use both the dominant mechanism as a “narcissistic shield” or “moral racket” (if we’re not allowed to continue doing this, children will starve!) as well as a rear-guard action (You are all racists because the people perpetrating the scheme are black!)

Clean Water Around the World

One of the most vexing problems I’ve struggled with in deciding to help various student groups over the years is the ‘clean water’ problem. And inevitably, requests for donations also show up in my mailbox — arguing for this scheme or that for bringing drinking water to the unwashed masses. Often these schemes are in esoteric locations, often in Africa to places I’ve never been. I’ve spent significant time in 40+ countries, and not just in conference hotels. So I have some reasonable perspective on what life is like in the various parts of the Third World and Fourth World that most people would never go in their lifetimes.

What I’ve seen is that people all over the world, even in the poorest places, always seem to be able to afford three things — cell phone minutes (I have yet to visit a place where cell phones are not ubiquitous, and I’ve been to some crazy places) , sugary or savory snacks in small packages, and bottled water. I have a modest reluctance to pronounce this, but I’m increasingly skeptical that there is a drinking water problem anywhere outside a war zone. I have yet to visit a true Stone Age venue, where there are no small kiosks selling these things.

And if you focus in on water, this is, like it or not, the de facto solution for drinking water around the world. No mother is going to take water out of some sand trap contraption that engineers specializing in Third World development and give it to her baby. It just ain’t happening, unless there is some major crisis.

And once again, outside of war zones, various NGOs have swarmed over all those sub-Saharan countries, with various well-drilling and water production schemes. Nothing is new under the sun. My own university had a revolving door with Malawi and a series of classic dysfunctional development schemes there. My favorite was drilling a well for a cabbage grower. Various development agents came in, and drilled a well. Initially, the cabbage grower was elated. Instead of growing 10 cabbages a year, he could now grow 100! The development folks left, and came back the next year.

How had he fared? He was weeping. “Last year, I had 10 cabbages, but all got sold. Now I have 100 cabbages. But I have no way to get them market, and most of them are now rotting. And I did make a little more money, but I started drinking. My two wives told me that they would not live with an alcoholic, so they left me.”

There was a similar story about people in Malawi growing rice. Except people in Malawi don’t grow rice. Rice requires flooded paddies. But flooded paddies then create mosquitoes. And mosquitoes create malaria. And so on.

The point of all this is now we have another perfect psychopathic mental model that can be used by outside forces to run yet another Long Con. You have an issue everyone is familiar with, that has been around forever. You are asked for money — who could refuse money for clean water for kids? You cannot protest — you will be condemned for a lack of virtue. Meanwhile, maybe no wells get drilled. Mothers are still feeding their kids bottled water. And you are threatened with a moral racket, or narcissistic shield if you even question.

The pattern is clear.

Alternatives

Give locally, and know the people you live with. Grounding validity is always the answer. I give no more to organizations with fungible accounting categories.