New York Times Grants Race Science Enthusiast Anonymity in Mamdani Hit Piece
AP Photo/Heather Khalifa
The New York Times published a story that cited hacked documents at Columbia University showing that New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani identified as “Black or African American” on his college application.
Mamdani, who is of South Asian descent, was born in Uganda, where his family lived for about 100 years, according to the Times. He was not accepted by Columbia, where his father was – and remains – a professor of anthropology.
The paper granted the source of the hacked documents anonymity. That person is a known enthusiast of race science, a fact the Times more or less acknowledged in its piece.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York state assemblyman, shocked the political world last month with a primary win over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his position in 2021 after several women accused him of sexual harassment.
The Times noted that on the campaign trail, Mamdani touted his Muslim faith and South Asian ancestry. He was born in Uganda in 1991 and moved with his parents to South Africa five years later. Two years later, the family moved to New York.
The Times report cited a figure who goes by the name Crémieux on X and Substack:
Last month’s cyberattack appears to have been carried out in order to see if Columbia was still using race-conscious affirmative action in its admission policies after the Supreme Court effectively barred the practice in 2023.
While Mr. Mamdani was not a target of the hack, the information about him was included in a database of millions of student applications to Columbia going back decades. The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X. He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.
In an article about neo-natalism published in March, The Guardian said it had corroborated that Crémieux is a man named Jordan Lasker, who, as Crémieux, spoke at a neo-natalist conference at the University of Texas this year. The Guardian reported:
One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics.
The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.
On 27 November, Musk reposted a Cremieux comment on falling birthrates, adding: “With rare exception, all countries are trending towards population collapse.”
On 29 April, Cremieux posted: “Only about a third of the world even meets replacement rate fertility. This is the biggest problem of our time.” Musk responded: “Yes.”
Musk has also boosted or responded favorably to Cremieux posts on other rightwing hobby horses such as crime in Portland, Oregon, and allegations that Democrats had created loopholes in the asylum system.
Away from X, Cremieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and IQ. A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.
The publication went on to state that Lasker has been an ardent defender of the work of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.
“Until his death in 2023, Lynn was a key figure in organized scientific racism,” The Guardian added. “He served on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funded ‘leading Anglo-American race scientists’ for decades. He was editor of Mankind Quarterly, a long-standing “pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality.”
Regarding his ancestry, Mamdani told the Times that “he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather ‘an American who was born in Africa.’ He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process.”
Currently, Mahmadi is set to square off against Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa and Mayor Eric Adams, who is running a third-party bid after being indicted on bribery charges in September. Those charges were dropped by the Trump administration.
During last year’s presidential campaign, the Times received a leaked dossier about then-Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance that had been compiled by the Trump campaign. The publication declined to reveal its contents. That decision came roughly four years after the Times opted to publish hacked campaign emails obtained from John Podesta, who at the time was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager.
