The New York Times published a hit piece on Zohran Mamdani using data obtained by an anonymous, right-wing hacker targeting Columbia University. The damning material? Mamdani, born in Uganda, identified as black in college applications:
Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times. [...] In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said 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. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)
This scoop was provided to the NYT by a notorious alt-right eugenicist race scientist, known by his digital pseudonym, Crémieux:
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.
Crémieux, whose real name is Jordan Lasker, is at the center of the eugenicist, race hygienist, natalist networks of the contemporary fascist far right; he's against affirmative action because he thinks black people biologically have lower IQ. Lasker is not an academic by any definition. He works together with Emil Kierkegaard and his Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly to revive and popularize long-discredited ideas of scientific racism, usually peddled under a euphemism, "human biodiversity," concealing that these people believe other races have innate, inferior characteristics.
Crémieux, by the way, tried make money off this story by pumping online betting markets:
There are, somehow, three journalists on this byline, none of whom considered it a duty to fully disclose who Crémieux is. One of them, Benjamin Ryan, is more or less a transphobe who has written time and time and time and time again against medical care for trans teens. Notably, these bylines are in the New York Sun, a Republican, Murdoch-owned rag, not in the NYT or The Guardian, where he usually published.
The NYT, a racist, pro-fascist paper, is running a smear campaign to discredit Mamdani among black voters—something it's done since the day after the primary by, e.g., describing his voters as "white gentrifiers." What is the story here? That Mamdani couldn't figure out how to best choose rigid racial categories that don't conform to his background? That ticking off a race identity box doesn't automatically grant you affirmative admission to an Ivy League? That Mamdani didn't get into the place where his dad is a famous professor, contrary to the absurd "nepobaby" claims?"
(It's worth noting that the chunk of Abundunce people who support Adams/Cuomo follow and have close interactions with Crémieux.)
