The New York Times Shamed Itself With Its Nonstory About Zohran Mamdani

It somehow failed to identify its source as a well-known eugenics supporter

Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

The New York Times two days ago published a lengthy story reporting that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, checked boxes saying that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American” on his college application when he was a high school senior.

Seriously, New York Times? This is news?

Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents, has made a point of identifying as a Muslim immigrant of South Asian descent during his mayoral campaign. He has never identified as Black or African American, except, apparently, on the Columbia University college application he filled out as a teenager, according to The Times.

The Times suggested that checking off that box could have given him an advantage because Columbia at the time had a race-conscious affirmative admissions program. In the event, Mamdani was not accepted by Columbia, even though his father was (and remains) an anthropology professor there. Instead, he was admitted to another selective school, Bowdoin College in Maine, where he majored in Africana Studies.

Mamdani, to his credit, didn’t deny that he checked off the “African American” box when he was asked about it by The Times. He told the newspaper that his answer was an attempt to represent his complex and heterogeneous background, “given the limited choices before him,” and that he didn’t do it to gain an advantage in the admissions process.

But The Times article clearly meant to suggest that he was trying to game the system. Otherwise why would it have run the piece?

Let’s say that Mamdani was trying to game the system, although a reasonable case can be made that the choices offered on the application were too limited to encompass his complex background and that, as a person born in Uganda who emigrated to America when he was 7, he wasn’t being devious when he checked off the box.

My question is, who gives a fig what boxes he checked off on his college admission application when he was an 18-year-old high school student?

But what makes The Times’ article especially shameful is not all of the verbiage that it devotes to what, at most, was a venial sin. What makes it shameful is the source of its information: a hack of Columbia University that was shared with the newspaper by a person to whom it granted anonymity. And not just any hacker, it turns out, but someone who is a white supremacist.

The Times said the hack was of a database of millions of student applications to Columbia going back decades. It said it 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,” The Times reported. “He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.”

What The Times failed to say is that this so-called academic has been identified by other sources as a well-known eugenics enthusiast. Back in March, The Guardian reported on a natalist conference in Texas featuring race-science promoters. It identified Crémieux, one of the speakers at the conference, as a man whose real name is Jordan Lasker. A longtime proponent of eugenics, his account on X has been boosted dozens of times by Elon Musk, according to The Guardian.

“Away from X, Crémieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and IQ,” The Guardian reported. “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 Guardian said that those arguments, first made in a book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, are now so discredited that journals that published articles based on their data have since retracted them.

Lynn is a self-described “scientific racist,” according to The Guardian, and is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the most unapologetic and raw “scientific racists.”

That The Times used illegally hacked documents is bad enough. That it lacked the forthrightness to state that the man who provided it with the hacked documents is a eugenicist is tantamount to journalistic malpractice.

And all for the sake of what? A hit piece over a minor infraction—if that’s what it even was— committed by a teenager 15 years ago that caused no harm to anyone.

It’s an utter nonstory. The real story here is The Times’ decision to publish this article in the first place and to grant its scurrilous source the cloak of anonymity.

The Times continues to do great and admirable and courageous work. But when it runs a piece like this that’s more fit for the tabloid press and Fox “News” (and predictably, Fox and its corporate cousin the New York Post immediately picked up on it with screaming headlines¹), it diminishes and undermines the credibility of that work, and provides ammunition for critics who say The Times is just another corporate mouthpiece and shill for Wall Street.

Mamdani will survive this non-scandal and will be elected or not on the basis of more substantive matters, like what he hopes to do to make living in New York more affordable.

The Times will also survive, but you have to wonder what the editors there were thinking. My guess is that they figured if they rejected Crémieux’s offer of the hacked documents, he would have taken them to another media outlet like The Post, which no doubt would have gleefully reported the same story.

But The Times lent the story the sheen of its august reputation, which The Post and other news outlets simply don't possess. If I were a reporter or editor at The Times and been offered the documents, I would have shown Crémieux the door.

1. New York Mayor Eric Adams, who is African American, also seized on it, denouncing what Mamdani did as “an insult to every student who got into college the right way.” Which is rich, because Adams, who’s seeking reelection as an independent, was indicted last year for taking bribes and violating campaign finance laws. After trump became president, the Department of Justice, which under the direction of the execrable Pam Bondi now serves as trump’s de facto law firm, argued the case should be dismissed because prosecuting Adams would interfere with his ability to cooperate with trump’s immigration enforcement policies. Given the DOJ’s refusal to prosecute, the federal judge assigned to the case had no choice but to dismiss it.