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Transcript:
Hey, did you guys hear? The guy who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City checked the boxes for “African” and “Asian” on one of his applications to a college he ended up not attending, because he is in fact African and Asian. This is very upsetting for…reasons.
Of course, the guy he beat in the primary has an extremely detailed Wiki page just dedicated to his long history of sexual harassment accusations, but that’s neither here nor there. Don’t look at that. Look at this man, who again, correctly identified his racial background on a college application when he was a teenager.
Okay, obviously this is stupid bullshit. If you haven’t been following this story, Zohran Mamdani was an underdog in the New York City mayoral Democratic primary, but he built a tremendously successful campaign by asking New Yorkers what they wanted out of a mayor, suggested common sense policies that would improve the life of the average resident, and said things he actually seemed to believe without running them past a focus group of billionaire donors.
This has infuriated the conservative Democratic establishment, and so the New York Times stepped up to do their part to undermine Mamdani and give a boost to the serial sexual abuser who is going to run against him as an “independent” in the actual election this fall.
Obviously social media isn’t reality and we all have our little bubbles but it certainly seems to me that every reasonable person saw the New York Times hit piece and laughed at it, and then got even more excited about Mamdani because clearly the establishment is panicking, which means he could actually win this thing. But beneath the obvious clownery is a much, much darker story that I think merits a second glass. Namely this: how did the New York Times even find out what boxes Mamdani checked on his college application 16 years ago?
The Times reports that they obtained the information from an “intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X,” who they describe as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.” Do you see them? Do you see the red flags?
“Crémieux,” they say, obtained the information from a massive hack of Columbia University that the hacker told Bloomberg was done to verify whether or not the university was continuing to consider race as part of its admission process, in violation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision that destroyed affirmative action. At that time, the hacker was anonymous, and the New York Times chose not to reveal the identity of the pseudonymous intermediary “Crémieux.”
It is of course normal for a newspaper to want to protect their source’s anonymity, but it becomes absolutely necessary that they do so if they’re hoping that the average reader doesn’t wonder exactly what the source has to say when they write “often about I.Q. and race.” Luckily, the Guardian didn’t have any reason to protect the identity of Cremieux in this piece from March describing a convention of racists. Jordan Lasker is his name, and the Guardian does not hesitate to describe precisely what he has to say about IQ and race: arguments “so discredited that journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society and Psychological Science have retracted articles that relied on the data. In 2020, the scholarly European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association published a blanket condemnation of (the) data alongside its code of conduct on its website, writing: “Any conclusions drawn from these data are both untenable, and likely to give rise to racist conclusions.” The data was originally published by Richard Lynn, a man who described himself as a “scientific racist” and who was once the editor of Manking Quarterly, a racist publication I have discussed several times in what I’m now considering my ongoing series on Eugenics and Its Link to Science and Skepticism.
In fact, the Guardian has this to say: “Jordan Lasker has also sought to rehabilitate and employ Lynn’s work in papers published under his own name, perhaps most controversially in a co-written paper, Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. One of his co-authors, Bryan Pesta, was later dismissed from his tenured professorship at Cleveland State University over the use of National Institutes of Health data in the paper.” That’s Bryan Pesta, my old friend from the James Randi Educational Foundation forums, who I talked about in this video last year about how Nazis were secretly funding YouTubers to launder their hate speech through the lens of science and skepticism.
Isn’t it nice when everything just falls into place like that? It truly is a small world (of Nazis).
So that was the “intermediary” who the New York Times protected in order to publish their hit piece. But where did Lasker get that data? Who actually hacked Columbia?
I found the answer thanks to Elizabeth Lopatto at the Verge, who correctly identified the hacker as a “violently racist…anime Nazi.” If you thought that Jordan Lasker’s pseudonymous rantings were baldly racist, the hacker makes Lasker look artful and subtle. For a start, their username on Xitter and other social media sites is the N-word. They repost “statements and images such as swastikas, “miss u hitler,” and “minorities have no place in our world.” (and they themselves) posted such things as “I am racist,” “I am violently racist toward black people,” and a picture of a unicorn sitting on a swastika.”
“On a post from November 5th, 2024, when then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ X account was encouraging people to vote, the alleged hacker’s account replied, “You will be executed.” The next post after that was “kill them all please, mr president.” When another X account asked the Anime Nazi if they were concerned about law enforcement, they replied with a quote of a post from President Donald Trump: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
And all of this is, according to Lopatto, and “open secret” online. So the New York Times accepted hacked data that a “scientific racist” got from a violently racist Nazi and chose to publish the data as an indictment of a Brown African-born South Asian Muslim man who wants all children to have access to pre-K education, instead of asking themselves, “Hey, is the real story here something about how a self-described violently racist Nazi currently has the private data of millions of people, including their Social Security numbers, addresses, family members’ information, and citizenship status?”
Because personally, I find that fucking terrifying. That’s the personal information of at least every person who applied to Columbia University between 2019 and 2024, but obviously goes back further and ALSO INCLUDES the data of people who applied to or attended New York University as far back as 1989, as well as those at University of Minnesota. The Anime Nazi also claims to have hacked the University of Mississippi and Miami University of Ohio. And again, this is a person who describes themselves as “violently racist towards blacks” and who keeps lists of Black people. What’s the worst that could happen?
So, why did the New York Times choose to ignore the Nazis with all this personal information on Black and Brown people and instead focus on mocking a Brown man’s application to a college he didn’t even attend? One can only wonder. A generous response, I think, is to simply say that “Deep-seated professional and cultural traditions play a part.” Those aren’t my words, but the words of Laurel Leff in her 2005 book Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, in which she details the paper of record’s horrific downplaying of the Nazi regime, either ignoring the Holocaust entirely or burying stories in the back of the paper. It’s hardly a surprise, considering that the very first article the New York Times published about Adolf Hitler described his anti-semitic rhetoric as “not so violent or genuine as it sounded.”
They wrote, “he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
“A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.”
So yeah, “Deep-seated professional and cultural traditions” at the New York Times really makes it inevitable that they would provide adequate cover to the new fascists rising up to terrorize immigrants and people of color here in the United States. Don’t fall for it. If you’re in New York City, vote for Mamdani this fall. If you need to access any of the sane reporting that is still happening at the New York Times (and yes, there are plenty of good journalists still working there), consider using your library card or gift links found online.
