Who's Afraid of Zohran Mamdani?

And what it means to be an immigrant on July 4th

Here is one version of the story. An anti-affirmative action hacker broke into Columbia’s records, stealing private student information in the hope of providing material for Trump’s authoritarian squeezing of the university. The hacker makes this data available to a eugenicist who writes about racial differences in IQ. The eugenicist, in turn, shares the information with a reporter who subscribes to his newsletter. The data is about one unsuccessful Columbia applicant, and Democratic candidate for New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani. The reporter accepts the information, and grants the eugenicist anonymity.

Here is the version of the story as it appeared in the New York Times, for the reporter worked for the paper of record.

Did Mamdani Do Anything Wrong?

First, lets get to the question here of did Mamdani do anything wrong. The fact that his failed college application is being discussed in the New York Times certainly suggests he did. Otherwise, it would not be a very newsworthy story!

The short answer is: No, not really.

The longer answer is: No, not really, though you could argue his application response was technically wrong (a bit more on that below), and it certainly feels wrong to Mamdani’s political opponents like Eric Adams, who said that Mamdani trying to “exploit that [African American identity] for personal gain is deeply offensive.”

By way of background, Mamdani was a high school student who had lived in America but was born in Uganda. He is also of South East Asian descent. As he told the Times “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.” He also told the Times that he added “Uganda” in a box soliciting more information.

That’s a pretty reasonable explanation.

A more critical perspective is that the question was about race and not geography, and uses Census racial categories. The Census defines African American as tied to “origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.” Most of us would struggle with the notion that Elon Musk is African American (as conservatives have sometimes portrayed him).

Using the Census definition, Mamdani’s response was technically wrong as an answer to a question about race. (The sociologist Philip Cohen argues that I am being too harsh here). It was also an understandable and reasonable response to the question, especially for someone born in Africa. People grow confused and frustrated with the limitations of Census categories, and detailed Census definitions are not provided on admissions applications. Racial categories tend not to reward complex experiences, like Asians or Europeans whose families migrated to Africa. Mamdani’s interest in Africa is genuine — the topic of both his father’s academic career, and his major in Bowdoin College.

Therefore, the Times making this a story implied some serious wrongdoing that Mamdani’s explanation seems to reasonably address, wrongdoing that the reporters do not seem quite willing to accuse him of. They added the Adams’ quote after the story was initially posted, seemingly glad of someone willing to go further than they would.

The problem, of course, is that many people are not going to read the nuances of Mamdani’s response, and assume he was engaged in unethical behavior. This matters because headline and the accusation often stick with a new politician, even when they do not represent reality.

For example, the New York Post picked up the story, and added little except angry accusations that Mamdani engaged in fraud from his political critics, such as the Chair of the New York Conservative Party (be honest, you did not know that was a thing), who declared that “race is scientific specification.” NewMax posted the misleading headline that implied that Mamdani had claimed he was Black.

And it is not just that the reporters and editors decided that the story is newsworthy. They had to overcome some serious red flags to do so.

Why Publish Hacked Data?

As noted, the story was based on hacked data. As a general rule, news media tend to be cautious about using hacked information, especially when the hacker has a clear axe to grind.

For example, in the run-up to the 2024 election, a foreign adversary hacked a presidential campaign, and tried to shop the story to various media. The foreign adversary was Iran, the campaign it hacked was Trump’s (including vetting materials about JD Vance), and the media that chose not to publish the materials included the New York Times. This piece in the Post explains the reasoning of editors who felt burned when dealing with hacked materials in the past:

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post.

Responding to the Mamdani piece, Chris Hayes made the case for publishing hacked material should be very compelling.

In this case, it is very hard to make the case that the story is of such newsworthiness that it should be published given its origins. The Pentagon Papers, it ain’t. It is also clearly rewarding the hackers.

For example, the person who shared the data with the Times was hoping to damage the Mamdani campaign, immediately boosting the story in a misleading way…

…while bemoaning that it did not seem to make any difference to election markets. Apparently, there are not a lot of New York voters who get upset about the niceties of college applications, but find Eric Adams the type of ethically attractive candidate they aspire towards.

The hacker’s motivations were not subtle: they forced Trump’s image on Columbia University screens. A review of their online profile found that they were a virulent racist. They hoped to provide data showing that Columbia was engaging in illegal affirmative action, providing leverage for Trump to abuse his power to defund the university. The Times source took the hackers data and claimed to have shown exactly that in a blog post, which the Times story obligingly linked to.

Presumably the hacker and the Times source were delighted that the Times publicized their cause, insinuating a Muslim democratic socialist politician had done something wrong. The fact that these people wanted their hack to reach a mass mainstream audience via the Times does not mean the Times should not have published the piece. But it should have certainly given the editors pause: was the piece compelling enough to justify releasing personal information from a politically motivated hack? Is the hacker more or less likely to mine personal information now that they have been rewarded for it?

Why Grant the Source Anonymity?

The story is also a mess when it comes to its source, and how he is presented. First, the Times granted this person anonymity. Why? The journalistic question here is whether anonymity was justified given the content of the story. One politics reporter and editor put it this way:

Here is what the Times says about using anonymous sources generally, which reflects concerns about motivation and reliability, as well as the trust of the reader.

Of course there are cases where anonymity is valuable. I’ve provided anonymity to federal employees with reasonable fear of retribution for speaking out (see, e.g. the EPA suspending 144 employees who wrote an open letter accusing the administration of undermining its mission).

The decision to grant anonymity in this case is all the more baffling because “Crémieux” is not actually anonymous. He is a well-known poster, followed by Vice President Vance, and who has won support from Elon Musk online.

He has been previously outed by the Guardian as Jordan Lasker, who writes a lot about race science and IQ, pushing the discredited eugenics ideas including the “genetic pathways of crime” and the “race-IQ gap.”

The Times initially described the source as “an academic and opponent of affirmative action.” It later amended this description to add “and often writes about I.Q and race.” The modified presentation of Lasker’s profile suggests some disquiet with Lasker’s motivation after the story had gone to press.

The framing of Lasker as an “academic” grants him the credibility of serious research. While an active blogger, it is unclear if he remains a PhD student at Texas Tech. What is clear is that much of his research is published in open access venues that lack peer review, or in dubious race science journals, where one of Lasker’s co-authors were also, handily enough, the editor-in-chief. Even though Lasker listed his affiliation with the University of Minnesota for at least one of these publications, an investigation found no record of his presence there. For one of these papers that Lasker worked on, the same co-author lost his tenured academic position for academic misconduct because of misuse of National Institutes of Health data. Lasker’s other frequent co-author, Emil Kirkegaard, who also writes on race science, and has faced numerous accusations of academic misconduct, including using hacked personal data.

In short then, Lasker is an academic in that he has published some papers, and may or may not be a PhD student. But the papers were also published in shoddy journals or not subject to peer review, and he and his co-authors have faced serious accusations of academic misconduct. I skimmed through Lasker’s blog, and on the one topic he wrote where I have expertise — politicization of the civil service system — a generous interpretation would be that he ignores credible research that contradicts his priors.

As such, Lasker is not an authoritative or especially credible source. This seems to undermine the NY Time’s criteria for granting anonymity “have they proved reliable in the past?”

How had Lasker reached out to the Times reporter with his story? This is not disclosed in the piece. But the lead author of the piece, Ben Ryan, appears to follow the hacker and subscribe to Lasker’s newsletter, so it would not have been difficult for one to reach out to the other.

How Did the Times Deal with the Fallout?

A day after it was posted, New York Times editor, Patrick Healy, explained the choices for the piece in response to some negative feedback.

There are, I think, a number of reasonable responses. Comparing the story of Mamdani’s unsuccessful college application to stories about abuses of military power, or the President’s refusal to reveal potential financial conflicts of interest, seems risible. The public interest in such stories was clear, here, less so, beyond that anything related to “the thinking and background of a major mayoral candidate” is fair game, which seems like a very broad topic. I don’t think that printing an online alias, and assuming that readers will then do a deep dive on, is a substitute for reporting the information directly to the reader. And the Times presenting Mr. Lasker as an academic was a choice to give the source greater authority and weight than he deserved given his record.

The overall message, and the answer to my question, is that the Times editorial team believes the story was newsworthy enough to justify using the hacked personal data, since they were able to verify that the information itself was accurate. The Time’s editor, Joe Kahn, praised the story in a daily meeting with staff, as well as the process by which is was developed, and the explanation offered by Healy.

What the Times editors did not mention is that they were in a race with Chris Rufo to publish the piece. Rufo would go on to post a story revealing Mamdani’s SAT scores from the hacked data, while asserting Mamdani intended to “falsely portray himself as black.” Rufo is flatly opposed to affirmative action as a corrupting influence, you see. Well, except for the New College, where he is a trustee, where Rufo cheered reducing standards in order to throw scholarships to male athletes with weaker academic records than the female students that Rufo deems to be too plentiful.

The Times treating Rufo as a peer competitor raises two issues. First, the Times has facilitated Rufo gaining a national profile, using him as a go-to source on higher education stories, while also helping him to take down his liberal targets, most notably Claudine Gay as President of Harvard. In the last year, the Times featured Rufo 29 times. With the Mamdani story, they effectively cut out the middle man. They were willing to take on the stories that they would cover only after Rufo would break them. Second, a newsroom competing for stories with a bad-faith partisan actor who systematically targets people of color based on anonymous complaints may want to ask itself some hard questions about its guiding ethics and priorities.

Rufo gleefully took a victory lap about “my friends at the New York Times” treating him as a peer. What Rufo understands, but the Times seemingly does not, is that by legitimating Rufo, the Times delegitimates itself to it’s core readership. After all, the delegitimization of liberal institutions is at the core of Rufo’s mission in life. .

What other choice could the Times have made? Here is one option: Chris Rufo, a trustee at a public higher ed institution and advisor to the Trump administration on higher ed, was using hacked personal student data to score partisan political points. That seems more compelling that what box Mamdani picked when he was 17. Instead, the Times legitimated Rufo’s actions by making them their own. In doing so, they looked increasingly ridiculous to many readers. A satirical website generated fake headlines like this:

The Times ran a follow-up story, largely to give his political opponents a chance to accuse Mamdani of “fraud” and reiterating Healy’s defense of the editorial decisionmaking. However, the photo caption falsely claimed that Mamdani had claimed to be Black, putting the New York Times in the same category as Newsmax and Rufo.

While I initially thought this was a simple error, the wording remained several hours later, even after other corrections to the story had been made. The hyperlink to the story also seems to reflect the idea that those at the Times saw the story about Mamdani claiming to be Black (see bolded text) : https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/nyregion/mamdani-college-black-reaction.html

Why Was this Story Published?

Mamdani is obviously an important public figure, worthy of scrutiny, but it seems like a hard case to make that this is an important enough story that would require the Times to overcome its general concern with anonymous sources and its greater aversion to using hacked data.

If the Times dislikes Mamdani, they should focus on the substance of his policies. In fact, they did that. The Times editorial board engaged in a de facto reversal of a policy not endorse in state and local elections to join the New York Post in urging its readers not to rank Mamdani as a candidate. They argued that he lacked experience, and the record of progressive Mayors in New York and elsewhere suggested he should not be considered, even as Andrew Cuomo deserved a spot on voter’s ballots. It is also the case that multiple Times opinion columnists have written pieces defending or celebrating Mamdani, so the editorial board’s view is by no means uniform in the organization.

These types of concerns I raise here are ones that a public editor could be more effectively addressing. But the Times removed the public editor position in 2017. The comments of a previous public editor, Margaret Sullivan in the Guardian, suggest why: “With this made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani. And no lofty explanation about the mission can disguise it.” The impression that the Times does not want any internal pushback is reinforced by a policy of compelling it’s writers not to criticize other Times writers online, which led one to delete a series of posts about the Mamdani piece.

Step back a little further, and the broader context is even more worrying. Mamdani has been unfairly accused, even by Democrats, of being anti-semitic based on words he never used. As the Times piece notes, Trump has baselessly accused of Mamdani of being an illegal immigrant, and responded to suggestions that he be denaturalized, amidst a broader push to denaturalize citizens for vague reasons that include cases that the Department of Justice “determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.” In short, Mamdani is being othered and threatened for this identity.

The piece ran the evening before the 4th of July, an inauspicious time for the paper of record to put a naturalized citizen in the crosshairs even as the the Department of Justice is likely looking into Mamdani’s citizenship application materials for slip-ups.

Every so often during the last few years I think, “I’ve never seen a more hostile environment against immigrants in the decades since I immigrated here” and it continues to be true because things keep getting worse. But this year feels especially bleak. The talks of denaturalization, the push for mass deportation based on disappearing peaceful long-term residents, the militarization and massive expansion of ICE. Where are we going?

Mamdani is an immigrant. He is seeking to lead a city where more than three million immigrants make up more than one-third of the city’s population. Rather than seeking a gotcha on how he represents his identity, it would be more compelling to understand why New Yorkers are responding to that identity, how it would shape how he would govern, and why it is drawing such overt hostility from the President and his supporters — including anonymous hackers.