Last Thursday, the New York Times committed a rare act of journalism by revealing that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in the NYC mayoral race, claimed that he was “Black or African-American” on a 2009 Columbia University student application.
As Legal Insurrection shared, the Times observed that “Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.”
Ultimately, he was unsuccessful, as the paper also noted that he wasn’t accepted at the school. But the information is prompting fresh questions for the Democratic Socialist as his star rises in the Democratic Party, with their emerging new leader telling the paper that “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.”
The Times obtained the information from an anonymous Substack and X user with the handle “Crémieux” after Columbia’s database experienced a cyberattack last month in what university officials have alleged was a politically motivated attack, though Mamdani getting caught up in it was reportedly merely coincidental.
The paper’s description of the anonymous person as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race,” and the fact that the piece was mildly critical of Mamdani, prompted backlash from their leftist readers who were apparently demanding to know more about the paper’s sourcing methods and why they ran the story in the first place (even though Mamdani himself confirmed it was true).
Patrick Healy, the NYT‘s assistant managing editor, posted a lengthy thread on X, where he indicated that reader feedback had been substantial enough to warrant a response:
Presumably, most of the leftist eruptions happened on BlueCry BlueSky, as I didn’t see much hubbub about it from The Usual Suspects at X. The NYT‘s Communications account at BlueSky re-posted Healy’s messages from X, and suffice it to say, the feedback to that wasn’t so good for them, either.
Healy and his newspaper, of course, were widely mocked on the X machine for trying to smooth ruffled feathers among their reader base:
Considering how leftists have been perfectly okay with digging all the way back to someone’s high school yearbook for material (including fart jokes) with which to try and smear conservative candidates for higher office, their complaints on the snoozepaper of record’s anonymous sourcing in the Mamdani piece rings a bit hollow, methinks.
-Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter/X.-
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY