It’s nothing the mayoral candidate has said or done; it’s what the New York Times, in reporting accurately on him, has done.
It seems we learn something new about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City, every day. Those things we learn do not in any way challenge the image he has cultivated over the years as that of a far-left radical with Marxist affinities. Rather, each new revelation contributes to that well-founded impression.
Occurring far too late in life to be dismissed as a youthful indiscretion, Mamdani endorsed the Leninist goals of augmenting “class consciousness” and “seizing the means of production.” With the power he seeks, “we can . . . gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership,” he promised. He lavished praise on the Bolshevik putsch in Russia. He feted the Black Liberation Army figure Fred Hampton, a figure who “believed” in the “socialist revolution.” His model for a successful mayor is an explicitly communist revolutionary who helmed a “detachment of Red Volunteers” in India.
Throw onto that mounting pile the candidate’s affirmation of a central tenet of Karl Marx’s philosophy; in Mamdani’s words, “Each according to their need, each according to their ability.”
For weeks, the political press has largely downplayed these revelations — attributing concern over Mamdani’s dalliance with bolshevism to wild-eyed right-wingers and casually dismissing the notion that his political affinities could possibly influence his policy prescriptions. This weekend, however, we learned what really enlivens the mainstream press when it was discovered that Mamdani sought to abuse the college admission system’s hierarchy of racial preferences.
In what Semafor’s Max Tani revealed was an effort to beat Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo to the punch, the New York Times reported over the weekend that Mamdani misled Columbia University administrators about his background on a 2009 application. On it, the mayoral candidate identified himself as both “Asian” and “Black or African American.”
The Times gave the subject the tenderest of treatments. Mamdani doesn’t consider himself black or African American, but he said that “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.”
Mamdani was born in Uganda, and he is of South Asian descent. But he himself has admitted that it would be “misleading” to claim a racial status with which he has no association. If Mamdani’s followers agree, they were far too incensed by the Times report on his indiscretion to say so.
A veritable cascade of apologetic social media posts from the Times’ assistant managing editor for standards and trust, Patrick Healy, is illustrative of the fiery reaction the piece inspired among the paper’s left-of-center readers. “Our reporting helps readers better understand how candidates think and what they believe,” Healy noted. It seems a significant portion of the Times readership did not want to be so informed.
The Times dispatch inspired a manhunt for the anonymous source of the leak. The Guardian subsequently identified the paper’s anonymous source, “Crémieux,” as Jordan Lasker, a Substack writer who posts provocative racial comments on social media and has captured the attention of Elon Musk. Lasker may have obtained Mamdani’s records as a result of an illegal hack of Columbia’s database last month. With that, the story was no longer the story. Instead, it was how the story became a story at all that consumed left-wing discourse.
The comprehensive “liberal backlash” the Times story inspired has become the focus of dozens of navel-gazing posts and think pieces. “So far, the Times has, publicly at least, struck a defiant tone,” the Columbia Journalism Review’s Liam Scott wrote. The Times even published a companion piece to its original reporting in which it compiled quote after quote from New York–area lawmakers and office-seekers insisting that Mamdani’s racial identity didn’t matter.
Well, it shouldn’t matter. It rather clearly does matter to those who have worked themselves into a lather over what they see as the unethical nature of the Times’ reporting — a category that includes Times employees. Maybe these objectors resent the implication in this story that Mamdani sought to exploit for personal advantage a system that its advocates insist cannot be gamed. Perhaps they merely dislike the source from which this information flowed.
Either way, this episode is illustrative of the elite left’s priorities. Mamdani’s racial identity will have far less bearing on public life in New York City after his election than will his radically socialistic policy preferences. And yet those preferences have received a fraction of the intense scrutiny the Times generated by revealing what we already knew: that race-conscious admissions are an easily manipulable form of racial discrimination. The Supreme Court did its utmost to eradicate that scourge from the country. When it comes to Mamdani’s communist sympathies, however, it looks like we’re on our own.