Raynor and Moth Winn’s world collapsed when they were in their 50s. The British couple lost their home and savings after investing in a friend’s business, then Moth was diagnosed with a rare and fatal degenerative brain disorder. Out of money and running out of time, they took to the road, camping along southwestern England’s scenic, 630-mile and often windswept and rainy South West Coast Path. Their subsequent struggles with the elements and their tent, and their redemption through hiking and heartwarming encounters with the natives, led to Raynor’s 2018 memoir, The Salt Path. It became a huge hit, generating two bestselling sequels and now a minor motion picture, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
The Observer marked the movie’s release by exposing the “lies, deceit, and desperation” behind The Salt Path. Raynor Winn is really Sally Walker, and Moth is her husband, Timothy. In 2008, Sally, an accounts clerk, was caught defrauding her employer of $87,000. To pay it back and cover legal costs, the Walkers borrowed $135,000 at 18% interest from a distant relative, using their home, on which they had a $312,000 mortgage, as collateral. The relative’s business went bust, and the debt was sold on. In 2013, the Walkers forfeited their house in court. Ever ingenious, the Walkers founded a publishing house. Its catalogue contained a single book and a unique inducement. All buyers would be entered in a prize draw to win the Walkers’ house, which was offered “free of mortgage or any other legal or registered charge.”
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Fiction requires a talent for fantasy, and the Walkers had more fantasy than a Lord of the Rings box set. But the Walkers claimed, and still claim, that The Salt Path is a true story. Their publisher, Penguin Books, says it did “due diligence,” but it didn’t query the book’s claim that Timothy Walker’s condition had been alleviated by manual labor or how it was that he has lasted 18 years with a condition whose usual life expectancy is six to eight years. This is not the first time this kind of fiasco has arisen with memoirs. In 2006, Random House agreed to refund readers of James Frey’s fake addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, to the cost of 2.35 million little dollars.
We are all the authors of our own lives and our own misfortunes. Consider Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America member who is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York. Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian Hindu and Shiite Muslims. In 2009, he identified as Asian and African American on his application to Columbia University. At the time, he was even less of an African American than Elon Musk is: Mamdani did not become a U.S. citizen until 2018. Mamdani has also been accused of using artificial intelligence to fake his fluency in Spanish in a campaign video and performatively eating rice with his hand to support his claim that “When you grow up as someone, especially in the third world, you have a very different understanding of the Palestinian struggle.”
The “Palestinian struggle” has nothing to offer New York, unless Mamdani proposes diverting federal funds to digging a new tunnel from Manhattan to the mainland. There is nothing especially third-world about him. He moved to the Upper West Side at 7 and was privately educated at the Bank Street School. His mother, Mira Nair, is probably the world’s most famous director of Indian origin. Her films include Mississippi Burning, Salaam Bombay, The Namesake, and, I kid you not, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. His father, Mahmood Zamdani, is a professor of postcolonial racial grievance at Columbia University who was voted the ninth “top public intellectual” in a global survey by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.
Zohran Mamdani is a child of the privileged post-1990s transnational knowledge class: a theatre kid cosplaying as Franz Fanon. He might not be smart enough to get into Columbia, even though his father worked there and he exploited affirmative action on his application, but he is smart enough to understand the incentive structures around him. The public loves a redemption story, so publishers incentivize people such as the Walkers to fake it till they make it. The redemption story of affirmative action, with its hidden promise of racial redemption for whites in particular, has reshaped the values and incentive structures of every American institution. Its structures, and the faux-radical academic ideologies that justify them, incentivize people such as Mamdani to make it by faking it.
These structures also incentivize their mirror image, the resentment of the excluded. In this regard, Mamdani and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are two cheeks of the same backside. It’s a waste of time to try to untangle their inner motives from their external incentives. They are true fakes, like all actors. So long as the incentive structures are there, they will continue to lead us down the Salt Path to perdition.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.