The NYT Has a New Standard for What's Newsworthy: Whatever White Supremacists Are Pushing

The paper laundered hacked documents from a race scientist into a hit piece on Zohran Mamdani, then silenced their own columnist for pointing out their source was a Nazi.

The New York Times wants you to know something very important about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor: When he was 17 years old applying to college, he checked multiple boxes on a race question.

That's it. That's the story.

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On Thursday, the Times published what it apparently considered a major scoop about how Mamdani — who is of Indian descent, was born in Uganda, and lived in South Africa before moving to America at age 7 — identified himself as both "Asian" and "Black or African American" on his 2009 Columbia University application. He also wrote in "Ugandan" to clarify his background, tried to represent his complex identity within the limited options available, and was rejected from the school anyway.

This might strike you as a complete non-story. A teenager filling out college forms tried to accurately capture that he was, quite literally, an Asian person from Africa? Stop the presses! But the Times didn't just report this as some minor curiosity. They splashed it across their website and ran a print headline suggesting scandal — "Mamdani Faces Scrutiny Over College Application" — and gave his opponent, Eric Adams, prime real estate to declare this was "an insult to every student who got into college the right way."

Here's what makes this journalistic malpractice even worse: The Times got this "scoop" from a white supremacist who had access to a hacked Columbia's admissions database. They knew this. They gave him anonymity anyway. And according to Semafor's reporting, they rushed to publish because they were terrified of being beaten to the story by Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who manufactured the "critical race theory" panic.