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What We Learned From The New York Times’ Anti-Zohran Crusade
- Ryan Cooper, The American Prospect
- Jul 9
- 6 min read
The most powerful newspaper in America doesn’t care about American democracy.
The New York Times has it out for the Democratic nominee for New York City’s mayoralty, Zohran Mamdani. That much was clear after the paper’s editorial board announced that they would no longer be issuing endorsements for local political races back in August last year, only to reverse course and issue a backhanded endorsement of disgraced sex pest Andrew Cuomo on June 16. It turned out this editorial was written by David Leonhardt, who does not even live in New York City. Curious!
When Mamdani trounced Cuomo anyway, the Times doubled down. Last week, they ran another story (on top of their avalanche of other critical coverage) accusing him of identifying as African American and Asian on an application to Columbia. The clear implication was Mamdani was pretending to be Black to boost his chances of getting in.
What actually happened was this: In the section of the application dealing with race and ethnicity, Mamdani—who was born in Uganda, where he spent his years as a small child, and also lived in South Africa during another part of his childhood—did check those boxes, but also wrote in “Ugandan.” As anyone who travels abroad can testify, American racial categories are deeply strange to outsiders and straight-up nonsensical for someone like Mamdani. Moreover, despite the fact that his father was a tenured professor at Columbia, he was not accepted. This is just not a story.
Much more interesting than the story was its source: Jordan Lasker, who got the Columbia data from a hacker. The Times initially identified him only as “Crémieux,” his Twitter handle, describing him as “an academic and an opponent of affirmative action” and even linking to his (incredibly racist) Substack. But not only had Lasker’s name already been published by The Guardian in an article about a “natalism” conference full of racists (sensing a theme here), one of his few published articles—another piece of “scientific” racism—was also so atrocious it got his co-author, Bryan Pesta, then a tenured professor at Cleveland State University, fired.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported the story back in 2022. Pesta published the article, “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability,” he co-wrote with Lasker in the first issue of a new journal of which he was the editor in chief. The entire issue was nothing but racist pseudoscience, but worse, it turned out that Pesta had gotten the data for his article by lying to the National Institutes of Health about what he intended to do. That got him canned, and deservedly so. There’s a reason why race “science” is on the fringes of academia: It’s complete nonsense, the province of freaks, liars, and failures.
None of this was in the Times article. Either the authors and editors knew about it and chose to whitewash a racist troll, or they did no investigation whatsoever of their only source—perhaps because they were worried about being scooped by Chris Rufo. Their only concession was a stealth edit adding that Lasker “writes often about I.Q. and race.” Oh really? What, pray tell, does he write exactly?
The incident is revealing not only of the profound institutional rot at the Times—not to mention its deep racist streak—but also of the general crisis of American democracy. At a time when the Trump administration is setting up a police state and network of concentration camps, the most important newspaper in the country is working hand in glove with a gutter racist, along with numerous wealthy interests and billionaire Trump donors, to smear a democratic socialist mayoral candidate. One must conclude that they view one threat as greater than the other.
WHENEVER THE TIMES IS CRITICIZED for its appallingly poor coverage of Trump, constantly downplaying his outrageous abuses and declining mind or putting a massive positive slant on his “wins,” the paper’s top reporters and editors always hide behind the myth of Objective Journalism. “Journalistic independence demands a willingness to follow the facts, even when they lead you away from what you assumed would be true,” Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said in a response to critics last year.
Their anti-Mamdani crusade exposes this as a transparent fraud. The Times’ top brass knows perfectly well how to conduct a political attack: You publish every possible critical story you can think of, day after day after day, damaging the target’s reputation and creating an impression of scandal—even if it means ignoring the paper’s own guidelines about anonymous sources, which explicitly warn about considering their motivations. When a story seems to draw blood, then you assign more stories reporting on the narrative you pretend you didn’t create. “Mamdani Once Claimed to Be Asian and African American. Should It Matter?” (The photo caption on that one initially falsely asserted that Mamdani had claimed to be Black.)
If you don’t want a story to be a scandal—like when Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said Trump is a fascist who admires Hitler—then either you refuse to publish it, or if you’re worried about someone else grabbing the story, you run it in the back pages and move on. The Times did a similar routine to build support for the Iraq War back in 2002-2003, laundering Bush administration propaganda with blaring front-page headlines while burying their own reporting that the propaganda was not true.
An interesting context for this mess is that a sizable chunk of New York’s Democratic establishment has endorsed or at least accepted Mamdani as the nominee. Attorney General Tish James, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) have endorsed him. Even Gov. Kathy Hochul sternly defended him from Trump’s attacks. “I don’t care if you’re the President of the United States, if you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you’re picking a fight with 20 million New Yorkers—starting with me,” she posted on Twitter/X.
Hochul has one of the worst tin ears I’ve ever seen in politics. If a governor who can’t get a judicial nominee past her own party can see which way the wind is blowing, it must be a pretty stiff breeze. All else aside, conducting a hysterical, weekslong smear campaign against a guy supposedly because he wants to open some city-run grocery stores and get rid of bus fares, all while Trump is attempting to consolidate a fascist dictatorship is, shall we say, poor priorities. The Times’ crusade is clearly enabling Trump’s threats to denaturalize and deport Mamdani—which in a grim coincidence is the exact same thing that the psychotic Ugandan dictator Idi Amin did to his father, Mahmood Mamdani.
I think the Times’ leaders—along with Andrew Cuomo, Eric Adams, former New York Gov. David Paterson, various New York real estate executives, and so on—are quite aware of the stakes of what Trump is doing. They just don’t care. What they do care about, as Cooper Lund argues, is preserving the current power structure of corruption and patronage that defines New York politics. Mamdani will struggle mightily to get his agenda passed, but if he wins, it means no more automatic access to the mayor’s office (perhaps with some plane tickets in hand), nor to the extensive levers of power the mayor controls.
And that will require squashing the incipient revolt bubbling up from the Democratic base, which unlike in 2017 is deeply dissatisfied with its leadership class. Mamdani himself is proof that this anger can be harnessed. So he must be stopped at any cost, even if it means a disgraced sex pest or an outrageously corrupt incumbent, both of whom are in Trump’s pocket, ends up as mayor instead.
In other words, the Times leadership and its allies in the anti-Mamdani crusade would be perfectly happy as the controlled opposition in a Trump dictatorship. They are part of the rotten establishment that enabled Trump’s rise to power, and they must be defeated if a new generation of leaders—like Zohran Mamdani—can rise to fight him.
(c) 2025, The American Prospect
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