LIBERALS ARE PISSED OFF AT THE NEW YORK TIMES - YES, AT THE NEW YORK TIMES - FOR MAKING PUBLIC MAMDANI'S SCAM

Mamdani and the consequences of woke racial classifications

The Democratic mayoral candidate claimed to be an African-American when applying to college. The danger of the Marxist racialization of society goes beyond that minor scam. 

 

By Jonathan S. Tobin 

 

JNS

Jul 7, 2025

 

 

The New York Times committed an act of journalism recently, and many of its readers—and its staff—lost their minds. It reported the fact that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor of New York City, whose campaign successfully pitched him to the public as the Muslim-American and Indian-American candidate, had claimed to be an “African-American” on one of his college applications.

Since the partisan liberal readers of the Times are not used to seeing articles about the hypocrisies of their side’s standard-bearers, the story has provoked an avalanche of left-wing rage. The subsequent cringe-inducing efforts of the paper to justify bringing to the attention of the public something that would—if it had been done by a Republican and conservative—been considered a heinous offense by the same people who are angry about it being made public speak volumes about our bifurcated political discourse.

What’s the real issue?

The Times’ story has engendered a lively debate about journalistic standards (the information came to them via what is likely to have been an illegal Internet hack of private records), as well as what is considered acceptable when classifying an individual’s race. While these points are worth discussing, the dustup about which boxes the 33-year-old checked off 15 years ago when applying to school has obscured something far more important than what is essentially a minor scam.

What this kerfuffle should remind us of is the terrible consequences of the imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) on American society. Insisting that Americans are all essentially defined by race and ethnic origin—whether it concerns college admissions, hiring employees, determining government funding and a host of other categories—is part of a Marxist effort to create a permanent race war between those deemed “people of color,” who are always victims, and “white” oppressors, who are always in the wrong. In seeking “equity” between these groups rather than equal opportunity, which is the polar opposite, past injustices are not being redressed as much as the entire debate creates new ones.

An argument can certainly be made that Mamdani shouldn’t be blamed for trying to game the system. The truth, however, is that not only is he a hypocrite. His plans for transforming New York City into an economic experiment in socialism, coupled with his support for anti-Jewish and anti-Israel positions and organizations, flow from the same sort of toxic ideas that produced the application form that is now being criticized for his answers. The issue isn’t so much whether or not Mamdani lied about being an African-American, but that the “progressive” doctrines that he champions are a singular threat to the racial peace and the future of the United States.

Should the Times have reported the leak of Mamdani’s application?

There is an argument that since the information was obtained by an illegal hack, it shouldn’t have been reported. But that is a standard that the mainstream press has never applied to any story that served its ideological or partisan agenda, dating all the way back to the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers. Why should it be used now, when it portrays someone on the left in a less-than-flattering light?

Who’s the racist?

But that begs the question of whether or not it is OK to talk about anyone’s racial background. It should be noted that in July of last year, the Times itself judged President Donald Trump’s discussion about then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s mixed racial background by a very different standard. At the time, the paper portrayed his comments asking whether someone who had also identified as Indian-Asian was authentically African-American as not merely unfair but something that invoked a “haunting and unsettling history” of racism.

Apparently, the Times does not consider it racist to raise the question of whether Mamdani is African-American.

If you think “African” is a geographic construct, then Mamdani did nothing wrong. Considering that he was born in Uganda to parents who were Gujarati Indians who subsequently immigrated to the United States, Mamdani is African. But most Americans, especially those who identify as African-American—and when using the term for consideration of both entry to academic schools and funding purposes—consider the term to apply to black people. 

And so, they take a very different view of it. They see it as someone trying to gain an advantage by claiming an identity not fairly applicable in this instance. After all, no one on the left, including Mamdani, thinks that it’s acceptable for Elon Musk, a white person born in South Africa, to call himself African-American. Incumbent New York Mayor Eric Adams, himself a native black New Yorker, spoke for many in the African-American community who regarded the application as racial (and potentially, financial) fraud.

The problem with Mamdani’s application was not so much a case of cultural appropriation as it was a system that allows wealthy people to gain an advantage over middle- and working-class Americans by means of identity politics. As a person of South Asian origin and a Shia Muslim, Mamdani was part of ethnic, racial and religious minority groups. But as the son of a successful, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker and a tenured professor at Columbia University, he is also a child of privilege in terms of income and access to the educational system. Mamdani was seeking to be chosen for admissions at Columbia over other applicants who didn’t check as many boxes on the DEI list of favored minorities.

That’s both unfair and increasingly unviable in a country where so many Americans fit into more than one racial or ethnic category. And whether or not that’s true, a country where we are primarily defined by skin color or our ethnic or religious origins is one in which freedom is replaced by a destructive woke race consciousness.

As it happened, Mamdani wasn’t accepted at Columbia and instead spent his college years at Maine’s Bowdoin College, where he led the chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine—an organization that doesn’t merely support the destruction of the State of Israel, but also routinely engages in antisemitic blood libels and incitement.

Discriminatory racial policies

This is, after all, the same man who now advocates for charging those who live in “whiter” neighborhoods with higher property taxes than those who live elsewhere, an inherently discriminatory and racist proposal. He’s also the same person who supports the Palestinian war on the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet because he considers it unacceptable for Jews to have their own nation, a standard he and other “progressives” don’t apply to any other people or country.

Nor are these isolated positions. They are part of a mindset, often articulated by his Marxist father and mother, who joined an effort to prevent Gal Gadot from appearing at the Oscar Awards ceremony simply because she is Israeli, that sees both America and Israel as illegitimate settler-colonialist states.

The self-avowed Democratic Socialist’s campaign shouldn’t be judged because he was someone who tried to play the DEI intersectional race game to his advantage when he was a teenager. He is a person whose entire life and political career revolve around an attempt to impose these toxic ideas on every aspect of society.

The consequences of such policies have already been made obvious by the events of the last 21 months since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. Mamdani cheered on pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses that targeted Jewish students for intimidation and violence. They did so because they had been indoctrinated in the left’s big lies about Israel being a “white” racist settler-colonialist “apartheid” state, as well as because they believed the biased coverage of the post-Oct. 7 war in legacy corporate media like the Times.

This is exactly the problem that President Trump is trying to grapple with in his conflicts with elite institutions like Harvard University and Columbia. It’s not just that these schools are being given billions of dollars in federal funds while illegally discriminating against Jews by tolerating or encouraging antisemitism.

A progressive threat

The progressive capture of major institutions of American life, like the arts and education, didn’t so much enable the surge of antisemitism as make it inevitable. Yet the leftist culture that produced Mamdani not only threatens Jews; they are but the canaries in the coal mine. The assault on the canon of Western civilization that Mamdani’s Marxist beliefs embody is a problem that transcends the peril it poses to Jews.

A New York in which the candidate’s ideas prevail is one in which racial division is paramount and the values of individual liberty that are the foundation of the American republic are trashed. And since his fellow Democratic Socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) lead a faction that seeks to control not just New York but the national Democratic Party, this is a problem that should concern all Americans.

Zohran Mamdani’s college applications shouldn’t matter, but race-hucksters and DEI racists like him aren’t just hypocrites. The controversy that the scrutiny of this period of his life produced highlights exactly why leftist ideologues like him are a threat to everyone.