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.