New York Times Has To Defend Telling The Truth About Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani stands a better than even chance of being the next mayor of New York City. This means that anything he says or does is fair game for the media, even the New York Times.

So when the New York Times covered the information that they received from the data hack at Columbia University, revealing that Mamdani marked himself as “Black or African American” in his application to the university in 2009. The information had been passed to the New York Times by an account on X called Crémieux, who verified the data before publishing their story.

But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.

When approached about this, Mamdani confirmed to the New York Times that he did indeed put this on his application.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)

“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” said Mr. Mamdani, a state lawmaker from Queens.

The application allowed students to provide “more specific information where relevant,” and Mr. Mamdani said that he wrote in, “Ugandan.”

“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he added.

While neither Mr. Mamdani nor Columbia University could provide the template for the application form the college used at that time, a copy of it was archived online. Mr. Mamdani said he filled out all of his college applications in the same way.

The Times could not find any speeches or interviews in which Mr. Mamdani referred to himself as Black or African American, and Mr. Mamdani said the college applications were the only instances where he could recall describing himself as such.

This is a bad look, and you can tell the left knows it is a bad look because they’re now making excuses for why Mamdani did this.

A NY Times columnist pretends Zohran was showing solidarity with black Americans by trying to steal their affirmative action slots. pic.twitter.com/EWEn5HP7YL

— Bluesky Libs (@BlueskyLibs) July 4, 2025

Yeah, as multiple people have pointed out, the left refused to call Elon Musk “African American,” so this is definitely not going to fly. What Mamdani has done here is try to claim his birthplace of Uganda as a racial identity – but he only did it on college applications! And then he didn’t even get into Columbia University, where his father was (and still is) a professor! (This raises the question of just what his grades and test scores looked like.) To top it all off, Mamdani wasn’t even an American citizen when he claimed to be “African American.” But the left has decided that the problem is… the New York Times. Why? For even reporting on this story. The complaints have gotten so loud that the NYT’s assistant managing editor for “Standards and Trust,” Patrick Healy, took to X on Friday evening to explain why they even published the story.

The Times has been reporting comprehensively on Mr. Mamdani’s proposals for the city, his vision on the economy and affordability, his leadership record and his personal background, including his biography and South Asian heritage that he’s talked about during his campaign.

— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) July 4, 2025

The X thread continues with:

Our reporters obtained information about Mr. Mamdani’s Columbia college application and went to the Mamdani campaign with it. When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times.

Mr. Mamdani shared his thinking about the limitations of identity boxes on forms like Columbia’s, and explained how he wrote in “Uganda,” the country of his birth – the kind of decision many people with overlapping identities have wrestled with when confronted with such boxes.

We believe Mr. Mamdani’s thinking and decision-making, laid out in his words, was newsworthy and in line with our mission to help readers better know and understand top candidates for major offices.

We sometimes receive information that has been hacked or from controversial sources. The Times does not solely rely on nor make a decision to publish information from such a source; we seek to confirm through direct sources, which we did with Mr. Mamdani.

On sourcing, we work to give readers context, including in this case the initial source’s online alias, as a way to learn more about the person, who was effectively an intermediary. The ultimate source was Columbia admissions data and Mr. Mamdani, who confirmed our reporting.

We heard from readers who wanted more detail about this initial source. That’s fair feedback. We printed his online alias so readers could learn more about the person. The purpose of this story was to help illuminate the thinking and background of a major mayoral candidate.

The New York Times treated this story with kid gloves (imagine how they would have treated a Republican candidate who did this on a college admission form!), but they committed an act of journalism against the left’s current darling, and the rage is palpable among the most strident.

Your absolute abrogation of the NYT standards would in a better era there have led the full range of you in management to resign. Utter failure. Then again, if you don’t realize NYT is perceived as actively campaigning against Mamdani, you’re all lost anyway.

Maybe you should…

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) July 4, 2025

But this story has legs, and everyone knows it.

The real question becomes how New York City’s black voters – who by demographics voted overwhelmingly for Andrew Cuomo – process this story.

A slew of black Big Apple residents fumed Friday over mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s claim on an Ivy League college application that he is African American — with them raging the socialist pol is a “fraud” and “trickster.”

“He’s just trying to get over,” an 86-year-old Harlem resident, identifying herself only as Marjorie, said of Mamdani, a socialist of Asian Indian descent.

“You can look at him and see he’s not” black, she said. “Absolutely not.

“I don’t like him. I didn’t like him from the first time I heard him. You can look at him and see he’s a trickster,” she said of the pol, who struggled mightily to make inroads among black voters at the Democratic primary-race polls last month, despite his stunning win.

Another longtime local who asked not to be identified seethed, “He’s a fraud.

“He’s a foreigner. He ain’t no African American,” the man said of Mamdani, who was born in Uganda but became a naturalized US citizen in 2018 and holds dual citizenship between the countries.

A Bronx resident named Joshua added, “He’s a liar. Point-blank, period.

“We don’t need a lying mayor or a mayor that says he’s black so he can get black people to vote for him.

“We black,” he said. “We ain’t stupid.”

The Cuomo campaign is now asking for an investigation into Mamdani’s college applications as potential “fraud,” and Mayor Eric Adams called what Mamdani did “an insult” and wants Columbia to release his full application.

The New York Times, shockingly, has nothing to apologize for in this case. They got a tip, they asked legitimate sources – including the candidate himself – to confirm it, and once they had confirmation, they published a story. That is called “reporting.” That leftist media are upset because the Times told the truth, and their new Chosen One now has a problem. Mamdani is probably slick enough to tough this out. He will plaster on his bearded Joker grin and make some kind of concession or apology, and then the left will want to move on. Whether or not this becomes a stumbling block for Mamdani’s campaign is going to be up to the voters of New York.

Featured image via Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license

The post New York Times Has To Defend Telling The Truth About Mamdani appeared first on Victory Girls Blog.