❧ Is scientific racism back in vogue? This week, the New York Timesran a piece on New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s college application. The piece itself is a nothingburger. Mamdani checked that he was both Asian and African American on his college application to Columbia University in 2009. Mamdani was born in Uganda and at the time was only a citizen of Uganda (he now holds dual US-Ugandan citizenship). He also was not admitted to Columbia. But more interesting is how the Times came about this tip. The article initially credited “an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux.” That man is better known as Jordan Lasker, a PhD student at Texas Tech. Lasker is a self-described eugenicist and racist; his writing is centered on one argument: that white and Asian people are genetically superior to those of Black and Hispanic descent. The Times eventually added that Lasker “writes often about I.Q. and race.” This is one chapter of the extremely troubling rise of “scientific” racism, the belief that some races are genetically more intelligent than others. These views are extremely prominent in Silicon Valley, and they’ve exploded in visibility since Elon Musk began promoting them on Twitter. They’re also being laundered by major liberal media outlets surprisingly frequently. For example, the Timesreported favorably on the Natal conference, a conservative convention on the issue of convincing people to have more kids. They quoted attendees who were dismayed that the natal movement was uncharitably tied to racism and patriarchy. But the Times didn’t note that among the speakers at the conference were Lasker and other eugenicists.
