Criticism grows over Zohran Mamdani's ethnicity
He confirmed writing 'Ugandan' in a space that allowed for additional background, adding, 'I wanted my college application to reflect who I was.' The Ivy League institution ended up rejecting Mamdani even though his father - Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani - has worked there since 1999. But several on social media - and the hosts of Fox & Friends - accused Mamdani of filling out the form as he did to gain an upper hand in the admissions process.
At the time, Columbia considered race in its admissions process, a system designed to boost the chances of underrepresented minorities. 'Mamdani just baldly lying on every one of his college applications that he was "racially Black" in order to exploit an utterly corrupt & unjust system for his own selfish advancement,' wrote UNC School for Civic Life & Leadership Associate Dean David Decosimo on X. '[M]ay be the most authentically communist thing he has ever done.'
Prominent progressive Chris Cillizza got it on the action as well, re-sharing a portion of the report that discussed the discrepancies between Mamdani's current Muslim immigrant identity and the labels unveiled in the leak. 'Oops!' the former legacy journalist wrote, as another called Mamdani's application 'The latest in a long list of frauds from the Democrat Party.' Over on the Fox & Friends sofa, the outrage was similarly swift, with Fourth of July fill-in hosts Charlie Hurt, Griff Jenkins, and Katie Pavlich airing suspicions about Mamdani's motivations as well.
'Democrats' new nominee to be the mayor of New York City, Mr. Mamdani, clearly despises America and everything that we stand for,' said Hurt to start the segment, calling Mamdani a 'full-blown communist.' 'Also a racist, by the way,' he added. 'It turns out that he had-, when he applied for Columbia University, he described himself as being Black and African-American because his parents happened to be in Uganda when he was born.' Pavlich compared the case to the controversy the one that's plagued Elizabeth Warren, while joking about Mamdani still not being accepted after the fact.
'He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, and not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process,' she said. 'Maybe he should call Elizabeth Warren and see how this worked out for her, but she did use it to get ahead. So, you know, maybe there's a difference there.' Others compared it to the controversy surrounding Warren's Native American heritage as well, years after it resurfaced when Donald Trump referred to the Democratic senator as 'Pocahontas' during a 2017 ceremony at the White House.
Warren's ancestry came into question in 2012, when she was a candidate trying to unseat then-Sen. Scott Brown. At the time, the former Harvard professor claimed to be part Cherokee and Delaware Indian - without a shred of evidence. Brown - and many others - subsequently accused her of claiming to be a descendant of American Indians to advance her career in academia. Warren denied it. 'Let me be clear. I never asked for, never got any benefit because of my heritage,' Warren said in a 2012 TV rebuttal ad at the time.
When pressed by the Times, he said that aside from those forms, he could not recall another time where he identified as black or African-American. He also said he doesn't identify as either race he checked, and that he sees himself as 'an American who was born in Africa.' The information comes from a leaked database of past Columbia applications laid uncovered in a recent hack.
It also comes as Mamdani is set to face off with incumbent Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Silwa, and reportedly Andrew Cuomo - this time as an independent - in November, following a whirlwind campaign that saw him upset the latter last month. His promises to freeze rents, streamline transportation, and strengthen the city's social services has been panned by some as realistic.
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Sky News
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The NWS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr Schumer's letter but earlier defended its forecasting and emergency management. Ms Leavitt has told reporters that claims Mr Trump was responsible for any issues responding to the flash floods were "depraved and despicable". "It is not [a political game], it is a national tragedy," she said. The press secretary also claimed, in relation to some NWS offices being reportedly understaffed, that one place actually had "too many people". "Any person who has deliberately lied about the facts around the catastrophic event, you should be deeply ashamed," she said. She also said that Mr Trump was going to visit Texas "later in the week". Previously, Mr Trump said it was likely he would visit on Friday. Ms Leavitt was speaking after Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said on Monday that 75 bodies had been recovered from the area, which is seven more than the previous figure for the county. 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The Guardian
43 minutes ago
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‘Don't forget': mural brings attention to the January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump
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Buehler recounts how the defacement of the Wall of Lies by the far-right group Proud Boys galvanised the community, leading them to cut out the Proud Boys graffiti and spraypainted hearts all over it and raise money for a bigger mural. 'How are we going to survive the next four years? This runs through your head. Then what can I do? Community gives you courage. Marching in those parades gives you courage to fight against this. We're using this symbolic art piece to rally around a different flag.' The Wall of Shame – installed at the same location as the Wall of Lies – was provoked by Trump's decision on his first day back in office to grant clemency to about 1,500 individuals charged or convicted in connection with the January 6 insurrection, including people found guilty of assaulting police officers. Democrats called the move an affront to justice and democracy. 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He's turned the White House into a car dealership showroom with Tesla. And now he's starting a war [against Iran] without the authorisation of Congress. I guess we're trying to highlight that was the first thing. Don't forget that one: the pardon of the rioters. That was his first act of trying to emulate Putin and become an authoritarian leader.' Trump has been waging war on reality for a decade, conjuring a mirror world in which up is down and black is white. He has described the January 6 rioters as patriots and martyrs while dismissing those who protested against immigration enforcement raids in LA as 'insurrectionists'. When he faced criminal investigations he blamed the 'weaponisation' of the justice department, while any negative media coverage is routinely branded 'fake news'. Rob Prichard of Radio Free Brooklyn, who initially suggested that Buehler tackle the January 6 pardons, finds something Orwellian in Trump's attempts to rewrite history and dominate the cultural space. The president has seized control of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and ordered the removal of so-called 'improper, divisive or anti-American ideology' from Smithsonian Institution museums, forcing the resignation of the director of its National Portrait Gallery. Speaking from Park Slope, Brooklyn, Prichard, 69, says via Zoom: 'As a nation we are as close to autocracy as we've ever been. It seems like fascism is basically a war on consensus reality and we need to put a pin in those points where it's so obvious that it's not true. 'Trump's entire political career is predicated on a demonstrable lie, saying Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and because we never called him out on it properly in the first place, it just continues. If you can get away with it you play the hand again. Steve Bannon [a rightwing podcast and former Trump adviser] is flooding the zone. We need to flood the zone too but with the truth.' The colour-coding of the mural is intentional, designed to reclaim a national symbol from what the creators perceive as its co-option by Trump supporters. Prichard adds: 'We're not ceding the red, white and blue. We claim it and we claim the true meaning of representative democracy. 'I have hope because for one thing, autocracy and fascism is predicated on violence and the threat of violence. Both violence and the threat of violence are untenable. They can't be. You just can't maintain them forever and it has to break. The fever has to break eventually and either there's complete submission or we liberate ourselves. I don't see complete submission. That's part of our DNA.' Prichard does not use words such as fascist lightly. His 91-year-old mother is German and was forced to join Hitler's youth movement when she was seven years old. 'She remembers it. She is deathly afraid of Trump. If she were 10 years younger, she would probably move to Germany permanently.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
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The Trump administration pushed out a university president – its latest bid to close the American mind
Under pressure from the Trump administration, the University of Virginia's president of nearly seven years, James Ryan, stepped down on Friday, declaring that while he was committed to the university and inclined to fight, he could not in good conscience push back just to save his job. The Department of Justice demanded that Ryan resign in order to resolve an investigation into whether UVA had sufficiently complied with Donald Trump's orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion. UVA dissolved its DEI office in March, though Trump's lackeys claim the university didn't go far enough in rooting out DEI. This is the first time the Trump regime has pushed for the resignation of a university official. It's unlikely to be the last. On Monday, the Trump regime said Harvard University had violated federal civil rights law over the treatment of Jewish students on campus. On Tuesday, the regime released $175m in previously frozen federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, after the school agreed to bar transgender athletes from women's teams and delete the swimmer Lia Thomas's records. Let's be clear: DEI, antisemitism and transgender athletes are not the real reasons for these attacks on higher education. They're excuses to give the Trump regime power over America's colleges and universities. Why do Trump and his lackeys want this power? They're following Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's playbook for creating an 'illiberal democracy' – an authoritarian state masquerading as a democracy. The playbook goes like this: First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you. Check. Next, intimidate legislators by warning that if they don't bend to your wishes, you'll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.) Check. Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with. Check in process. Then focus on independent sources of information. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews. Check. Then go after the universities. Crapping on higher education is also good politics, as demonstrated by the congresswoman Elise Stefanik (Harvard 2006) who browbeat the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT over their responses to student protests against Israel's bombardment of Gaza, leading to several of them being fired. It's good politics, because many of the 60% of adult Americans who lack college degrees are stuck in lousy jobs. Many resent the college-educated, who lord it over them economically and culturally. But behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism. JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has called university professors 'the enemy' and suggested using Orbán's method for ending 'leftwing domination' of universities. Vance laid it all out on CBS's Face the Nation on 19 May 2024: Universities are controlled by leftwing foundations. They're not controlled by the American taxpayer and yet the American taxpayer is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to these universities every single year. I'm not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orbán has ever done [but] I do think that he's made some smart decisions there that we could learn from. His way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they're much more open to conservative ideas.' Yet what, exactly, constitutes a 'conservative idea?' That dictatorship is preferable to democracy? That white Christian nationalism is better than tolerance and openness? That social Darwinism is superior to human decency? The claim that higher education must be more open to such 'conservative ideas' is dangerous drivel. So what's the real, underlying reason for the Trump regime's attack on education? Not incidentally, that attack extends to grade school. Trump's education department announced on Tuesday it's withholding $6.8bn in funding for schools, and Trump has promised to dismantle the department. Why? Because the greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. That's why enslavers prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. Fascists burn books. Tyrants close universities. In their quest to destroy democracy, Trump, Vance and their cronies are intent on shutting the American mind. Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at
