Laundering white nationalists
By 
Elizabeth Lopatto on what the New York Times was doing while the Wall Street Journal was getting scoops about the incumbent president:
The ultimate source for The New York Times’ story about Zohran Mamdani’s college application is an open secret. It’s an anime-loving neo-Nazi whose hobbies include furry drawings, posting fan art of a video game character, and hacking universities. On X, the alleged hacker is followed by New York Times freelancer Benjamin Ryan, who was the first byline on the Mamdani story.
The alleged hacker uses an online handle that is a racial slur, so I will be referring to them as the Anime Nazi; they have taken credit for five hacks of universities. Three of them, as first reported by Bloomberg, targeted the University of Minnesota, New York University, and Columbia University.
Social media reviewed by The Verge — including X and fediverse accounts — shows a series of reposts of statements and images such as swastikas, “miss u hitler,” and “minorities have no place in our world.” The Anime Nazi themselves posted such things as “I am racist,” “I am violently racist toward black people,” and a picture of a unicorn sitting on a swastika.
On a post from November 5th, 2024, when then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ X account was encouraging people to vote, the alleged hacker’s account replied, “You will be executed.” The next post after that was “kill them all please, mr president.” When another X account asked the Anime Nazi if they were concerned about law enforcement, they replied with a quote of a post from President Donald Trump: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
The Anime Nazi appears to have been specifically targeting universities, often for admissions data. They claim to have stolen data from millions of people. The data include Social Security numbers, addresses, family members’ information, and citizenship status. Perhaps significantly, that information also includes self-reported race — meaning that someone who is, in their own words, “violently racist toward black people.”
If what is uncovered in a hack is newsworthy enough it might be worth it irrespective of the motivations of the hackers and middlepersons, but needless to say that is not remotely the case here.
Also, if you’re going to reward a privacy violator with bad motives you at least owe your readers transparency. Instead, they were blandly described as people Just Asking Questions about affirmative action:
As a reminder, this was NYT's framing of the political motivations of the hacker. Personally, I do not think that this is the most relevant way to frame the "politics" of a hacker who uses a slur as a username, calls themselves "violently racist," and RTs swastikas. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/n…
[image or embed]— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong.bsky.social) Jul 21, 2025 at 7:58 AM
The process and the story here are both ugly.