The Times revises its policy about whether to publish stories based on hacked materials provided by ratfuckers again

The day that Republicans passed legislation to strip 17 million people of their healthcare, the Paper of Record announced a SCOOP:

Even on its face, this is a massive nothingburger — someone with Indian parents born in Uganda accurately filled out an application form. But wait, there’s more [no link obviously]:

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

So his form wasn’t just technically accurate, he clarified what “African-American” meant!

But wait, it’s even more ridiculous. The only conceivable reason for this story to exist is to play on paranoid fears that citing a minority racial or ethnic background is some kind of nuclear trump card in the admissions process. But Mamdani didn’t get accepted to Columbia. And didn’t get accepted even though his father is a famous professor there! This doesn’t even rise to the level of being a “nothingburger.” And there are three bylines on this non-story somehow.

But wait again. The Times got Mamdani’s information because Columbia was illegally hacked. The Times was ome of the many outlets that after an orgy of non-stories from hacked inboxes in 2016 declined to publish information hacked from the Trump campaign in 2024. So apparently the standards have been silently revised yet again, in every case to the disadvantage of a Democratic candidate. Amazing coincidence.

Oh, and speaking of paranoid racial concerns, who was the middleman who passed on the hacked information?

While Mr. Mamdani was not a target of the hack, the information about him was included in a database of millions of student applications to Columbia going back decades. The data was shared with The Times by an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X. He provided the data under condition of anonymity, although his identity has been made public elsewhere. He is an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.

“Writes often about I.Q. and race” is…one way of putting it. And I have no idea why they would grant him anonymity.

This, on other words, is a pure trip to the 2016 nostalgia file. Times reporter(s) got sent on a snipe hunt by a sketchy, self-interested reactionary source, and then rather than admitting that they came up with nothing and were being used hyped up a bunch of trivia into a story framed just as the source would want it. This is another case where the decision to publish the story is a vastly more interesting story than the story itself. In particular, why Times reporters and editors are so willing to accept the bizarre framing of a race science creep would be a real story.