By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, July 08, 2025
On Thursday night, just as we were heading into the
holiday weekend, the New York Times broke the biggest news of the month: It turns out that I got a far better score on my SATs than New York City
Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Okay, maybe that wasn’t your
primary takeaway from the Times’ revelation that a young Mamdani had
applied to (and been rejected by) Columbia University as a
“black/African-American,” but given that it won’t have any effect on his likely
victorious campaign, it’s worth savoring the fact that the man got dinged by a school
where his father has tenure as a professor.
Last week I warned you that Mamdani was a communist. This
week I am pleased to soak in my own private little kulturkampf and confirm to
you that on top of that, he is also a midwit fraud who played cheap race games
on his college applications. (For those
who feared that a kid named “Zohran Kwame Mamdani” might be trying to juke the
system in a world driven by affirmative action, worry not: The Times stipulates
that on his applications, he made sure to clarify that he was “Ugandan.” You
know, just in case you got the wrong impression.) The hollow cynicism of it all
— from a man whose subsequent public life has been constructed around an
activist obsession with race, oppression, and anti-colonialism — makes for one
of the finest “just so” stories in recent progressive politics.
Others at National Review have already discussed
the most salient aspects of this mini-scandal: the complete
incuriosity of the media about Mamdani’s past statements
up until this point and the online left’s immediate (yet entirely predictable)
impulse to try and make this a story about the New York Times —
their sourcing, their motives, and their unpardonable blasphemy in daring to
report on a story that embarrasses their progressive god. Those are all
fascinating angles — particularly the pressure campaign on the Times, a
classic example of how progressives “work the refs” — but permit me a more
personal one.
Because I knew Zohran Mamdani when I was in
college. No, I don’t mean him specifically, but even a decade before Mamdani
submitted his college applications posing as a black man “for reasons,” I knew
a girl in my own class who snuck her way in along similar lines. (Think of it
as a variation on the “Elon Musk claims to be African” joke.) And I can only
wonder at the shudder of recognition that ran through New York Times readers
— most of them well-educated and competitive urban sophisticates — as they read
about Mamdani’s manipulation of the process. Because it’s a dark ritual many of
us are painfully familiar with.
And this is why the left’s intelligentsia is freaking out
right now about this. It won’t sway the election. But it stings in a
very personal way. Older readers may not fully appreciate how cutthroat the
college-admissions process has become over the last quarter-century. Most every
middle-class kid of my era or younger can summon instant and deeply unpleasant
memories of playing “the admissions game” to get into a reasonably good
college. It was your ticket to a life of opportunity, prestige, social networks
. . . if you could catch the eye of an admissions committee. Even in my
relatively bucolic era of 1997, every ambitious kid who had talked to an honest
high school counselor understood the new racial calculus, at least vaguely: You
had a better shot of getting into the Ivies and other top schools if you were
from a favored ethnic category.
“South Asian” was emphatically not one of them, something
I well recall my Desi friends endlessly and justifiably griping about. I
remember my mother jokingly suggesting I mark down “Native American” on my
applications to get a leg up over the rest of my fellow young strivers. “Why
not?” she said. “I’m from Missouri — everybody pretends they’re 1/64th Indian!”
Little did I know that, at the very moment my mom said this, Elizabeth Warren
was out there working the same grift with far more success. (Fortune favors the
bold, I suppose.)
Perhaps there is a secondary story to be told here, one
about Mamdani’s reflexive need — as the child of ultra-wealthy, cosmopolitan
South Asian Marxists — to identify with the Oppressed Other, up to the point of
impersonating them on his college applications. It is worth noting that Mamdani
became an African Studies major. But he knew full well when he checked that box
that he was neither black nor “African-American” — he wasn’t even American yet
for that matter. (Mamdani received citizenship only in 2018.) “Other” was
always available as an option.
He chose to prevaricate regardless, as someone with such
advantages in life (yet only middling test scores) might feel the need to. His
weakness is nothing new to me, and all the more contemptible for that. He is
yet another one of the many people I have met in life who insist on a racial
spoils system for entrance into the college elite, while gleefully gaming it in
every possible way when nobody is looking.
Elon Musk Walks Off to Look for America
A brief note on the further doings of Elon Musk, whose
trajectory through the Trump administration — first as DOGEfather, now as
apostate — is beginning to resemble a SpaceX rocket in “rapid
unscheduled disassembly.” When last we discussed Musk, it was to suggest
that Trump had successfully managed to squelch what threatened to become a shooting war
between his administration and the disgruntled entrepreneur, smarting from cuts
to EV subsidies and the out-of-control spending in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful
Bill.” That disaffection may have publicly quieted, but it did not die. Musk announced this weekend that he is forming a new political
party, the “America Party,” to act as a theoretical spoiler in upcoming
elections.
I am not sure what to make of it. (Neither is Donald
Trump, if his unusually measured and diplomatic response — for him — is anything to go by.) Perhaps Elon
Musk thinks he can be a powerbroker in electoral politics. But I’m not sure how
big he thinks the coalition for his kind of politics is. He’s no candidate
himself — Musk, as a naturalized citizen, is ineligible to run for president —
and of what interest would a bunch of nobodies running on his ideas or ticket
be?
I doubt his money, celebrity, or policy platform would
even be enough to make him or his party the difference in close races. Let’s
face it: Elon Musk isn’t exactly Nigel Farage when it comes to having either
the common touch or an agenda capable of inspiring anything more than a bunch
of Silicon Valley types and those who share their intellectual pretenses. This
is either a bluff or a folly.
It does seem like a great way to pay for political
consultants’ summer homes, though. (I hear John Weaver is looking for work.)
The Epstein Files Were Always a Mirage
In January 1978, at the Sex Pistols’ final-ever
performance during their brief original run, Johnny Rotten dropped a line for
the ages. Disgusted by the suffocating hype surrounding his band and ready to
quit, he sang half-heartedly for under an hour and then wrapped the night’s
events by leaving a bemused and dissatisfied audience without an encore, but
with a
grand imponderable instead: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
That naturally puts me in mind of Attorney General Pam
Bondi. You remember Bondi, right? Bondi — fresh from obscurity as a former
Florida AG and registered lobbyist for the nation of Qatar — was no doubt eager
to curry favor with Trump’s MAGA base after being chosen to fill the mephitic
shoes of Matt Gaetz as an understudy. To that end, she promised the world that
her first order of business, once sworn in, would be to get to the bottom of
the so-called Epstein Files. At one point in February, she even claimed to have Epstein’s client list “sitting on
my desk waiting for review.” (For those who don’t remember who Jeffrey Epstein
is, or what that “client list” is purported to contain, then this quick
interview will catch you up.)
This led directly to the gloriously
stupid moment in late February when Team MAGA’s biggest social media
influencers made a pilgrimage to the White House at Bondi’s behest, to stand
outside on the driveway waving binders containing the nonexistent “Epstein Files.” Once some of MAGA’s more
demanding adherents, such as Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, opened those
binders, they found little better than a glorified phone book — a long-known
personal rolodex, not a client list. No surprise names, no revelations, nothing.
Three months after that, FBI Director Kash Patel and
Deputy Director Dan Bongino publicly announced that, after reviewing all available
surveillance video and investigative files, they had concluded with complete
certainty that Epstein really did kill himself. The more
conspiratorially minded quarters of MAGA World immediately began to grumble
about their refusal to confirm a beloved theory.
And now, over the weekend, Attorney General Bondi has
finally completed the full walkback, or rather had her staffers do it for her.
The Department of Justice released
a memorandum announcing that, on second thought, there’s nothing to see here, move along:
“This systematic review revealed no
incriminating ‘client list,’” the memo said. “There was also no credible
evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his
actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation
against uncharged third parties.”
“No further disclosure would be
appropriate or warranted,” the memo continued, adding that the work of the
Justice Department and the F.B.I. on the records had been thorough.
Needless to say, I could have told you all of this long
ago — and in fact as it turns out, I did. I still maintain that it is likely that Epstein had
noteworthy connections to various international intelligence services, and I
suspect that a great deal is left unsaid hiding behind the sentence “No further
disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” I am perfectly fine with this,
as a matter of simple tradecraft, and I consider anyone who isn’t to be an
unserious person. (I reiterate what I said there: If you ever do see
something like that emerge from the Epstein files, then that only means that
somebody really screwed up.)
So I’ve been wanting to ask that same question as Johnny
Rotten’s to all the people who foolishly believed there was a pot of gold
hiding at the end of this rainbow: Do you feel cheated? Do you
understand now that you were taken for a ride? Do you realize it was always
going to end this way? And have you learned a single thing from this?
No comments:
Post a Comment