The New York Times gives cover to the white supremacist eugenicist Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux).

If you are my age you may remember Judith Miller.

In 2002 Miller was the New York Times reporter who served as a conduit for the CIA and State Department to place false information about non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on the pages of her newspaper.

The goal was to build public support for the war that was to come.

You can count on the New York Times.

The recent “leak” by the Times about Zohran Mamdani’s Columbia University application (he didn’t get in) was provided by white supremacist and eugenicist Jordan Lasker, aka Cremieux.

More about Lasker in a moment.

Here is an interesting tie-bit from New York Times’ history.

In a 1935 piece that appeared in the “paper of record” is an attack on New York’s progressive Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia for his socialist and “unrealistic” attempts to build a municipal power grid.

Raise your hand if this reads as amazingly familiar.

Here is more about the New York Times source, Jordan Lasker (Cremeiux).

From The Guardian, May of this year:

One of the speakers at the conference is billed under a social media alias, Cremieux, but the Guardian has corroborated that the account is apparently run by Jordan Lasker, a long-time proponent of eugenics.

The @cremieuxrecueil X account has been boosted or engaged with dozens of times by that platform’s proprietor, Elon Musk, often on the topic of falling birthrates.

On 27 November, Musk reposted a Cremieux comment on falling birthrates, adding: “With rare exception, all countries are trending towards population collapse.”

On 29 April, Cremieux posted: “Only about a third of the world even meets replacement rate fertility. This is the biggest problem of our time.” Musk responded: “Yes.”

Musk has also boosted or responded favorably to Cremieux posts on other rightwing hobby horses such as crime in Portland, Oregon, and allegations that Democrats had created loopholes in the asylum system.

Away from X, Cremieux runs a Substack also featuring posts on the supposed relationships between race and IQ. A prominently featured post there seeks to defend the argument that average national IQs vary by up to 40 points, with countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia at the high end and countries in the global south at the low end, and several African countries purportedly having average national IQs at a level that experts associate with mental impairment.

Those arguments, first made in a book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, are now so discredited that journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society and Psychological Science have retracted articles that relied on the data. In 2020, the scholarly European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association published a blanket condemnation of Lynn’s data alongside its code of conduct on its website, writing: “Any conclusions drawn from these data are both untenable, and likely to give rise to racist conclusions.”

Lynn, whose work Cremieux seeks to defend in the post, was a self-described scientific racist, and is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists”.

Until his death in 2023, Lynn was a key figure in organized scientific racism. He served on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funded “leading Anglo-American race scientists” for decades. He was editor of Mankind Quarterly, a long-standing “pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality”. He held a position on the advisory board of the Occidental Quarterly, a key platform for far-right intellectuals to express pseudo-scientific antisemitic views. He also presented at the American Renaissance conference, a white nationalist gathering where in 2002 he claimed higher rates of psychopathy and psychopathic behavior existed among Black populations compared to others.

Jordan Lasker has also sought to rehabilitate and employ Lynn’s work in papers published under his own name, perhaps most controversially in a co-written paper, Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. One of his co-authors, Bryan Pesta, was later dismissed from his tenured professorship at Cleveland State University over the use of National Institutes of Health data in the paper.

Last October, the Guardian reported that Pesta had joined a video call with a network of race-science researchers who claimed to have “under the table” access to sensitive genetic data at the UK Biobank. Another of Lasker’s co-authors on Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability, Emil Kirkegaard, was the host of that video call.

Kirkegaard is a self-described eugenicist, explicitly advocates “race science”, and has credentialled himself as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization headed by Richard Lynn until his death.