Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York state assemblyman, shocked the political world last month with a primary win over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his position in 2021 after several women accused him of sexual harassment.

The Times noted that on the campaign trail, Mamdani touted his Muslim faith and South Asian ancestry. He was born in Uganda in 1991 and moved with his parents to South Africa five years later. Two years later, the family moved to New York.

::: spoiler The Times report cited a figure who goes by the name Crémieux on X and Substack:

• Last month’s cyberattack appears to have been carried out in order to see if Columbia was still using race-conscious affirmative action in its admission policies after the Supreme Court effectively barred the practice in 2023.
• 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.
  :::

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.

::: spoiler 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.
  :::

New York Times Grants Race Science Enthusiast Anonymity in Mamdani Hit Piece

The paper granted the source of the hacked documents anonymity. That person is a known enthusiast of race science.

^{Michael Luciano (Mediaite)}

Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has proposed an entry ban for people from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa. It says this would help stop Germany’s practice of sending migrants who have illegally crossed the border back to Poland.

The proposal comes amid renewed debate over how to tackle migration, with the Polish government on Tuesday announcing the reintroduction of controls on Poland’s borders with Germany and Lithuania in an effort to prevent the “uncontrolled flow of migrants”.

After Prime Minister Donald Tusk had announced the border controls, the head of PiS’s parliamentary caucus, Mariusz Błaszczak, said that the government’s actions were “too little, too late”.

“This crisis has been going on for months,” he continued. “This issue requires far-reaching action.”

Błaszczak said that PiS would submit a bill to parliament introducing a temporary ban on entry to Poland for third-country nationals from “specific countries outside Europe…whose citizens illegally cross borders”.

Previously, on Monday, PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński had called for an “immediate ban on entry to the territory of Poland for people from the Middle East and North Africa”.

PiS has not yet specified which Middle Eastern and African countries would be included in its proposed ban. It says they would be selected based on analysis of data showing which nationalities most often cross borders illegally or are transferred to Poland from Germany.

A government information campaign discouraging people from trying to illegally enter Poland was recently launched in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt, countries from which Poland has identified the largest numbers of people crossing the border from Belarus.

Since 2021, tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers – mainly from Asia and Africa – have tried to enter Poland from Belarus, with the encouragement and assistance of the Belarusian authorities.

In response, Poland has heavily fortified its eastern border with physical barriers and electronic monitoring. The government also recently banned asylum claims by people crossing from Belarus. Those measures have led to a dramatic decline in the numbers entering via that route.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Błaszczak made clear, however, that PiS’s proposed entry ban was designed to address the issue that has recently caused most controversy, which is Germany’s policy of sending back to Poland thousands of migrants who crossed the Polish-German border illegally.

Many of those sent back are Ukrainians. Others are non-Europeans, often from Asia and Africa, who have either claimed asylum in Poland – and therefore must remain there while their applications are processed – or have simply passed through it after entering the EU irregularly.

“After the introduction of this [proposed] law, Polish border guards will be able to prevent citizens of these countries from entering our territory,” said Błaszczak. “So those who are today being transferred from Germany by the German authorities, or who are trying to cross from Germany to the Polish side, will not be able to do so.”

The migrant returns carried out by Germany take place under a combination of EU regulations, bilateral agreements with Poland, and the border controls that Berlin reintroduced in 2023. Earlier this year, Tusk declared that Poland may stop adhering to such agreements.

However, some Poles have sought to take matters into their own hands, organising self-declared “citizen patrols” – some of them hundreds strong – at the German border to monitor and prevent migrant returns.

Błaszczak said that PiS politicians will be visiting the German border to make clear that “we support the border defence movement”, which he described as “Polish patriots who took matters into their own hands when Donald Tusk’s state abdicated [its responsibilities]”.

He also pledged that the party “will provide support to those who are persecuted by the current authorities of our country” for undertaking such actions, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Earlier this week, Tusk and interior minister Tomasz Siemoniak criticised the actions of the citizen patrols, saying that they are disrupting the work of border officers and spreading false claims about the number and types of migrants being transferred by Germany.

https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/07/02/polish-opposition-proposes-entry-ban-for-migrants-from-middle-east-and-africa/

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_salad

The salad was created on July 4, 1924, by Caesar Cardini at Caesar's in Tijuana, Mexico, when the kitchen was overwhelmed and short on ingredients. It was originally prepared tableside, and it is still prepared tableside at the original venue.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/07/02/austerity-linked-to-over-1-million-preventable-deaths-in-eu/

https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/05/15/new-housing-ministers-comments-on-maintaining-price-of-homes-are-politically-mathematically-off-base-experts/

CNN data guru Harry Enten broke down the latest polling in the Democratic Party on views toward Israel and the Palestinians on Wednesday and marveled at the massive shift in attitudes, declaring he’s “rarely” seen anything like it in his many years of looking at polling data.

Enten spoke to anchor Kate Bolduan in the context of Zohran Mamdani’s sweeping victory over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary last week.

"What are we talking about here? All right, who do Democrats sympathize more with: Israelis or Palestinians? In 2017, the Democratic Party was a pro-Israeli party. Look at this. They sympathized with the Israelis by 13 points—more with the Israelis than the Palestinians. But look at this sea change. Now, Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians by 43 points.Oh my God! That is a change in the margin of 56 points over the course of just eight years. So all of a sudden, it’s the pro-Palestinian position that actually reigns supreme in Democratic politics, not the Israeli position. And that is part of the reason why Mamdani was able to do so well in this primary, because those attacks over Israel, simply put, did not ring true for Democrats"

‘Oh My God!’ CNN’s Data Guru Stunned By Democrats’ 70-Point Shift on Israel

"They sympathize with the Palestinians by 57 points. That is an over 70-point shift in the margin in just a matter of eight years!”

^{Alex Griffing (Mediaite)}