The Left’s latest darling, Zohran Mamdani, is ensnared in a web of their own making. Call it kismet. Actually, call it double-jeopardy, because Mamdani and the Left are more trapped in their weft and warp of race and gender definitions and privileges than they realize.
Thanks to his inane policies and inflammatory statements, New York City Democratic mayoral nominee and Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani makes more headlines than a corduroy pillow. His latest, though, comes from something he did on his college application to Columbia University back in 2009: he identified himself as “Black or African American” and as “Asian.” (RELATED: How Universities Created Zohran Mamdani)
Mamdani is not “Black or African American.” The closest he comes to either is that he was born in Uganda. Knowing himself to have been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Mamdani tried to put the lid back on: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.” Uh, huh. (RELATED: Beyond DEI: How a Top US University Became a Marxist Factory)
This is not the first time lefties have been caught trying to swipe cookies that they professed to be baking for others.
Years ago, Rachel Dolezal, head of the Spokane NAACP exposed for fraudulently claiming to be black. She is White.
For years and years, Elizabeth Warren claimed to be an American Indian. She then extended the story by trying to prove her claims with a DNA test, thereby provoking a firestorm of criticism from the Cherokee Nation, who said Warren could not swab her way into their culture.
To come back to the Mamdani episode: Why are we shocked?
As Dolezal and Warren demonstrate, such episodes happen at regular intervals. And the ones we know are just the high-profile cases where the culprits were caught. Does anyone doubt that there aren’t more? That countless boxes have been checked, on innumerable forms, but their underlying fraud has not been discovered?
Are we shocked that the Left are hypocrites? Really? America gets a daily dousing of this from a fire hose at full pressure.
Such quota-over-quality plays are specifically designed to get them in and exclude anyone who doesn’t think like they do.
That the Left backs an explicitly racist criterion for qualification and then seeks to trade on it? Setting up government systems that favor them is what they do. Why would we expect them to go to the trouble of setting up a system and excluding themselves from it? The Left is all about excluding others, not themselves. As evidence, look at their calls for inclusivity and diversity. It is clear who they want to exclude — and it’s not them. Such quota-over-quality plays are specifically designed to get them in and exclude anyone who doesn’t think like they do.
Having two sets of rules (one for thee and one for me) is what the Left does.
The one truly notable aspect of Mamdani’s attempted trade on racism is that his attempt came before the Left’s transgender craze. That matters. Why now, when a person can change their sex at definitional will, and everyone must accept it, can they not also change their race by simply saying they identify as one that is not the one given at birth?
The crux of transgenderism is that people decide for themselves who they are and that the rest of society must acquiesce.
Women are not allowed to be outraged over men identifying as women. They are not allowed to be indignant if these biological men compete against them in women’s sports. And they are not allowed to feel it unfair if this is done at any point on the age spectrum — schoolgirls, high school and college students, and apparently any woman at any point in life. At any time, people can cross the biological border at will. It’s a “get out of jail free” card.
Why can members of a racial group then be outraged about someone claiming to be of their race when they are not allowed to be offended at someone claiming to be their gender?
Race is a much narrower gap to clear. Two different genders of two different races can produce a mixed-race child. Mixed-race children are common. Not so, mixed gender. Two biological males or two biological females, left to their own devices, cannot produce offspring regardless of how they identify.
Yet the impossibility of bucking gender’s biological immutability is ignored by the Left. In fact, it is a tenet of faith and practice — a shibboleth that determines whether one belongs. However, the absolute possibility of race’s immutability (after all, everyone has a rather random gene pool at this point — the idea that there is someone with absolutely 100 percent homogeneous racial makeup is a stretch) is defended as a hill to die on.
The Left has created this exquisite problem for itself. Warped and wrapped like intertwined ribbons of DNA, this is who they are: a tribe so lost in itself that they cannot define what a woman and a man are, yet adamant that they can define race.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!” The Left has woven theirs from ideological whole cloth, and now, one of their Democratic socialist darlings is caught in it. And he, and they, are even more entwined in it than they realize.
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READ MORE from J.T. Young:
From Iran to Immigration: Experts Wrong Again
Broken Border Enforcement and Broken Windows Policing
Democrats Talk Only to Themselves on Immigration
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing, and has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
