Mother Jones illustration; X.com
Jordan Lasker, an X user who goes by the name Crémieux, recently made news by providing the New York Times with hacked data that showed New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his undergraduate application to Columbia University. While Lasker quickly celebrated his time in the spotlight, critics were appalled that the Times was relying on a source they described as a “eugenicist.”
But Lasker, according to interviews with people who know him, appears to have a more worrisome history than the current backlash might suggest.
A Reddit account named Faliceer, which posted highly specific biographical details that overlapped with Lasker’s offline life and which a childhood friend of Lasker’s believes he was behind, wrote in 2016, “I actually am a Jewish White Supremacist Nazi.” The Reddit comment, which has not been previously reported, is one of thousands of now-deleted posts from the Faliceer account obtained by Mother Jones in February. In other posts written between 2014 and 2016, Faliceer endorses Nazism, eugenics, and racism. He wishes happy birthday to Adolf Hitler; says, “I support eugenics”; and uses a racial slur when saying those who are attracted to Black people should kill themselves.
“He’s a pathological liar,” said a person who knew Lasker in college.
“Low IQ savages have NOTHING to contribute to the West,” Faliceer wrote in a representative 2016 post. “If you want them to degenerate anyone’s heritage don’t make it someone else – fuck yourself up. Go have kids with a n—-r but do not push your race traitor propagandism on the masses.”
In the comments, the account used the name Jordan on one occasion, made clear that Lasker was a family surname, and posted an internet IP address associated with Lasker’s hometown of Macon, Georgia. There are at least two websites on which a “Jordan Lasker” has used the Faliceer handle. Additionally, a “Zlatan Lasker🇩🇪” of Atlanta, Georgia, has used the Faliceer handle on Chess.com. (On Reddit, Faliceer claimed the German Jewish chess grandmaster Emanuel Lasker was one of his ancestors.)
Lasker’s childhood friend also told Mother Jones that Lasker, who is now 29, according to public records, used the handle Faliceer while playing video games online. After Lasker’s Facebook posts seemed to take a strange turn in college, the friend searched to see if Lasker was writing anything online as Faliceer. They came across the Reddit account and concluded that their old friend was posting “race science” as Faliceer. (Mother Jones obtained the Reddit posts independently of the friend.)
Numerous personal details shared by the Faliceer account also correspond with Lasker’s own biography. Both became Eagle Scouts around the same time, shared an interest in 5k road races in Macon, and were members of Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi), a Jewish fraternity, during the 2014-2015 academic year. (Lasker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Lasker could easily be ignored during the period that Faliceer was posting. That is no longer the case. On Substack, Crémieux has more than 23,000 subscribers—good enough for 14th in the science category. On X, his account has more than 260,000 followers. One is Vice President JD Vance. Others are major figures in the right-wing tech world (Joe Lonsdale, Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Andreessen), or members of the current administration (FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, White House crypto and artificial intelligence “czar” David Sacks, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill).
Lasker’s ties to the current administration are unclear. He claimed last month to be a friend of O’Neill’s, who used to be the chief executive officer for the foundation of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. And a post from February indicated inside knowledge about the administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE. During that time, Musk was frequently amplifying Crémieux’s posts on X.
The New York Times story about Mamdani’s 2009 application to Columbia was quickly seized on by Mamdani’s detractors, who argued that he was trying to take advantage of affirmative action for Black applicants. Mamdani has said he was trying to capture the complexity of his identity as someone who was born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent.
An early version of the Times article stated that the hacked application data was obtained via an “intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X and who is an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.” A later version of the article added that Crémieux “writes often about I.Q. and race.” The Times also agreed to withhold Crémieux’s real name, even though it was already publicly known. The Guardian reported in March that Lasker was behind the account.
Lasker has been cagey about his connection to Crémieux—even when on camera. During a recent in-studio interview, Charlie Kirk asked Lasker if he could identify him as Jordan. “Oh, Jay is probably better,” Lasker replied, appearing surprised to hear his real name. Kirk then asked his production team to “restart” because he wanted to “make sure I protect however you want to be presented.” (In keeping with Lasker’s request, a chyron identified Crémieux as “Jay Lasker.”)
These days, Lasker writes about a range of things as Crémieux such as weight loss drugs, probability markets, and data analysis. Since gaining a following on X, Lasker has called Holocaust deniers “some of the dumbest people around,” and has praised Adolphe Crémieux—the 19th-century French politician his account is named after—for promoting “classical liberal” principles. His account now appears to be popular with not only members of the tech right but also some liberals and self-styled rationalists.
But it is clear that he remains interested in race science. Following the Times story, the Atlantic published a piece by former Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland about Lasker under the headline “A Race-Science Blogger Goes Mainstream.” (Lasker wrote a detailed response on X containing his objections to the article in which he stated that he had “never supported racist policymatter, been hostile to members of any race for reasons of race, or anything that genuinely qualifies as racism.”)
Crémieux has also posted many times on X about Black people having lower IQs. In 2022, Lasker’s first article on Substack as Crémieux concluded with the claim that “whatever travails American Blacks suffered during slavery no longer matter for their socioeconomic attainment today.” Under his own name, Lasker has co-written papers with titles like: “Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis” and “Global ancestry and cognitive ability.” (The authors concluded in the latter that “European ancestry was a consistent predictor of cognitive ability, even after entering various controls into our models.”)
Another commonality between Lasker and the Faliceer account is a penchant for making outlandish claims about their relationships to Judaism. Specifically, the account claimed at different points to be an “atheist Jew” who was proficient in German, Yiddish, and Ladino; an Israeli with “a place in Eilat”; and “58% Ashkenazi.” (The claim about being majority Ashkenazi would have had a clear benefit for Faliceer, who argued the group has a genetic advantage when it comes to IQ.)
Despite the many claims about his Jewish identity, Faliceer self-identified as a Nazi. “I’m Jewish and a National Socialist,” Faliceer wrote. He claimed in 2016 that some of his own ancestors fit the same mold: “My family were considered to be Edeljude [noble Jews] because we were some of the first German nationalists and Hitler loved Germany so he declared us Aryan.”
Claims like these appear to have made Faliceer notorious on some parts of Reddit. In posts that are still available online, one Reddit user described Faliceer as “a ‘Jewish’ Nazi apologist,” a second user called out Faliceer for an alliterative post attacking a “Coalition of Kikes,” and a third user flagged a post from Faliceer that included the line: “Does this person not realize the huge negatives to racemixing or are they just ignorant?” (Faliceer posed the last question in a subreddit devoted to discussing the Gamergate online harassment campaign.)
Faliceer was also known to some members of the r/Judaism subreddit. As one user wrote about Faliceer’s posts on the notoriously racist r/European subreddit, “That user is probably the worst one on there. He actually claims to be Jewish.”
According to his childhood friend, Lasker was raised as a Christian and then appeared to convert to Judaism in college. The friend found out after seeing on Facebook that Lasker’s display name was in Hebrew and discovered he had joined a Jewish fraternity. A second person told Mother Jones that Lasker’s parents are not Jewish and are of a Christian background.
A person who knew Lasker in college said that Lasker rushed for AEPi wearing a kippah, adopted a Hebrew pronunciation of his first name, and would try to go “toe to toe” about his knowledge of the Torah with fellow members of the Jewish fraternity. “He would try to out-Jew some of the guys,” the person explained. They added that Lasker is a “pathological liar” and doubt that he ever formally converted to Judaism.
The childhood friend said that Lasker always wanted to be the “smartest person in the room” and that he had a reputation for being a “liar.” That appears to have included Lasker falsely telling people that he got what they considered to be a suspiciously high SAT score. “One of my friends asked for proof and [Lasker] just showed an image that looked like it had probably been saved from the internet,” the childhood friend explained.
According to the friend, Lasker also told people that he had been admitted to Georgia Tech, the most competitive public school in the state. They added that the story fell apart when someone from their high school ended up in a freshman seminar with Lasker at another school, Georgia Southern.
Lasker eventually moved on to a second college before ultimately graduating from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in southern Georgia. He then appears to have enrolled in a PhD program at Texas Tech. It is unclear whether he graduated or if he is still affiliated with the university. An assistant vice president at Texas Tech told Mother Jones that in “accordance with federal privacy law, we are unable to provide any information regarding the referenced individual.”
Offline, Lasker appears to still be making false claims about his relationship to Judaism. Two people told Mother Jones that Lasker, at recent in-person events, has claimed to have been raised Jewish.
