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Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are going to make a lot of money from their new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Some people find this aggravating, and for good reason. The vast majority of Americans (86 percent as of February 2024) used common sense to arrive at the correct conclusion long before the 81-year-old president shuffled on stage and bragged about beating Medicare. Biden was cognitively and physically unfit to serve another term in office. No shit. He was arguably unfit to serve at all. The scandal played out in plain sight, fueled by Democrats and mainstream journalists doing what they do best: scolding the American people for having the wrong opinions.

"Our only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023–2024," the authors write in the introduction. It's a carefully worded admission that their goal is not to provide a full account of the cover-up of Biden's decline, because that would involve a thorough examination of how mainstream journalists, who don't officially work "in the White House" or on behalf of Democratic campaigns (but often in practice), helped perpetuate the lies.

Original Sin is an illuminating and often infuriating exposé. It's packed with damning accounts from (mostly anonymous) Democratic sources who all waited until after the election to stop lying. Numerous villains are identified: Biden himself, his family, his inner circle, and the Democratic establishment. Meanwhile, the reporters who failed to expose the scandal when the stakes were higher are generally portrayed as sympathetic, well-meaning professionals with poor bullshit detectors.

"Many reporters took the White House denials at face value," the authors write. Yes, we know. But why? Are journalists just lazy? Incompetent? Was there some other reason so many of them were so willing to parrot Democratic talking points that defied credulity? While promoting the book last week, Thompson explained that even the people orchestrating the cover-up were shocked at how easy it was to manipulate the self-anointed "guardians of democracy" in the press. "We were sort of amazed at some of the stuff we were able to spin reporters on," the source said. "You guys should not have believed us so easily." This quote does not appear in the book. It should have been the opening line.

The authors are relatively unsparing when conveying the extent to which the Democratic Party went along with the charade. They interviewed numerous (mostly anonymous) donors, politicians, and party leaders who witnessed Biden's decline, which often reminded them of relatives who suffered from Parkinson's or dementia. They kept their mouths shut because they didn't want to piss off "The Politburo," the inner circle of longtime Biden aides who were essentially running the country while the nominal president was "at best a senior member of the board." Everyone was afraid of Jill Biden, who ruthlessly snuffed out dissent with the help of her reviled henchman, Anthony Bernal, described by some as "the worst person they had ever met." An anonymous donor, who saw a feeble Biden fail to recognize a former longtime aide in August 2023, tries to rationalize their inaction. "We weren’t going to change that he was running, and no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win," the donor says. "So no one said anything. No one wanted to hear it, and if you said anything, you got your head chopped off."

Others shrugged it off because they didn't really care if Biden was fit to serve as long as he had a chance of beating Trump. "He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while," said a longtime Biden aide granted anonymity to admit fraud. Another motivating factor was the general agreement among party elites that Kamala Harris, the most likely alternative, was even less capable than a walking corpse. For some of the key players, it's unclear what they were thinking at the time, but they're still lying about it now. According to the authors, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who often sat in for Biden at meetings with foreign leaders and helped translate his incoherent ramblings when he did show up, claims to have "continually witnessed the president fully able to meet the moment" right up to the debate with Donald Trump. The contents of Original Sin (and common sense) suggest this is some ass-covering bullshit.

When it comes to the media's role in the cover-up, there is no serious attempt to explain why so many journalists were such willing participants. The motivations were likely the same: fear of losing access, fear of losing to Trump, and so on. There is one brief passage in the book about a mystery reporter from a "national news outlet" who scrapped a story on Biden's decline in 2024 after White House counselor Steve Ricchetti berated her over the phone. He threatened to wage a full-scale assault on her credibility, and the reporter caved. The authors clearly view Ricchetti, not the weak-kneed journalist, as the uniquely villainous main character in this episode, as if every White House didn't act this way. To paraphrase Donald Trump: When you're a Democrat, they let you do it. Most readers will wonder about all the other journalists who were bullied into submission, cowed from speaking truth to power, and why there's only one example in the book. (There are definitely more.)

It's maddening, really. Go back and watch the tape of Tapper insisting (without evidence) that Biden was mentally "sharp" in September 2023. We know now that in the preceding months, Biden had turned in a series of awful performances at fundraisers that left some donors worried that he "might not make it to Election Day." This was around the time, the authors reveal, that a handful of unnamed Biden aides became convinced the president was too braindead to serve another term. They started leaking stories about Biden's limitations to Thompson, who was one of the only mainstream journalists to report on Biden's decline. Was Thompson the only reporter these aides ever contacted? Almost certainly not. What happened? In June 2024, Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal published a story on Biden's decline. As promised, they were instantly denounced as right-wing fabulists—not just by White House aides and other Democrats. Many so-called journalists joined the pile on, including Tapper's former CNN colleague Oliver Darcy, who slammed the Journal's (accurate) reporting for "playing into a GOP-propelled narrative that the 81-year-old president lacks the fitness to hold the nation’s highest office."

Tapper's response to the Journal story was also in line with White House talking points. He echoed Darcy's concerns about the sourcing, while noting that the paper was owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. He interviewed one of Biden's most ardent supporters, Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), who slammed the media for obsessing over "minor slips" that were "typical of anyone who's keeping a demanding 14 hours a day schedule." That wasn't true, but Tapper quickly changed the subject to Taiwan. Last week, Megyn Kelly asked the CNN host why he didn't invite Linskey and Hughes on his show to discuss their reporting. Tapper's defensive response was positively Bidenesque. "I don't know what the booking situation was," he said. "Megyn, if we're gonna do this, let's just stick to the facts here, OK?" Ahead of the book's release, Tapper went out of his way to praise the "heroic reporters" and denounce the "smear campaign" against them. How gracious of him.

The Original Sin rollout feels like a coordinated public relations campaign, because it is. To prepare for the book launch, Tapper hired a crisis communications expert who advised his former colleague, Zoom masturbator Jeffrey Toobin, and his former boss, Jeff Zucker, who juiced the network's ratings by promoting charismatic scumbags such as Andrew Cuomo and Michael Avenatti before being forced out in 2022 for concealing a romantic relationship with a subordinate. It was a clever move, not only because Tapper is a notoriously thin-skinned hack, but because CNN and other mainstream outlets are struggling to overcome a very real (and self-inflicted) crisis. It was also a clever move for Tapper to team up with Thompson, who joined CNN as a paid contributor in August 2024. Unlike his coauthor, Thompson maintains a modest degree of credibility when it comes to (gently) criticizing the media's failure to expose the truth, which he did at the White House Correspondents' Dinner earlier this year. Just not in his best-selling book.

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Penguin Press, 352 pp., $32

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Posted by Patrick Parr

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Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens) continues to make news, whether in unabashed reverence by comedian Conan O’Brien as he accepted this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, or in defamation by countless school boards who have banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which uses the "n-word" 219 times.

Huck, first published in America in January 1885, also inspired Percival Everett’s wildly successful 2024 novel James, a POV re-pivot focusing on Huck’s black friend and escaped slave, Jim. In comedy and contemporary literature, Twain’s shadow remains a long one, 115 years after his death.

For years, biographer Ron Chernow has been wrestling with Twain’s shadow, and now his latest effort, Mark Twain, at well over 1,000 pages, leaves no archival stone unturned. As he has done with J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, Chernow, 76, takes five to eight years to complete his meticulously researched biographies.

But for Twain, I did have my doubts. If you’re familiar with Chernow’s work, you understand that banking and politics appear to be his comfort zones, and I wondered if his choice—a fierce satirist enamored with teenage girls—had been affected by how Twain had helped former president Grant with his memoirs. That story was laid out wonderfully by Mark Perry’s 2004 dual bio Grant and Twain.

When it comes to Twain, so much has already been documented. As Chernow notes in his acknowledgments, Twain, upon his death in 1910, left behind hundreds of unpublished manuscripts. The Mark Twain Papers over at Berkeley has already scoured through thousands of pages, organizing Twain’s autobiography into three volumes, and NewSouth Books saw a market large enough to publish Huck Finn without the n-word.

It's worth noting that, regarding Huck’s Jim as a character, Chernow is succinct: "Whatever the shortcomings of Twain’s presentation of Jim, the Black man emerges as the morally superior figure in the story, surrounded by an appalling menagerie of whites who cheat, scheme, lie, and kill."

Mark Twain is so much more than the eccentric writer who wrote Innocents Abroad, Huck Finn, and Tom Sawyer; he is a cultural institution. Raised in "sleepy" Hannibal, Missouri, Twain watched as the small town came to life whenever a steamboat chugged its way up and down the Mississippi River. He dreamed of being a steamboat pilot, and it was this profession Chernow highlights where Twain found the most peace and freedom, writing a distant second. "In truth," wrote Twain, "every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none."

When not on the river, Twain, son of a distant, cash-strapped father—who died when Sam was 11—and adoring mother, became a prankster around town, ever craving the attention it brought. Eventually, young Sam settled into the escapism that the world of books provides.

As Chernow eloquently puts it:

In the manner of all autodidacts, Sam Clemens educated himself by reading from passion, not duty. He retained his boyhood fondness for The Adventures of Robin Hood, both the "quaint & simple … fragrant & woodsy England" as well as its characters, "the most darling sweet rascals that ever made crime graceful in this world." He and close friend Will Bowen would "undress & play Robin Hood in our shirt-tails, with lath swords, in the woods on Holliday’s Hill on those long summer days." Confined in the remote little town, Sam escaped into the far away exploits of Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, and The Count of Monte Cristo, which gave intimations of the boundless world "curtained away" beyond Hannibal.

Chernow has an ability, musical almost, to deploy a quote just long enough (note that three-dot ellipsis) to give the moment its veracity yet not impede upon narrative momentum. Another critical part of a Chernow reading experience is interacting with his endnotes. There are 75 pages of them, carried in two columns per page. Each endnote is thrifty, and the section includes a glossary of acronyms at the start. In the paragraph above, there are three endnotes—citing letters from three primary sources—clearly showing where the quotations come from.

If you think this is standard, well, you haven’t been reading a lot of biographies lately. It should be. The least a biographer can do is pave the way for someone else to keep the journey going.

It was after Twain’s father died that his career working as a printer started. Twain’s much older brother Orion was already working as a printer and sending money home from St. Louis. Twain preferred work to school, his time in the classroom a short-lived exercise, with Twain only attending "part-time" until he was 14.

Chernow brings to life these no-wage years working as a printer’s apprentice at various newspapers in a chapter aptly called "Printer’s Devil." It’s also during this time when Twain gets to know, for better or worse, Orion, who moved back to Hannibal and eventually started the Hannibal Journal. Orion, 10 years older than Twain, had been affected far more than his younger brother when it came to their father’s personal and financial shortcomings. As Chernow puts it, "the shadow of his father’s hardship fell heavily across his life."

The relationship between the brothers is fascinating, and Chernow wisely builds upon the work of Philip Ashley Fanning’s Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers, and uses letters from various archives across the United States to give each brother their own voice: "Both Orion and Sam were dreamers," writes Chernow, "but Sam had a tough, hardheaded practicality that would enable him to succeed, whereas Orion was an endearing oddball whose naivete would always serve as a whetstone that sharpened his younger brother’s cynicism."

Twain lived a packed life. At 17, out of frustration toward Orion and a desire for adventure, he left Hannibal for New York and Philadelphia, writing articles and taking printing jobs, exasperated by the explosion of immigrants. "I always thought the eastern people were patterns of uprightness," Twain wrote to Orion, "but I never before saw so many whisky-swilling, God-despising heathens as I find in this part of the country." Chernow also notes Twain’s evolving feelings over seeing black people free for the first time. Back then at least, Twain preferred talking with "a good, old-fashioned negro" back in Missouri.

Eventually, Twain went back to work for Orion, now married and living in Keokuk, Iowa. Chernow could have filled another thousand pages tracking Twain’s movements in his 20s; the printer/riverboat pilot/writer/pro-Confederacy militia soldier (for two weeks)/Nevada silver rush miner was in constant motion. Chernow notes "early February 1863" as the time when the first "Mark Twain" byline appeared in print. To Twain, the pseudonym, as Chernow puts it, "was short and melodious—a perfect spondee."

By 31, Twain had slowed down… a little, and was looking for companionship. "Beneath his ribald mockery," Chernow writes, "Twain was a suppressed romantic who needed a spotless soul to worship." To describe Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon, or "Livy," Chernow again dives into archival correspondence, while also using long-ago efforts of Twain estate editor Dixon Wecter and his 1949 collection, The Love Letters of Mark Twain. The result is a sweeping, 34-year love story that somehow endured losing their first-born son Langdon at 19 months. Twain’s devotion to Livy is admirable, but more so was Livy’s patience and stamina. How she somehow managed Twain’s lifelong wanderlust deserves its own book, and for readers curious about Livy’s perspective on her marriage with Twain, a great place to start is Barbara Snedecor’s Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens, published in 2023.

As far as Chernow documents, Twain was faithful to Livy, and when she passed in 1904, the then mega-famous writer was devastated, and for the last six years of his life, he appeared at times embittered and lost, his north star vanished.

Twain, writes Chernow, had a "lifelong fixation on chaste teenage girls on the eve of adulthood," and the biographer, credit to him, does not shy away from this shadowy, even "creepy" aspect of Twain’s personality. In fact, Chernow leans in, mentioning how one biographer, Gary Scharnhorst, accused Twain of being a "latent pedophile" whose actions were shielded from public view by his inner circle (another Twain biographer, Ron Powers, shied away from the topic). With an assist from Karen Lystra’s comprehensive Twain study, Dangerous Intimacy, Chernow manages to occupy middle ground on this issue, presenting just enough material for the reader to reach their own conclusion.

Twain was far from a perfect soul. He was bizarre, irreverent, boundary-pushing, and distinctly American. Chernow rightly ends with Twain’s greatest magician’s trick, completing his own 400,000-word autobiography and scheduling it to be published 100 years after his death. As Chernow puts it, "His clever tongue, full of vinegar and wit, suddenly spoke from beyond the grave. Even in death, he refused to yield the spotlight and showed with a flourish his posthumous mastery of public relations."

Twain’s strongest spiritual successor was arguably satirist Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007). In a 1987 conversation with Hank Nuwer, Vonnegut, whose curly hair and mustache look was inspired by Twain (with a dash of Hal Holbrook), said he was "very suspicious" of "people’s fondness for Mark Twain, because everybody pretends to have read him and very few people have." Indeed, unless your name is Ken Burns, or past Twain biographers Scharnhorst and Powers, Twain remains as familiar to the public as a postage stamp. With this monumental book, Chernow gives Twain dimension and verve.

A favorite "Twainism" of mine comes from one of his notebooks, dated 1886: "My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water." I’ll go ahead and declare Chernow’s Twain a smooth lager that goes down easy after a long day, but it doesn’t merit a six-pack. That’s because the power of Mark Twain lies far more in his own voice delivered by his own pen than in the hardscrabble life he led. The stakes in Twain feel smaller compared with Chernow’s Grant or Alexander Hamilton. There’s a level of tedium here that Chernow, despite his incredible skill, cannot escape. To take one example, Chernow does well in laying out what he deems "the bloodiest literary feud" of Twain’s life, between Twain and journalist Edward H. House. Again, Chernow leans on a strong secondary source, James L. Huffman’s A Yankee in Meiji Japan, and combines it with archival correspondence between the two men. But Burr vs. Hamilton this is not.

Adjust your stakes, find a comfortable recliner, and open that beer. Chernow is back, but in a minor key.

Mark Twain
by Ron Chernow
Penguin Press, 1,200 pp., $45

Patrick Parr is the author of Malcolm Before X and One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation.

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Posted by Jon Levine

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Some people just aren't that interesting.

But for the sake of transparency, the Washington Free Beacon is publishing the names of the yet-reported anti-Israel radicals arrested after storming Columbia University’s Butler Library earlier this month.

They aren't celebrity nepo babies, or phallus-obsessed poets, or silver spoon activists, or do much for search engine optimization—but they were still part of a violent raid that injured two, distributed pro-Hamas flyers, and damaged university property.

Below are the names of the individuals arrested on May 7. All but one was charged with criminal trespassing for storming the Columbia library, while the outlier, Hamza Mankor, was charged with misconduct and threatening behavior. The vast majority were students of Columbia or its affiliates, Barnard College and Union Theological Seminary.

Columbia University Students

Nisreen Khokhar, a J.D. candidate at Columbia Law School, signed several anti-Israel letters before her arrest. Just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, while she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Khokhar signed one that falsely accused Israel of committing genocide and called for an immediate ceasefire. She signed a second that was distributed following an anti-Israel demonstration inside a school building that resulted in 40 arrests in November 2023. It demanded the school divest from companies that do business in Israel and shut down their partnerships with Israeli universities. She was the first signatory on both letters.

Priyanka Joshi is a Columbia senior studying philosophy and evolutionary biology. Joshi pursued a dual degree with Trinity College Dublin, according to a webpage for the program that has since scrubbed her presence. She’s quoted on the page saying, "You don't have to have a reason for everything you do." She's currently seeking an internship in New York City, according to her now-deleted LinkedIn.

Jessie Rubin, a Ph.D candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia, has long been a member of several anti-Israel groups, including Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. She also helped form Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Ivy League school’s most notorious anti-Semitic group that took credit for the Butler Library storming. Her father, Jeff Melnick, is a professor of American studies at University of Massachusetts Boston and describes himself as an "anti-Zionist." Hours after two young Israeli embassy staffers were killed in a brutal, close-range shooting, Melnick posted a defense of the slaying, arguing that "taking one life is not like killing all of humanity."

Brenda Gonzalez is a Columbia senior pursuing a double major in ethnicity and race studies and education. She is an occasional contributor to the San Francisco-based Spanish-language newspaper El Tecolote, where she has produced such pieces as "8 Latinx events that center community and resistance in San Francisco" and "These 7 S.F. organizations support undocumented immigrants. Here’s what they offer."

Two weeks after Matthew Ware’s arrest, he graduated from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and was inducted into the school’s Delta Omega Honor Society, which was established to "recognize outstanding achievement in the field of public health."

Nadia Schwingle listed herself as a Barnard alumna in a November 2023 petition demanding Columbia reinstate the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after it was suspended for repeatedly holding unauthorized anti-Israel protests. A university directory notes she is affiliated with Columbia’s School of Social Work.

Pramit Ghatak is a Columbia undergraduate studying computer science, according to university records. She signed a "dancers for Palestine" petition last year to show her solidarity. "Dance does not get an exception from the political realities of the places and times it is created," the petition read. "May we dance into liberation soon."

Ysabelle Tiana "Bell" Santos is pursuing a Masters of Social Work at Columbia. "I am for equity because equity starts with everyone," she touted in a now-deleted LinkedIn page. In the past, she has worked as a behavioral therapist for the Manhattan Psychology Group.

Fatima Aamir is a student at Columbia’s Teachers College, according to the school’s student directory. When she’s not agitating for Hamas, she works as a therapist for Manhattan Alternative, which provides "nationwide kink, poly, trans & LGBQ affirmative providers," according to its website.

"I create a therapeutic space where healing, self-exploration, and empowerment come together. I honor that we live in a world of interconnected systems, where the flow of power can impact each of us differently. Together, we can create ways for you to connect more deeply with yourself and the worlds around you by channeling the safety of hope," Aamir offers.

Hayes Buchanan graduated from Columbia in 2021 with a M.S. in urban planning, according to his LinkedIn profile. After finishing college, he moved to Lebanon, where he has spent more than three years working for Beirut Urban Labs.

Buchanan has a passion for environmental justice, equitable international development, and decolonization, according to his website. In May 2021, he told a Columbia blog that President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 motivated him to become politically active. Buchanan also said he was motivated to pursue his degree by Hiba Bou Akar, who acted as security for the second pro-Hamas encampment.

Ayah Fakhy is a Columbia College student in the class of 2025. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree with double majors in political science and sustainability studies and a minor in statistics, according to public records. Before attending college, she was active in Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, where she served as a "youth vanguard member." She also worked as a production assistant for Netflix.

Ben Patricia Erdmann, the chief engineer of Columbia University’s student radio station WKCR, pursued urban studies and art history at the Ivy League school. He’s slated to start a Ph.D. in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the fall, his now-deleted LinkedIn notes.

Amena Aamir is a Columbia student associated with its Teachers College, according to the university’s student directory.

Valerie Yang is pursuing a bachelor's degree in history at Columbia, according to her LinkedIn.

Daniel Fu is a student at Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, according to the student directory.

Jenna Elizabeth Price announced plans to attend Columbia to study visual art. Before it was removed, her entry in the Columbia student directory noted that she was studying in the religion department.

Belan Yeshigeta is a Kluge Scholar at Columbia, according to her now-deleted LinkedIn. The program aims to serve "underrepresented minority students."

Mairead Hynes is a Ph.D. student in the history department "studying the comparative transpacific history of women’s war mobilization and anti-military feminism in 20th century Japan and the United States."

Aeden Kamadolli is a Columbia sophomore majoring in human rights.

Mohsin Kazim is a master's student at Columbia's School of Social Work, according to his deleted LinkedIn.

Barnard College Students

Safiya Isabella O'Brien is a Barnard undergraduate who was an officer with Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. She has a lengthy profile with the watchdog group, Canary Mission, which notes that she began publicly supporting Hamas just one day after Oct 7. In December 2023, she whined in the Columbia Spectator that she didn't always feel safe wearing a keffiyeh.

Hayden Moir Chernow, meanwhile, attended Boston Latin Academy, a public exam institution ranked as a top-20 school, and resided in a five-bedroom, million-dollar home, before heading to Barnard.

She’s a member of the college’s prestigious Laidlaw Scholars Leadership & Research Program, sponsored by the Laidlaw Foundation, an international nonprofit dedicated to "developing leaders who embody excellence, act with integrity, and who are driven to solve the world’s most intractable problems." Her research examines how the rising number of young refugees affects access to quality education in Jordan.

After the Free Beacon emailed Moir Chernow to seek comment on her arrest, one of her mothers, Susan Moir, responded via Instagram. "Get a real life, you running dog for the MAGA movement," she told the Free Beacon reporter. When asked for further comment, the elder Moir deactivated her Instagram account. Her Instagram bio had read, "Palestine will be free. Stop the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Stop all military aid to Israel. Divest from all complicit corporations."

Eva Salmon is a Barnard undergraduate in the department of political science, has held leadership positions in Barnard’s student government, and is expected to graduate in 2026. Before becoming an anti-Israel activist, most of her energy had been focused on climate change. She has previously worked as an intern at the Climate Campus Network and was a board member of Sunrise Columbia, which tackled environmental issues at the university.

Cody Cragun was the salutatorian of Rio Rancho High School’s Class of 2022 in New Mexico and attends Barnard.

Melaina Rose Moy, who touts "she/her" pronouns, is a diversity and inclusion coordinator in the Barnard class of 2026. She is matriculated in the school's department of psychology.

When she's not raging for Hamas, Barnard student Maimuna Islam enjoys babysitting and making handmade jewelry, according to her LinkedIn.

Union Theological Seminary Students

Maya Andonina Weber—a Union Theological Seminary student who identifies as "they/she"—proudly notes her enrollment in a class called "Queer Theology," taught by the Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng. Cheng, an expert in "Queer Anglicanism,"  serves as chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

Katherine Scott is a Union Theological Seminary student, according to Columbia's student directory.

New York University

While the rest of the arrestees were charged with third-degree trespassing, Mankor distinguished himself with misconduct and threatening behavior. Mankor is a doctoral student at New York University in the comparative literature Ph.D. program and J.D. candidate at the School of Law, according to an official NYU biography that has since been taken down.

Mankor lists "Critical theory, Black study, Indigenous studies, anarchist studies, anticoloniality, Africana and Arab existentialism" among his research interests. He is a longtime agitator and was labeled persona non grata in NYU buildings last year as a result of his past activism.

None of the schools listed above responded to requests for comment, nor did any of the contacted students. The following arrestees could not be reached since their contact information was scrubbed: Joshi, Gonzalez, Kamadoll, Kazim, Cragun, and Islam.

Unclear Affiliations

The following individuals were among the arrested, but the Free Beacon could not identify them as students of Columbia or its affiliates. As a result, none of the individuals in this section could be reached for comment.

Zachary Berman was among those arrested during the violent takeover of Columbia's Hamilton Hall last year, The Free Lance reported.

Jingying Lin was also among the arrested. He was previously busted in June 2024. It's unclear if he is affiliated with Columbia.

Allison Rachel Wuu was arrested for a second time in the spring semester after being taken into custody for storming Barnard’s library in March.

One person arrested was named Grace Wang. Columbia’s directory shows several students associated with the university, but the Free Beacon couldn’t determine if she was any of them.

New York Police Department sources also provided the following arrestees, but the Free Beacon could not identify them with certainty: Samuel Pham, Layla Rodriguez Johnson, Jasmine Walker, Henry Mohr Odelle, Katherine Annette Rose, Tiffany Yang, and Sofia Rodriguez Basil.

Previously Reported

The Free Beacon previously identified additional arrestees in the following stories:

Columbia Students Arrested for Storming Library Include Several Repeat Offenders—Including Grad Student Who Demanded Humanitarian Aid From University

11 Percent of Columbia Library Arrestees Identify as They/Them—Nearly 7 Times America's Trans Population

'Corpse of the Phallus,' Black Latex, and Circus Performers: Meet The Avant-Garde Artists Arrested For Violently Storming Columbia Library

Bloomberg Journalist Among Anti-Israel Radicals Arrested for Storming Columbia Library

From Million-Dollar Homes to Radical Activism—These Posh Private School Alumni Were Among the Arrested Columbia and Barnard Students

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