On Wednesday, incoming Mayor Zohran Mandani announced his new Director of Appointments, i.e. the person who would be bringing the fresh talent into his administration. Her name is Catherine Almonte Da Costa and Mamdani promoted it as "A New Era!"
Mamdani posted this *yesterday.*
— Oren Kessler (@OrenKessler) December 19, 2025
"Welcome to A New Era, Catherine Almonte Da Costa!
Cat’s spent over a decade in public service and personnel management... Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Queens, she’s joining us... to bring top talent into this administration." pic.twitter.com/scchMfIdkZ
Yesterday Da Costa resigned after a bunch of her old, racist tweets about Jews and white people resurfaced. Let's take a look at a few of those tweets.
Mayor-Elect Mamdani has announced Catherine (Cat) Almonte Da Costa as his Director of Appointments, tasked with “bring[ing] top talent into this administration.”
— ADL New York / New Jersey (@ADL_NYNJ) December 18, 2025
Her social media footprint includes posts from more than a decade ago that echo classic antisemitic tropes and… pic.twitter.com/fMe2zMuphA
Those are just a few turned up by the ADL But a site called Judge Street Journal found a lot more.
“This was a harsh blow but it’s not the first time this country has let me down,” Da Costa wrote on November 10, 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected president. “It’s important that white people feel defeated.”
“For so long power has been in the hands of men and/or white people. It has brought us ruin,” she wrote on January 19, 2020...
““When we operate the way White power has operated for generations by opening doors for our own, is it considered nepotism? Or is it just leveling the playing field?” -@ElaineWelteroth” she wrote on July 3, 2019.
Even Santa Claus wasn't spared from her racial critique: "You won't catch me telling my kids that an old white man is the one bringing them presents. I work too hard for that to be the narrative."
When the Judge Street Journal contacted Da Costa for comment, she deleted her entire X account and then gave them the same statement about having Jewish children. In any case, the day after her new position was announced, Da Costa was out of a job.
The Mamdani transition announced her resignation hours after the Anti-Defamation League resurfaced the comments by Ms. Da Costa, posted more than a decade ago, in which she denigrated Jews.
“I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Ms. Da Costa said in a statement provided by the transition. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”
In a separate statement, Mr. Mamdani said, “Catherine expressed her deep remorse over her past statements and tendered her resignation, and I accepted.”
Of course, because this is the NY Times, they focus on how old some of these tweets are:
“Money hungry Jews smh,” she wrote in one 2011 post, when she was 18, using an abbreviation for “shaking my head.”...
Ms. Da Costa, now 33, is married to a deputy city comptroller who is Jewish.
Two points about this. First, why only mention the 2011 tweets when she was 18? What about the 2020 tweet when she was 27 (or maybe 28): "For so long power has been in the hands of men and/or white people. It has brought us ruin." The Times is intentionally downplaying this.
Second, the the NY Times is really not in a position to suggest that it's unfair to criticize people for tweets published when they were 18 (and adults). In 2020, the paper published an article titled "A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning." The gist of this article was that a high school student named Mimi Groves had used the N-word in a video made when she was 15 and a freshman in high school.
Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit.
Another student, Jimmy Galligan, decided to hold onto that video and to repost it to get the college she'd been admitted to to reject her.
Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer...
The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.
Groves explained herself but it was too late. She was given an ultimatum.
Ms. Groves said the video began as a private Snapchat message to a friend. “At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” she said in a recent interview, adding that the slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”...
Ms. Groves’s parents, who said their daughter was being targeted by a social media “mob” for a mistake she made as an adolescent, urged university officials to assess her character by speaking with her high school and cheer coaches. Instead, admissions officials gave her an ultimatum: withdraw or the university would rescind her offer of admission...
For his role, Mr. Galligan said he had no regrets. “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never forgets, the clip will always be available to watch.
“I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.”
He taught a 15-year-old a lesson by destroying her life. And the NY Times thought that was great and wrote an entire article that ends with his self-praise. That's how the Times feels about young people's racist tweets. At least it was five years ago. Now they seem to be using the fact that Da Costa was 18 when she was tweeting about "money hungry Jews" as an excuse for why it shouldn't be held against her.
Dan Levin, the author of that article from 2020, is still employed by the NY Times. Maybe the author of today's article, Dana Rubinstein, should have a chat with him so they can come to some kind of coherent policy about which tweets are too old to be held against you and which ones aren't. At present it seems to depend entirely on your politics.
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