So it's a historic decision from the United States Supreme Court.
They've now struck down affirmative action in college admissions.
It was a violation of the 14th Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, which suggests that all human beings, regardless of their race, have to be treated equally under the law.
And there are a bunch of reasons why they struck it down.
We're going to go through the opinion in full detail.
Let's start with this.
Affirmative action is deeply unfair on every level.
Doesn't matter what race you are talking about.
If one race is able to get into college with scores that are 200 points below another race, that is obviously racist and it's obviously discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause.
That's exactly what was happening when it came to Harvard University as well as the University of North Carolina.
Both of those particular colleges were the ones who were named in this lawsuit.
The statistics that are cited in the in the actual Supreme Court opinion showing Harvard's attempts to boost minority enrollment demonstrate the disparity between performances for the groups that got in and the groups that did not get in.
According to the Supreme Court, Here were the top academic decal chances of getting into college.
So you're the top performing people in your particular group, top 10%.
So if you are a top 10% performing Asian, you had a 12.7% chance in terms of getting into Harvard.
If you are a top performing white student, top tactile, right, meaning the top 10%, this means you had a 15.3% chance of being admitted to Harvard.
If you were Hispanic, you had a 31.3% chance of being admitted to Harvard.
And if you were black, you had a 56% chance of being admitted to Harvard.
These are people with the same scores.
What's even more astonishing is that when you actually look at this chart, you will find that if you are in the fourth academic tactile, meaning that you perform better than 40% of people, You perform better than 40% of other students when it comes to test scores and GPA.
If you are white, you have less than a 2% chance of getting in.
If you're Asian, you have less than 1% chance of getting in.
If you're Hispanic, you have a 5% chance of getting in.
If you are black, you have a 12.8% chance of getting in.
This means you have a better shot of getting into Harvard if you're a black student who performed better than 40% of the population than if you're an Asian student who performed better than 90% of the population.
Hey, that's insane.
And that disparity is obviously racist.
This means a discrepancy in scores of 200 up to 300 points between Black students who are getting into Harvard and Asian students who are getting into Harvard.
And it's Asians who are suffering the most under this regime because obviously the discrimination has to come at somebody's cost.
There's only one slot.
That slot goes to somebody.
If it goes to a Black underperforming student, it does not go to an Asian overperforming student.
Asians are overrepresented relative to their share of the population because Asians overperform when it comes to things like the math SAT.
As Wesley Yang points out, in 2016, there were 48,000 whites, 52,800 Asians, 4,800 Hispanics,
and just 2,200 blacks who scored above 700 on the math SAT.
Asians represent 6% of the overall population.
They represent almost half of the people who on the SAT get over a 700.
And those are the people who are being hurt when somebody else's slot, when their slot goes to somebody else.
It's a massive failure.
It's not just that.
Affirmative action on its own terms fails.
This idea that affirmative action is the rung up, it is the pathway to success for black students in America, it's just not true.
Steven and Abigail Thornstrom wrote years and years ago for The Atlantic and for the Brookings Institute.
They concluded, quote, not only did significant advances in black income increases predate the affirmative action era, the benefits of race conscious policies are not clear.
In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged.
Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30% of black families still live below the poverty line.
And then there's a bigger problem, which is that even the students who get into places like Harvard or Yale for affirmative action, because they were the top performing black students, but because they're performing maybe in middle of the pack in terms of overall student body, they're also more likely to drop out by leaps and bounds.
In fact, according to Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor in The Atlantic in 2012, mismatched black students, meaning students who got in through significant affirmative action, are twice as likely to be derailed from pursuing a doctorate and an academic career because if you succeed at Northwestern because you're a really, really good black student and then you go on to get your MD, that is a better career path than getting into Yale and then flunking out.
Black law school grads are currently four times as likely to fail the bar as their white counterparts.
Black college freshmen want to go into science or engineering more than white students but are twice as likely to drop out as of 2012.
And about half of black college students ranked in the bottom 20% of their classes and the bottom 10% in law schools.
They were overrepresented in terms of the underperforming students in the schools they actually got into, which makes a lot of sense.
Again, if you compare them in terms of test scores, black students who got into Affirmative Action to other students, of course they're underperforming.
That's why they required the Affirmative Action.
Now there is this idea that the best way to remedy historic injustices is to treat people as groups and then give them a quote-unquote leg up.
But there's no other context in which we would consider this good policy.
Take for example, Major League Baseball, just as an example.
So Major League Baseball had a color line for the first half century of its existence.
It was an evil.
Black players were not allowed to play.
This is why the Negro Leagues got started starting in like the 1920s.
And there are amazing black players in the Negro Leagues.
In 1945, Jackie Robinson is signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
He makes his first appearance in the Major Leagues by 1947.
By 1948, the Negro Leagues are out of existence.
Imagine for a second that Major League Baseball had said, we need a quota of black players.
We're not just going to take the best black players and then they're going to now play in the Major Leagues because we use the same standards.
Either you can hit, you can field, and you can run, or you can't.
Imagine if what they had said was, we need, in order to rectify past imbalances, we need to make sure that a certain percentage of Major League Baseball players are black.
Because after all, you can't hold people back from the starting line and then fire the gun, as the metaphor goes, and then expect that everybody is going to run equally or evenly.
So, what Major League Baseball would do, let's say, as an affirmative action program, is they would now insist that black pitchers would only need to throw two strikes to strike somebody out, and black hitters would get four strikes before they struck out.
Would that make black performance overall better?
Would that improve black performance?
Or would it be lowering the standard, meaning that you don't have to perform as well as a black baseball player in order to succeed in Major League Baseball if the rules were changed just for black players in 1948 in Major League Baseball?
Also, would that heighten or would it lower ethnic tensions in Major League Baseball if black players only had to throw two strikes and got four strikes at the plate?
That's effectively what we are doing with affirmative action programs.
They are racist.
They also happen to be racist against blacks, not just against Asians.
They're racist against blacks because the assumption is That in America today, blacks, it is impossible for them to succeed.
This can only be the evidence of two things, right?
There are only two possible arguments that blacks are unable to succeed.
One was presented by Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who ironically was selected to the Supreme Court specifically because of her race.
And her opinion is a very good example of why we should not do that, because it is a horribly written opinion that is filled with garbage.
We'll get to that in a moment.
But there are only two possible arguments here.
One is that black Americans are somehow lesser or inferior, which is just pure racism, and it's not true.
The other is that America is so inherently racist that black Americans will never be able to get ahead.
They will be inherently victimized just because of the color of their skin.
That's not true either, but that is the left-wing ideology that supports affirmative action.
The problem is there's no endpoint there, and there is no way to cure it, and there's no point at which you say, okay, everybody is now good.
Okay, so in a second we're going to get into the actual opinion because it is quite fascinating.
We're going to go through the Chief Justice Roberts' opinion.
This is a 6-3 decision.
He was joined by Thomas Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, so the conservatives on the court, the Republican nominees on the court.
We're going to go through his opinion, then we're going to go through Clarence Thomas' concurrence, which is one of the great pieces of legal writing I've ever seen.
It really is a tremendous piece of legal writing.
And then we're going to get to the Sotomayor dissent.
And then we're gonna get to the Brown-Jackson descent, which is just a horrendous piece of garbage.
We'll go through all of that momentarily.
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Okay, so let's go through some of this opinion.
So the opinion is written by Chief Justice Roberts.
I assume because it's a broad majority and also because he, I think, wants to moderate a couple of aspects of the Thomas opinion.
He wants to leave a loophole, as we'll get to in a second.
This is very typical for Justice Roberts, but it is a very well-written opinion.
So here's some of what Justice Roberts writes.
And by the way, the entire compendium of this case is about 240 pages.
So, Justice Roberts says, despite our early recognition of the broad sweep of the Equal Protection Clause, this court, alongside the country, quickly failed to live up to the clause's core commitments.
For almost a century after the Civil War, state-mandated segregation was in many parts of the nation a regrettable norm.
By 1950, the inevitable truth of the 14th Amendment had begun to reemerge.
Separate cannot be equal.
These decisions reflect the core purpose of the Equal Protection Clause, doing away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.
So one thing that the Roberts opinion, the Thomas concurrence, and the dissents have in common is they try to go through America's racial history in sort of one document.
And what Roberts is pointing out here is that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment mandates it was passed on the senate 1866 ratified by 1868 and it mandates that every person born or naturalized in the united states including people who are formerly enslaved must be must be given equal protection under the laws and what that was meant to do as justice thomas goes into detail about was ensure that black people were not different were not differently treated by the law than white people and asian people were not differently treated by the law than black people and everybody was treated the same based on race
Robert says, eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.
And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held applies without regard to
any differences of race, of color, or of nationality. It is universal in its application.
For the guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual
and something else when applied to a person of another color. And those are citations to
prior cases. So the list of affirmative action decisions, the big decision that everybody is
is worried about is a case called Grutter v. Volinger.
Grutter v. Bollinger followed on the heels of another case called Bakke.
So Bakke basically said affirmative action regimes are, we think, kind of okay, but it was kind of unclear.
Grutter v. Bollinger was designed to essentially soften that and make way for the possibility of getting rid of affirmative action at some point in the future.
It was a five-floor split opinion, was Grutter v. Bollinger.
The majority opinion was by Sandra Day O'Connor.
And the court held that the Equal Protection Clause did not prohibit Michigan Law School using, in narrowly tailored ways, race and admissions to further a compelling interest.
Now, the problem is they never really defined a compelling interest.
Gertrude W. Bollinger's very, very badly decided decision.
And the decision also suggests that sometime in the future, I mean, they openly state in this decision that sometime in the future, 25 years from now, perhaps, we will change our minds about this.
Well, it's been 20 years since Gertrude W. Bollinger, and now was apparently the time This is what the court points out.
Gruner concluded with the following caution, quote, it has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved
the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity
in the context of public higher education.
We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary
to further the interest approved today.
20 years later, says the court, no end is in sight.
Yet both of these colleges insist the use of race in their admissions programs must continue.
In other words, there is no actual defining feature to the timeline that was set out by the court.
and colleges are taking advantage of that.
They have no end goal, in other words.
The court says the question whether a particular mix of minority students produces, quote, engaged and productive citizens, sufficiently enhanced appreciation, respect, and empathy, or effectively trains future leaders is standardless.
The interests respondents seek, though plainly worthy, are inescapably imponderable.
In other words, there's a constitutional standard when you examine a law that appears to violate the Equal Protection Clause.
It's called strict scrutiny.
Basically, strict scrutiny says you have to have a really, really, really, really, really super good reason for violating the Equal Protection Clause.
And that super really really really good reason has to be something like you're trying to avoid a race riot at a prison.
So you separate the blacks and the whites at a prison because you're afraid that the Nazi gang is going to fight the black gang or something.
That's literally the case that they cite in this case.
Other than that, what compelling interest is there in treating people of different races differently under the law?
And the answer is none.
You can't say things like, we need quote-unquote diversity.
Nobody knows what that means.
For example, when is a standard of diversity actually reached?
Does it have to be representative of the general population?
And also, what are the gains of diversity?
Just because you have now represented the general population, how is that better?
Explain how that makes things better.
This is what the court is pointing out.
Universities may define their missions as they see fit, says Roberts.
The Constitution defines ours.
Courts may not license separating students on the basis of race without an exceedingly persuasive justification that is measurable and concrete enough to permit judicial review.
This is what we were talking about.
Black students are getting in.
Asians are getting booted.
to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages of the former group at the expense of
the latter. This is what we were talking about. Black students are getting in, Asians are getting
booted. So by the way are Jewish students. According to the court, we have time and again
forcefully rejected the notion that government actors may intentionally allocate preference to
those who have little in common with one another but the color of their skin.
The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb or because they play the violin poorly or well.
In other words, in the dissents, there's a lot of talk about, well, a seventh generation legacy white student who has the following characteristics versus a poor black student.
But the point the court is making is you can say poor without saying black.
Because it turns out there are lots of rich black people in this country too.
Like Bronnie James is doing just fine.
This belief that just because you are a member of a particular race you are therefore disadvantaged in some unspecified way compared to a white person from Appalachia or an Asian student who's studying in the closet because mommy can't afford the electricity to be available in another room in the apartment.
They don't have an extra room in the apartment.
People come in varieties of life experiences of various different races, says the court.
In the years after Bakke, the court repeatedly held that ameliorating societal discrimination does not constitute a compelling interest that justifies race-based state action.
We reached the same conclusion in Croson, a case that concerned a preferential government contracting program, permitting past societal discrimination to serve as the basis for rigid racial preferences would be to open the door to competing claims for remedial relief for every disadvantaged group.
And this is forcefully rejecting the idea that affirmative action is designed in order to remediate past discrimination because, again, that looks a lot more like the Major League Baseball example we're talking about.
And also, at what point do you decide which groups have had enough relief and which groups now deserve more relief?
The opinion concludes, while the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against Black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue.
In its view, this court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit.
Separate but equal is inherently unequal, said Brown vs. Board.
It depends, says the dissent.
That is a remarkable view of the judicial role.
Remarkably wrong.
Lost in the false pretense of judicial humility that the dissent espouses is a claim to power so radical, so destructive, it required a second founding to undo.
So the claim here is...
You say that you are in favor of affirmative action to quote-unquote end discrimination and yet you are promulgating discrimination.
You're basically on the side of people who are using the law in order to discriminate.
You're just doing it for a different race and that is unacceptable under the law.
We'll get to the loophole in the Roberts opinion in just one second because it's a dangerous loophole.
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Okay, so the loophole in the Roberts opinion is the one that the left is looking to exploit.
So the opinion says, quote, at the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.
But despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.
A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.
They literally put that in parentheses, which is basically saying, don't listen to Ketanji Brown-Jackson.
You can't write an essay about how being black in America just means that you have it worse off because you're black.
We don't believe that and we are not going to allow any university to establish that as the standard.
That instead of you essentially writing, checking a box on your form that says black, instead you just write in your essay, I am black, like a hundred times.
And then the college admits you.
And don't look to Ketanji Brown Jackson's standard for what now counts as admissible criteria.
Now, this does leave the door open to future problems, right?
You can see colleges attempting to end around this.
In fact, University of California has been doing this for years.
California actually banned affirmative action in 1996 and then re-upped that in 2020, as you'll recall.
And if you look at the admitted students at UCLA by race and ethnicity, one of the things that you'll notice is that as of 2021, They were back to levels of black tenants at the UCs that they haven't seen since 1995.
One of the ways that they've been doing that is by banning tests.
And they'll say, we don't take SAT.
We don't take GPA.
We'll create all sorts of weird new standards in order to effectively avoid the ban on affirmative action.
So could that happen?
Sure.
But is the court going to put a pretty skeptical eye on that?
You would imagine the answer there is yes.
Now, all of this leads up to one of the best concurrences ever written.
Honestly, Roberts should have just let Thomas write the opinion.
But the problem is that Roberts always wants to buy it back a little bit.
And that's why he added that loophole.
Thomas certainly would not have.
Thomas would have just said, listen, you try to claim that race is the establishing factor for you in why you should get into a college?
The answer is no.
So Thomas's opinion is fantastic.
And of course, Clarence Thomas can speak to this, growing up the grandson of sharecroppers.
Who is now on the Supreme Court of the United States.
I know that we're all supposed to pretend that Ketanji Brown-Jackson is somehow emblematic of the black racial experience in America.
Actually, Clarence Thomas is much more emblematic of the black racial experience in America, considering that he's much older and actively grew up in a time before the civil rights movement had had full effect.
As opposed to, say, Ketanji Brown-Jackson.
Brown-Jackson is, uh, how old is she?
She is currently 52 years of age.
Which means that she was born in like the early 70s.
Okay, Clarence Thomas was born In 1948.
So he had a lot more experience with discrimination than Katonji Brown Jackson.
So Thomas writes, quote, In the wake of the Civil War, the country focused its attention on restoring the Union and establishing the legal status of newly freed slaves.
The Constitution was amended to abolish slavery and proclaim that all persons born in the United States are citizens entitled to the privileges or immunities of citizenship and the equal protection of the laws.
Because of that second founding, our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Again, I've said for literally my entire legal career, Thomas is the best justice on the court.
He has always been, in my view, the best justice on the court.
I love Justice Scalia.
He was great.
He's a terrific writer.
Clarence Thomas is clear, he's concise, and he makes his case very persuasively.
In the 1860s, says Thomas, Congress proposed and the states ratified the 13th and 14th Amendments.
And with the authority conferred by these amendments, Congress passed two landmark Civil Rights Acts.
Throughout the debates on each of these measures, their proponents repeatedly affirmed their view of equal citizenship and the racial equality that flows from it.
In fact, they held this principle so deeply that their crowning accomplishment, the 14th Amendment, ensures racial equality with no textual reference to race whatsoever.
The history of these measures enactment renders their motivating principle as clear as their text.
All citizens of the United States, regardless of skin color, are equal before the law.
However, says Thomas, despite the extensive evidence favoring the colorblind view as detailed above, it appears increasingly in vogue to embrace an anti-subordination view of the 14th Amendment, that the amendment forbids only laws that hurt but not help blacks.
Such a theory lacks any basis in the original meaning of the 14th Amendment.
He says three aspects of today's decision weren't common.
First, to satisfy strict scrutiny, universities must be able to establish an actual link between racial discrimination and educational benefits.
Second, those engaged in racial discrimination do not deserve deference with respect to their reasons for discriminating.
And third, attempts to remedy past governmental discrimination must be closely tailored to address that particular past governmental discrimination.
The court, he says, makes clear that in the future, universities wishing to discriminate based on race and admissions must articulate and justify a compelling and measurable state interest based on concrete evidence.
Given the strictures set out by this court, I highly doubt any will be able to do so.
And then he points out that without guardrails suggesting colorblindness, the 14th Amendment would, quote, become self-defeating, promising a nation based on equality, but yielding a quota and case-ridden society steeped in race-based discrimination.
Now the best part of Thomas' opinion is where he just destroys Jackson's dissent.
So Jackson's dissent, which we'll get to momentarily, is truly an awful piece of writing.
It is evidence, in and of itself, that affirmative action picks are not good.
She was literally picked because Joe Biden said he wanted a black woman.
His words, not mine.
But it is amazing how Thomas just stomps the dissent in this particular concurrence.
He says, Justice Jackson has a different view.
Rather than focusing on individuals as individuals, her dissent focuses on the historical subjugation of Black Americans, invoking statistical racial gaps to argue in favor of defining and categorizing individuals by their race.
As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today.
The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society's riches by racial means as necessary to quote-unquote level the playing field, all as judged by racial metrics.
I strongly disagree.
He says Justice Jackson would replace the second founder's vision with an organizing principle based on race.
In fact, on her view, almost all of life's outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.
This is so, she writes, because of statistical disparities among different racial groups.
Even if some whites have a lower household net worth than some blacks, what matters to Justice Jackson is that the average white household has more wealth than the average black household.
This lore is not and has never been true.
Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color.
Then as now, not all disparities are based on race, not all people are racist, and not all differences between individuals are ascribable to race.
Put simply, the fate of abstract categories of wealth statistics is not the same as the fate of a given set of flesh and blood human beings.
That's a quote from Thomas Sowell.
Worse yet, says Thomas, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims.
Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me.
I cannot deny, says Justice Thomas, the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds.
Nor do Justice Jackson's statistics regarding a correlation between levels of health, wealth, and well-being between selected racial groups prove anything.
Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race rather than socionomic status or any other factor in individual outcomes.
In fact, as we'll see, in the opinion, Justice Jackson specifically cites a stat that is just wrong.
It's just not a true stat.
Talking about how black patients with black doctors are more likely to suffer maternal health effects, are less likely to suffer bad maternal health effects, so you need black doctors in order to stop black women from their babies dying.
That's rooted in false statistics.
Justice Jackson cites it anyway.
Because she's just using Ibram X. Kendi as her Supreme Court guide.
Her basic premise is the exact same as Ibram X. Kendi's.
Any disparity is the result of discrimination.
If black Americans are underperforming on the SATs, that must be slavery and Jim Crow.
It can't be because a bunch of people are dropping out of high school or because they're not studying as much.
Justice Jackson supplies the link herself, the legacy of slavery, and the nature of inherited wealth.
This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste.
Such a view is irrational.
It is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.
If an applicant has less financial means because of generational inheritance or otherwise, then surely a university may take that into account.
As Thomas is saying, if you apply to a college and you say, I grew up really poor and I had to work my way Through high school because my parents didn't have enough money to pay for shoes.
That obviously is relevant to your college experience and that will be taken into account, but that's not what she's talking about.
She says if you just write, I am black on your application, you should get points for that.
If an applicant has medical struggles or a family member with medical concerns, the university may consider that too, says Thomas.
What it cannot do is use the applicant's skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for black, he therefore conforms to the university's monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract average black person.
Accordingly, Justice Jackson's race-infused worldview falls flat at each step.
Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments.
What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them.
And their race is not to blame for everything, good or bad, that happens in their lives.
A contrary, myopic worldview based on individual skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.
In a brutal language, and absolutely appropriate in this case, Tom is just ripping into Jackson.
He doesn't stop there.
He says, unsurprisingly, this tried and failed system defies both law and reason.
Start with the obvious.
If social reorganization in the name of equality may be justified by the mere fact of statistical disparities among racial groups, then that reorganization must continue until these disparities are fully eliminated, regardless of the reasons for the disparities and the cost of their elimination.
If blacks fail a test at higher rates than their white counterparts, regardless of whether the reason for the disparity has anything at all to do with race, the only solution will be race-focused measures.
If those measures were to result in blacks failing at yet higher rates, the only solution would be to double down.
In fact, there would seem to be no logical limit to what the government may do to level the racial playing field.
Outright wealth transfers, quota systems, racial preferences would all seem permissible.
In such a system, it would not matter how many innocents suffer race-based injuries.
All that would matter is reaching the race-based goal.
Worse, the classifications that Justice Jackson draws are themselves race-based stereotypes.
She focuses, in her opinion, on two hypothetical applicants, John and James, competing for admission to University of North Carolina.
John is a white seventh-generation legacy at the school, while James is black and would be the first in his family to attend.
Justice Jackson argues that race-conscious admission programs are necessary to adequately compare the two applicants.
As an initial matter, it's not clear why James' race is the only factor that would encourage UNC to admit him.
His status as a first-generation college applicant seems to contextualize his application, says Thomas.
Right, you don't have to mention his race, just say he's a first-generation guy trying to get into college.
But, setting that aside, why is it that John should be judged based on the action of his great-great-grandparents?
And what would Justice Jackson say to John when deeming him not worthy of admission?
How, for example, says Thomas, would Justice Jackson explain the need for race-based preferences to the Chinese student who has worked hard his entire life, only to be denied college admission in part because of his skin color?
If such a burden would seem difficult to impose on a bright-eyed young person, that's because it should be.
History has taught us to abhor theories that call for elites to pick racial winners and losers in the name of sociological experimentation.
And then in a ringing endorsement of the meritocratic system, which is absolutely correct, Thomas says, In fact, meritocratic systems have long refuted bigoted misperceptions of what black students can accomplish.
I have always viewed higher education's purpose as imparting knowledge and skills to students rather than a communal rubber stamp credentialing process.
I continue to strongly believe and have never doubted that blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.
Meritocratic systems with objective grading scales are critical to that belief.
Such skills have always been a great equalizer, offering a metric for achievement that bigotry could not alter.
Racial preferences take away this benefit, eliminating the very metric by which those who have the most to prove can clearly demonstrate their accomplishments both to themselves and to others.
The point that Thomas is making right there is that if you use a meritocratic system, this means that when you have a black doctor, your first thought isn't, did that guy get in through affirmative action?
Do I have to worry about his skill set?
Which is a normal thought if the person was admitted based on a group stereotype as opposed to on, you know, the basis of a great score.
If we use actual test scores, then this means that I know that everybody who got into Harvard had a 1500 on their SAT.
That means everybody who got into Harvard is smart.
But if some people are getting in with a 1200, and I know who those people probably are statistically, because only certain groups get the affirmative action benefits, am I more likely to go to the black doctor?
Or am I less likely to go to the black doctor?
It is a stereotype that black people have to carry around with them throughout their lives, even after having gotten the credential.
Okay, so this brings us to Katonji Brown-Jackson's dissent.
It is a disaster area.
It is an absolute bleep show and disaster area is Katonji Brown-Jackson's dissent.
As you would imagine, there are no less than two justices who are currently sitting on the Supreme Court who are appointed explicitly for their race and for their ethnicity.
Sonia Sotomayor was selected by Barack Obama because she was a quote-unquote wise Latina woman Which is not a good reason to be selected for the Supreme Court.
And Ketanji Brown-Jackson, because Joe Biden has decided that in order to reach out to black voters, he was going to select black women for high-ranking slots, including vice president and for the Supreme Court of the United States.
He pre-committed to selecting a black woman before actually selecting a qualified candidate.
The lack of qualifications of Katonji Brown-Jackson are on full display in her wild opinion, which seems like just a paraphrase of Robin DiAngelo's white privilege.
We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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Okay, this brings us to the Kitanji Brown-Jackson dissent.
And again, she is a perfect case of why affirmative action should not be used in hiring.
Because she is truly a terrible justice.
This opinion is egregiously bad.
It is Ibram X. Kendi, but just shoved into a legal opinion.
I mean, there are factual problems with it.
She literally cites statistics that are not true.
But the overall argument is it's basically the meme by Ryan Long, the comedian, woke and racist.
They think the same thing.
That's that's her opinion, because her opinion is indistinguishable if you just switch the races from a Ku Klux Klan or circa 1920.
Quote, Gulf size race based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth and well-being of American citizens.
They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations.
Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles, the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal.
So, she begins with the premise that a disparity is pure evidence of discrimination.
Obviously, any disparity is discrimination whatsoever.
Yeah, if black Americans are poorer on average than white Americans, it must be that America is a discriminatory system.
She fails to explain, for example, how it's discrimination that rationalizes why 99% of people in prison for violent crime are men.
That obviously is a form of discrimination against men or something.
She also doesn't explain why white people are far more likely to commit suicide than black people, obviously must be past discrimination or something.
Or why the NBA is largely black, must be discrimination.
Right, obviously her argument makes no sense.
Anytime there is a disparity between groups, there are multiplicity of causes.
Discrimination could be one of those causes, but you actually have to look at the particular circumstances we are talking about here.
She says, history speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. Forever.
The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today.
By all accounts, they are still stark.
So she is here saying that we need racial reparations for the rest of time.
Literally forever.
Forever.
Treat different racial groups differently.
Forever.
Literally forever.
And here's where she gets to the best.
This is the worst part of her opinion.
Well, no, they didn't announce that.
The 14th Amendment announced that.
It's literally the 14th Amendment.
That's the text of the 14th Amendment.
But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Well, I mean, but we're talking about the law.
We're not talking about in life.
In life, there are lots of reasons why people perform differently.
There are lots of reasons why some people are richer than other people.
It's not all because of the law.
The law is the law.
It's not the same thing.
Having so detached itself from this country's actual past and present experience, the court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America's real-world problems.
No one benefits from ignorance, says Ketanji Brown-Jackson.
Yes, clearly Clarence Thomas is ignorant of America's discriminatory past.
Having grown up in the sharecropping South.
Nailed it.
Although former race-linked legal barriers are gone.
So she acknowledges that you are not allowed to have legal barriers.
Like by the Constitution or the Civil Rights Act.
Race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways.
And today's ruling makes things worse, not better.
So, lived experiences, if you are a Supreme Court Justice and you're citing lived experiences, you're writing crappy college essays that never should have gotten you into high-profile schools in the first place.
Lived experiences are not a legal regimen.
Lived experiences.
Literally try that in any area of law.
You walk in for your hearing with the IRS, and the IRS is like, you owe $100,000, you don't share my lived experience.
Do you know my lived experience?
The IRS doesn't give a crap.
If you violate the law, you violate the law.
You know what the law is?
We don't treat black people differently than white people in this country.
That's what the law should be.
And vice versa.
But Ketanji Brown-Jackson continues, the best that can be said of the majority's perspective is that it proceeds ostrich-like from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism.
No, that's not what it says.
It says that that is a better corrective than treating people differently based on race, which is clearly true.
But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain.
If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away.
It will take longer for racism to leave us.
Yes, clearly affirmative action has been a massive corrective to racism in America.
Nailed it.
Ultimately, says Ketanji Brown-Jackson, ignoring race just makes it matter more.
This is the line where I was like, okay, that is just a KKK line.
Ignoring race just makes it matter more.
This is where you get the meme from Predator.
The two fists gripping.
Ignoring race makes it matter more?
This is literally what all racists think!
Those of us who are not racist, we look at disparities and we say, well, there are a lot of reasons for those disparities.
Crime disparities, for example.
That's not because black people are black.
That's because there are a lot of black people in poverty.
It's because there's a lot of single motherhood.
Like, there are a bunch of reasons why there are disparities in crime statistics.
Ketanji Brown Jacks is like, you're ignoring race.
Yeah, you know who agrees?
The racists.
Quote, the only way out of this morass for all of us is to stare at racial disparity unblinkingly and then do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together, collectively striving to achieve true equality for all Americans.
It is no small irony that the judgment the majority hands down today will forestall the end of race-based disparities in this country, making the colorblind world the majority wistfully touts much more difficult to accomplish.
Ah, yes, full racial communism is the only way to achieve all of this.
Now, Let's take, for example, let's take her at her word.
Let's assume that the United States decided that we were going to implement some form of race-based redistribution system.
We were going to spend trillions of dollars.
They say the wealth gap is like $110,000 per family, something like that.
Let's say that we were to calculate all of that out, we were to do all the math, and we were to, I believe the Brookings Institute did a calculation, spend a couple of trillion dollars just handing checks to every black household to equalize their wealth with white households.
Within a couple of years, differences would emerge again.
Not because of racism.
Those differences would emerge because people act differently.
People act differently.
That's the end of the story.
It is not up to the law to then rectify the imbalances in the consequences of how people act on the individual level, even if they are grouped differently within racial groups.
Again, you can't take a room of 200 people anywhere, divide it down the middle, and assume that the people on one side of the line are going to be equal in a statistical aspect to the people on the other side of the line in literally any way.
It won't work for height.
It won't work for weight.
It won't work for income.
It won't work for educational level.
That's not how any of this works.
And it has nothing to do with race.
That's just you draw a line down the middle of a room.
But Katonji Brown Jackson is, in fact, a racist, and so she writes in racist fashion here.
Again, I read you that line once more because it is a racist line and there is no way around it.
Quote, ultimately ignoring race just makes it matter more.
Oh, OK.
Sonia Sotomayor, of course, agrees with Katonji Brown Jackson.
Again, not a shock.
She touted herself as a wise Latina with different life experiences because of her Latina descent.
Quote, ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.
What was true in the 1860s and again in 1954 is true today.
Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.
Man, again, the lines, if a racist said that, equality requires acknowledgment of inequality?
Are we talking about inherent inequality or equality of outcome?
Like, what are we talking about here?
Because that's real ugly language.
She said, my favorite part is when Sonia Sotomayor is like, you're not allowed to overrule precedent.
Overruling precedent is bad.
My favorite stupid legal argument is when people are like, sorry, decisive says, yeah, give me a break.
Like seriously, no one cares.
You guys didn't care.
You're perfectly willing to overturn Bowers versus Hardwick in Lawrence v. Texas.
And then you were willing to overturn literally all of American law in Obergefell.
You guys are perfectly willing to overturn American law on a routine basis.
Roe versus Wade was overturning all American law for two centuries.
Don't pretend you care about stare decisis.
it's ridiculous.
But, says Sotomayor, it's not a stereotype to acknowledge the basic truth that young
people's experiences are shaded by a societal structure where race matters.
Acknowledging there is something special about a student of color who graduates valedictorium
from a predominantly white school is not a stereotype.
Nor is it a stereotype to acknowledge that race imposes certain burdens on students of
color it does not impose on white students.
Now that, those two sentences are disconnected.
She gives a specific example of an experience that a black person might have that might be different than an experience a white person has.
Right?
A black person graduating valedictorian from a white school might have a different experience than a white person graduating valedictorian from a white school.
Sure, and you can explain that in an essay.
Explain how that impacted you.
Okay.
That's not the same thing as, it is not a stereotype to acknowledge that race imposes certain burdens on students of color.
It does not impose on... Yes, it is.
Of course, it's a stereotype.
I mean, I can tell you it's a stereotype.
The only reason that it would not be a stereotype is, ironically, because of affirmative action, which dictates that a black student may have a different educational experience than a white student by law.
The best line in the Sotomayor dissent, and it truly is evil, is what she has to say about Asian-Americans.
Because Asian-Americans, again, are the ones getting skunked by affirmative action.
Quote, There is no question that the Asian-American community continues to struggle against potent and dehumanizing stereotypes in our society.
It is precisely because racial discrimination persists in our society, however, that the use of race in college admissions to achieve racially diverse classes is critical to improving cross-racial understanding and breaking down racial stereotypes.
Woo boy!
So, just to help decode that, she's saying, sure, it's true that we're discriminating against Asians, but it's good discrimination, guys.
We have to discriminate against Asians so everybody understands each other better.
So you, you need to sit over there in the corner because you got the wrong color skin, and that will make all of us understand each other better.
That's what diversity is all about, is you get a 1580 on your SATs, and that dude got a 1200 on his SATs, but he's black, you're Asian, you're out, he's in.
Congratulations, diversity achieved.
I hope you feel better about racial America.
The absolute level of disdain for Asian Americans that is replete in that opinion is just, it's just wild.
Alrighty, so a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in higher education, and the left goes wild.
They are absolutely out of their mind angry over this.
How dare you say the Constitution does not allow us to preference one racial group over another racial group, even though the Constitution explicitly says you're not allowed to preference one racial group over another racial group?
How dare you?
Again, the left's perspective on law is basically that the law is just another tool for power.
Remember, the same left that's constantly declaring its enemies dictatorial?
It's projection.
They really, really love the idea that they ought to be able to use every government authority in order to just do what they want without reference to the actual job of that authority.
So Joe Biden led the way.
By led the way, I mean he stumbled around and drooled on himself.
He yesterday said, this is not a normal court.
It's not a normal... I'm so sick of hearing it's not a normal... Because for you, a normal court is just one that does your bidding.
A normal court is just one that does your bidding.
Stop saying this is not normal when you are absolutely abnormal.
Like physically, mentally, all abnormal.
Supreme Court has thrown into question its own legitimacy.
Is this a rogue court?
This is not a normal court.
Yeah.
Undermining institutional legitimacy every day of the week.
Joe Biden, that's a dude who loves institutional legitimacy while signing executive orders that are patently illegal and ripping into the Supreme Court.
But don't worry, Donald Trump is the threat to democracy and democratic institutions.
Meanwhile, Biden did an interview last night.
He did a 20-minute interview in which he was not asked at all about his son Hunter's corruption and his own likely corruption.
Instead, he was asked a bunch of softballs.
It was on MSNBC, so that's what they do over there.
And he did his best to undermine the court.
You said this court is not normal.
What did you mean?
What I meant with that is it's done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.
And that's what I meant by not normal.
It's gone out of its way to... I mean, for example, take a look at overruling Roe v. Wade.
Take a look at the decision today.
Take a look at how it's How it's ruled on a number of issues that have been precedent for 50, 60 years.
I love when they talk about precedent.
I love it.
It's my favorite thing where they pretend that precedent is something they give absolutely any craps about.
It's such a lie.
Roe vs. Wade overruled all American law for two centuries.
Two centuries.
Obergefell overruled all of American law for two and a half centuries.
And Joe Biden was super happy about that.
Don't give me precedent, like these people give a crap about precedent.
By the way, you shouldn't give a crap about precedent if the precedent is bad.
Plessy vs. Ferguson was precedent also, and then Brown vs. Board overturned it.
It's so irritating.
Whatever brick is behind their back, they just hit you with.
Oh, well, you broke a precedent?
I'm gonna smack you with that.
Wait, the precedent's bad?
I'll smack you with that.
It's ridiculous and silly.
Also, listening to Joe Biden jabber about the law is just amazing.
Here he is mixing up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence because he is no longer sentient.
But you know what?
It's not just because he's old.
It's because he was never sentient.
If you look back to his confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, Some of your former Senate colleagues on the Judiciary Committee would go as far as to say that it's anti-democratic.
coverage of the law that's also been the case.
But it is.
Its value system is different.
And its respect for institutions is different.
And in that sense, it is not as embracing of all Well, I think the Constitution says we hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men and women are created equal, endowed by their Creator.
It's a uniqueness of America.
We never fully lived up to it.
We never walked away from it.
And this Court seems to say that, no, that's not always the case.
I love it.
So many problems with this.
One, he's citing the Declaration.
Literally, the notion that all men and women are created equal, I love how he adds in women, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, means you should not treat them as racial stereotypes.
That's literally what it means.
When you say we didn't live up to our commitment, you know why?
Because we didn't treat people as individuals, we treated them as members of racial castes.
That's why.
How can, I don't even, the Orwellian insanity of citing a sentence like all men are created equal in pursuit of a policy that says black people should be able to score 250 points lower on the SATs than Asian people and get into the same colleges.
How do you even, how do you hold those two thoughts at the same time?
It is not possible.
And I love Nicole Walsh.
Are they anti-democratic?
Of course the Supreme Court is anti-democratic.
That's literally what it does for a living.
What do you think a judicial branch is?
What do you think a judiciary does?
The legislature is the democratic branch of government.
The judiciary is the anti-democratic branch of government because it overrules popularly elected officials.
That's what it does for a living.
Oh, I get irritated about this because not only is it insulting to the intelligence, it's so stupid.
And then here is Joe Biden just babbling nonsensically because, after all, it's a day ending in Y. How did the six get it so wrong?
Well, you know, that's look, remember the Federalist Society when you were in another administration?
In another party.
Yes.
Well, I didn't mean it that way.
It's OK.
But the Federalist Society had a very, very strict construction of the Constitution.
And if it didn't, they used the word, it didn't exist.
But this administration, this court has gone beyond that.
And I just find it, I don't know how to express it, find it just so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people.
And I think that across the board, the vast majority of the American people don't agree with a lot of the decisions this court is making.
Oh, really?
The vast majority of people don't agree.
So I love they call this anti-democratic.
Here is the problem.
It's a lie.
The vast majority of Americans don't like affirmative action.
According to the New York Times yesterday, quote, half of Americans do not support colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions.
Only one third approve the practice.
But apparently it's anti-democratic, according to Joe Biden.
Then he awkwardly walked off the set.
Because this is what we do now.
Because we have a senile old man who is in charge of the most powerful country in the history of the world.
This interview ends, and he just literally gets up and starts hobbling off the set, like Grandpa Simpson, forgetting his hat.
We didn't get a lot, but we got a lot of bipartisan things done.
And now they're running on your bipartisan accomplishments.
Could Nicole Wallace have her lips plastered any further up Joe Biden's ass?
She can taste his colon at this point.
Whether they voted for me or not.
Well, and the ones that didn't vote for your bills, but run on them.
That's right.
Mr. President, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Great to have you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Don't go anywhere.
It's a very exciting day around here.
A good camera angle there as Joe wobbles off the set.
Man, Nicole Wallace, that's some solid reporting there.
Okay, meanwhile, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, he says, well, nothing has changed.
We're just going to continue, you know, along these lines.
Our intent has not changed, which presumably is to stack higher education with people who are unqualified academically, but are of quote-unquote diverse ethnicity.
Here he is.
The president, though, in trying to look forward as we head into a new era, said he wants you as the Department of Education to light the way, to find new areas.
How is that going to look?
How is it going to work?
In a few weeks, we're going to convene a national summit on educational opportunity in response to the SCOTUS decision.
We're going to bring Thought partners and leaders from across the country to discuss this and in the third thing by September We're gonna put together a report and publish a report on the best practices in college admissions To ensure that while the Supreme Court limited our use of a tool to provide diverse learning communities with the intent has not changed and the passion around making sure that students who have been historically
Okay, by the way, plaintiffs are taking down your words as we speak.
Secretary Cardona.
I mean, that'll end up back at the Supreme Court.
Like, in a brief.
You saying, yeah, we know what the Supreme Court said, but we're just going to continue doing what we've always been doing.
Amazing stuff.
Meanwhile, Barack and Michelle Obama are sounding off on this.
Michelle Obama is leading the way.
She is, by the way, she was always far more radical than Barack.
Barack is a very radical person.
Michelle Obama was always way more radical.
She wrote her entire thesis at Princeton University on how discriminated against she was as a black woman at Princeton University.
She had a real rough life.
Princeton University, followed by Harvard Law School, followed by a Kush law firm job, followed by being married to the guy who ended up President of the United States.
I mean, it's been real rough.
Anyway, Michelle Obama writes, quote, back in college, I was one of the few black students
on my campus and I was proud of getting into such a respected school.
So first of all, I know people who are at Princeton at the same time she was, it's not true.
There were a lot of black students on campus.
I knew I'd worked hard for it, but still, I sometimes wondered if people thought I got there
because of affirmative action.
It was a shadow that students like me couldn't shake.
Whether those doubts came from outside or inside our own minds.
Well, I mean, that's because those doubts are true.
I mean, of course people will have doubts about whether you deserve to be there when literally the standard is lowered for people because of their color.
Of course, that's true.
But the fact is this, I belonged.
Well, by whose standard?
Really, by whose standard?
Not by the meritocratic standards, apparently, according to you.
If by I belonged, you mean that you have self-esteem now, I mean, I'm glad you have self-esteem, I suppose.
I'm not so glad that somebody who's better qualified didn't get in because you had to have your self-esteem boost or whatever.
Semester after semester, decade after decade, for more than half a century, countless students like me showed they belonged too.
Well, actually, a ton of them dropped out because they couldn't hack it.
But it wasn't just the kids of color who benefited either.
Every student who heard a perspective they might not have encountered, who had an assumption challenge, who had their minds and their hearts open, gained a lot as well.
Okay, that speaks to life experience.
It does not speak to color.
It wasn't perfect, but there's no doubt it helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb.
Of course, as Michelle Obama, students on my campus and countless others across the country were and continue to be granted special consideration for admissions.
Some have parents who graduated from the same school.
Others have families who can afford coaches to help them run faster or hit a ball harder.
Others go to high school with lavish resources for tutors and extensive standardized test prep that help them score higher on college entrance exams.
We don't usually question if those students belong.
So first of all, I've questioned legacy admissions for literally as long as I've been talking about this.
I don't like legacy admissions.
There's really no point to them.
I assume the idea there is just it's donor-based.
They want people to give donations because this is quote-unquote my family school.
As for student-athletes, student-athletes, that disproportionately benefits people who could not get in academically, and very often those are people of minority ethnicity.
As far as standardized test prep and all the rest of this, a lot of that stuff is now available for free in public schools.
It's just that people do not take advantage of those courses at the same rates by race.
She says, Well, except that, again, the Supreme Court explicitly says that you can say that there is a class distinction between you and the other applicant.
to compete when the ground is anything but level.
Well, except that again, the Supreme Court explicitly says that you can say that there is a class distinction
between you and the other applicant.
I scored 50 points lower on the SAT because I had to teach myself while I was writing to work
because I had to help support my family.
Hey, that goes in an essay and that will help you undoubtedly.
That has nothing to do with race.
So today, says Michelle Obama, my heart breaks for any young person out there who's wondering what their future holds, and what kind of chances will be open to them.
And while I know the strength and grit that lies inside kids who have always had to sweat a little more to climb the same ladders, I hope and I pray the rest of us are willing to sweat a little too.
Today's a reminder, we have to do the work, do the work, not just to enact policies that reflect our values of equity and fairness, but to make those values real in all of our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods.
Except, by giving black kids the opportunity to go to a charter school, Or giving them a school voucher.
Or by breaking the garbage teacher's unions.
Or by making sure that black parents get married at a higher rate.
Or by making sure that black students study more.
All those things we can't do.
What we can do is **** about it.
A lot.
And we can say that Michelle Obama got to go to Princeton because she scored lower on her SATs, but she was black.
And so should you.
Like, don't solve any of the systemic problems that actually lead to the disparity.
Just blame race.
And then Barack Obama put out like a two sentence statement, quote, like any policy, affirmative action wasn't perfect, but it allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged.
Now it's up to all of us to give young people the opportunities they deserve and help students everywhere benefit from new perspectives.
Well, wow, that's, you could prove, you know what's one way to prove you belong at a school?
By scoring appropriately to get into that school.
It's an amazing way to prove you belong to that school.
It really is an incredible thing.
Okay, so Barack and Michelle Obama sounding off.
Gavin Newsom sounded off as well, which is always fun.
The governor of California put out a sweet quote.
They want to whitewash our nation's history.
They want to bring America back to the era of book bans and segregated campuses.
We cannot let them.
Well, I did notice one thing, which is that in your state of California, affirmative action has been banned since 1996, and they re-upped that ban in 2020.
So, why don't you start at home, my friend?
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, who literally touted herself as a Native American despite no Native American background, said, quote, Here's the thing.
Nobody on the left actually thinks racial justice is possible to achieve.
They don't.
back the march toward racial justice and narrowed educational opportunity for all. Here's the thing,
nobody on the left actually thinks racial justice is possible to achieve. They don't,
because the minute that happens, their entire gravy train goes away. That is the big problem.
You have a massive incentive misalignment here.
The same people who are claiming that they wish to pursue racial discrimination in order to end racial discrimination don't want racial discrimination to end because the goal is the means, not the end.
They like the racial discrimination.
It allows them power.
It allows people like Elizabeth Warren to pretend she's fighting for a group of dispossessed youngsters.
Quote, I won't stop fighting for young people with big dreams who deserve an equal chance to pursue their future.
And how about all of those actual Native Americans who didn't make it into school because you were the Native American appointment, Elizabeth?
How about that?
I assume that you took one of their slots.
Meanwhile, Harvard University put out a statement basically saying that they won't comply.
Segregation now, segregation forever.
Dear members of the Harvard community, we write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depends upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.
That principle is as true and important today as it was yesterday.
And then they put out, they talk about how terrible this is, how horrifying all of this is.
That was statement one.
Then they put out a second one, quote, dear members of the Harvard community, a few hours ago, the Supreme Court issued its decision in our admissions case, a decision that carries weight, not only for Harvard as an institution, but for many of us as individuals.
Today is a hard day.
If you're feeling the gravity of that, I want you to know you're not alone.
Oh, oh, well, not alone.
So that is solid stuff.
Okay, so here is the deal.
By the way, I think some of my favorite response here comes from the president of Columbia.
So the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, he says, test scores are discrimination.
You knew they were going in this direction, right?
That if you score poorly on a test, this is because of racism, not because maybe you're not as smart as the guy down the hall who scored 300 points higher.
So we know that standardized test scores were introduced many decades ago.
with the idea that they would help achieve equality of opportunity for students all across the country.
It wouldn't connect, wouldn't depend upon connections, wealth of your family, etc.
You could take the test, and if you did better than people who were well-connected and wealthy, you could get in.
So that was the idea of standardized tests.
Increasingly in the past decade or so, it's become fairly clear to everybody that standardized test scores are a way of reinforcing inequality rather than overcoming it.
So I have a question.
Why are they reinforcing inequality?
As Ballinger says, the entire design of a test is that it is colorblind.
It is literally a question and you answer the question and then you get a score.
So why is it that they have become now racist when they were not racist to begin?
The answer is people are underperforming.
People are underperforming.
Based on race.
And it's not because they are black.
It is because of all the other things that no one wants to actually fix because people on the left don't give a damn about fixing the problem.
All they want to do is b**** about how terrible America is and how racist it is.
Because that is how they gain votes.
Because it turns out, you know, it's a real easy sell to people.
It's not your fault.
It's America's fault.
That's a super easy sell to people.
You know what's a hard sell?
Maybe we ought to break the teachers' unions.
Maybe we ought to fix our public schools.
Maybe we ought to give more local control to parents.
Maybe we ought to teach kids reading, writing, and arithmetic as opposed to garbage CRT, Critical Race Theory.
Maybe you should do all those things.
They don't want to do all those things.
That is their agenda.
Their agenda matters more than the result.
And when the result is ugly, they blame the test score, blame the metric.
This is like deliberately stunting the growth of an entire population by undernourishing them.
And then when you find out that everybody is five inches shorter than they otherwise would have been, you're like, you know, I hate rulers.
Rulers are bad.
I really hate tape measures.
Those tape measures are racist.
Well, maybe it's not the tape measure that's racist.
Maybe it's you.
Because you're the ones who are pursuing these garbage policies.
And then the Columbia president, again, it's amazing.
They're literally saying the things that will then be used in appellate court to challenge their own policies.
Here's Lee Bollinger saying a thing that is not legal.
He says we have to use affirmative action to correct for past discrimination.
That is literally against the opinion of the court.
Here he is.
Brown versus Board of Education was a great moment in American history.
Declaring that the 14th Amendment required equal protection and not separate but equal schooling and other programs in the United States and set off the civil rights era.
That was a great moment.
But that was only about stopping racial discrimination.
Any kind of effort to overcome the effects of racial discrimination are not allowed in his view.
To Justices Jackson and Sotomayor, this is, and Thurgood Marshall in the Bakke case, this is wrong thinking.
That we've had several hundred years of discrimination against African Americans in particular, and we must as a society find means to try to correct for that because they're ongoing.
They haven't stopped.
So we have to grade people by race.
Good luck with this when Columbia's admissions policy comes up for, I'm sure, judicial review inside the next year or so.
Meanwhile, the president of the National Education Association, Rebecca Pringle, of course she doesn't want to actually discuss the actual problems in education.
She's just, again, going to say America's racist.
That's why there's a disparity, not because you, the head of the NEA, one of the worst unions in America, is responsible for the garbage education that black kids are receiving across the country.
What do you think about this, Becky?
How much of an uphill climb is it now if this affirmative action program goes away from a university to actually have a diverse student body?
In every sense of that word, diversity.
So just like your other panelists have said already, the headline for today is Access and Opportunity Denied.
As John just said, we know that we are stronger, our schools are stronger, our communities are stronger, our country is stronger.
When we have spaces that reflect all of the diversity of this country, it's what makes us strong.
And today's decision is taking us backwards.
Yes, judging people based on race.
That's taking us forward.
Saying that we should not judge people based on race, that takes us backward.
Amazing, amazing stuff.
Members of the media doing the same sort of routine.
Al Sharpton, who again, I have no idea why this person is a respected member of the media, when he's one of the worst race baiters in American history, one of the most nefarious racial forces in American modern history.
Here he is talking about how it's a dagger in the back.
What has gone through your mind in terms of how you believe this will affect specifically the African American community?
Well, I think that this is tantamount to sticking a dagger in our back.
Because what they have said now is that it is unconstitutional to even consider race.
And given the racial history of the country, let's not act like blacks are behind because there's something in our genes that made us behind.
It was against the law for us to even read and write until 160 years ago.
Okay, you notice where it says 160 years ago?
That's 160 years ago, my friend.
And so the idea that blacks have not been reading and writing for, you know, almost two centuries is what he's saying right there.
And that's why the disparities exist today.
Weird, because you know what happened with, say, Asian populations who came over here?
They didn't speak English, and now they're destroying these tests.
How about Jewish populations who, when they first arrived in the United States in the early 20th century, were actually considered low IQ because they couldn't read English?
And now, they are performing about one standard deviation.
Ashkenazi Jews perform about one standard deviation above other people on IQ tests.
Is that because of racial inequality and inequity?
Or is it because people learn to read and write?
In other words, discrimination of the past and evils of the past are rectifiable, but only by individuals who actually go and do the work to overcome those objections.
This notion that people are failing today, in 2023, when it is literally illegal for black people to be discriminated against in the United States.
That the failure is because people couldn't read and write 160 years ago?
It's so pathetic on every possible score.
It's not true and it's pathetic.
Perhaps the best media moment of the day yesterday is one of the plaintiffs in this case is an Asian student who was on with Abby Phillip and he just wrecks her.
Abby Phillip is trying to make the case that it would be better if this Asian student weren't able to get into an institution of higher education despite scoring really high on the SATs and he's like, uh, no.
Because of affirmative action, black Americans graduate from law school at the bottom 25% of their classes, largely speaking.
And we don't want that.
We want black students to succeed.
We want every student to succeed.
Low-income students to succeed.
But you have to put them in scenarios in places where they're likely to succeed.
And lowering your standard to admit somebody of a socioeconomic status or race would not help them do that.
In fact, it would harm their graduation rate and excellence.
Well, as the case also points out, the standard isn't necessarily lowered because students are all admitted.
The question is whether race can be an added consideration, a tipping point in some of these cases.
No, the standard is lowered.
The standard is lowered.
The standard is lowered, as the student admissions data shows, an Asian has to score 273 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a Black person.
So the standard is lowered for Black Americans.
Oops!
You're just not going to get around that.
But apparently that's okay.
Because that Asian guy?
After all, he's Asian.
He isn't black.
So if he has to suffer according to the left, well, you know, them's just the breaks.
Them's just the breaks.
And then presumably, a generation from now, then we can, you know, do some affirmative action for Asian people or something.
The never-ending carousel of racial discrimination will continue forever, and it'll just be awesome.
Final take goes to Whoopi Goldberg.
Who, uh, comes up with the dumbest possible answer here.
She says, I don't even know how she- I don't even know how she gets here.
And Whoopi Goldberg, that is a- that is a mind upon which inspiration springs.
My goodness.
When you have a justice who says something as ridiculous as I don't get it, it just makes a kid, an Asian kid, a Native American kid, a black kid feel like you don't matter.
Right.
Like you didn't you don't understand why my struggle is hard or your struggle or your struggle.
You know, is this leading to no women in colleges soon?
Is this leading to no women in college?
Yes, nailed it, Whoopi.
Women constitute a majority of current college and grad school enrollees, by the way.
A sheer majority.
Yeah, nailed it, Whoopi, as per our usual arrangement.
Probably we should put her on the Supreme Court.
Honestly, she can't write an opinion any worse than Ketanji Brown Jackson did.
Alrighty, coming up, we are going to be joined by Coleman Hughes.
He has a great piece on the end of affirmative action today.
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