Interviewing Elon Musk this week, former CNN host Don Lemon demonstrated the real-life consequences of affirmative action.
Interestingly enough, Lemon himself is an affirmative action beneficiary who miraculously hung on at CNN despite committing one moronic gaffe after another (maybe he's just got television magic!). The only CNN on-air personality to handle himself worse was Jeffrey Toobin.
Lemon was baffled by Musk's claim that "if we lower standards for what it takes to become a board-certified surgeon ... then more people will die than if we don't lower the standards, therefore we should not lower the standards."
This was apparently Lemon's first encounter with the logical sequence known as a "syllogism."
Lemon's response: "Do you understand how by saying just that standards are being lowered that you're implying that they're being lowered because people are less skilled and less intelligent, and you're talking about people of color?"
What on Earth do liberals think "affirmative action" is? (And when I say "liberals think," of course, I'm speaking figuratively.)
Does Lemon understand that when universities fight like wildcats to hide their black students' SAT scores, they are also kind of implying blacks are less skilled and less intelligent?
Last year, during the part of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit known as "discovery," Harvard University finally coughed up the data. If -- you'll pardon the expression -- "newsman" Lemon had followed the news, he would know precisely how much standards had been lowered for black students.
Applicants in the top "academic decile" (GPA plus standardized test scores) were accepted in the following percentages: Asians: 13%; Whites: 15%; Blacks: 56%. Perhaps more jaw-dropping, in the fifth academic decile -- not quite Harvard material -- the percentages were: Asians: 2% (musicians); Whites: 3% (football players and Jared Kushner); Blacks: 22%.
People who've been paying attention were shocked. Good lord, who are the 44% of blacks in the top academic decile who DON'T get into Harvard? What kind of horrendous character defect do they have? Do they all submit "Cill My Landlord" as their personal essay? How can it not be 100%?
Nonetheless, Lemon asked Musk, "Why do you think they're lowering the standards for minority doctors?" To his credit, at no point did Lemon cry out, "I thought we agreed there'd be no math during this interview!"
The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald has been documenting the total abandonment of standards at medical schools for years. Before choosing your heart surgeon, you might want to review the statistics she's laid out most recently in her book, "When Race Trumps Merit."
In 2021, the average white score on the MCAT was at the 71st percentile. The average black score was at the 31st percentile.
Whereupon medical schools began dropping the MCAT altogether. Henceforth, some students (guess who?) would be offered admission on the basis of their "strong appreciation of human rights and social justice," as The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai puts it. In other words, would-be physicians can now skip those chapters on chemistry and physiology as long as they watch the Source Awards.
The lowered standards persist throughout medical training. Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), given after the second year of medical school, allows students to begin practicing medicine and "matches" them to a residency. But it seems that the average score for black students is a full standard deviation below the score for whites and Asians.
Although the test is multiple-choice and graded by computer, in January 2022, the USMLE dropped grades for Step 1 and converted it to "pass/fail."
So now, instead of medical students being matched to specialties that play to their strengths, they are randomly assigned to residencies for which they may have little aptitude or interest. You know, the same way they assign on-air talent at CNN. It's a brilliant way for training the next generation of doctors.
Also, starting next year, open-heart surgery will be graded "pass/fail."
Responding to Musk's claim that the "probability that someone will die I think at some point is high," Lemon said, "but that's a hypothetical that doesn't mean it's happening."
In fact, it already has happened, countless times, all over the country -- but notoriously, to the most famous affirmative action doctor of all: the black applicant who took Allan Bakke's place at the medical school of the University of California at Davis. Here was an incompetent black doctor whose medical errors couldn't be brushed under the rug, though affirmative action proponents did their best.
Dr. Patrick Chavis openly admitted that he never would have gotten into medical school without UC Davis' affirmative action program. Sen. Teddy Kennedy, The New York Times and the Nation magazine all touted Chavis as an affirmative action success story! Unlike Bakke, who went to work at the Mayo Clinic, Chavis was serving a disadvantaged community and "making a difference in the lives of scores of poor families," as Sen. Kennedy said.
Yes, he was making a difference in his patients' lives, mostly by shortening them. Dr. Chavis' liposuction surgery left one patient bleeding, vomiting and urinating uncontrollably. But instead of taking her to a hospital, he let her bleed in his home for another 40 hours. By the time she managed to escape and check herself into a hospital, she'd lost 70% of her blood. (To be fair, she looked amazing when bikini season rolled around!)
Miraculously, she lived, as did most of his other liposuction patients who ended up in the emergency room. One, Tammaria Cotton, did not.
But the affirmative action cover-up can never end: It took the California medical board a year to suspend Dr. Chavis' license, with patient advocates screaming bloody murder at such a pathetically slow response.
You think Bakke could have killed a patient to so little fanfare?
The New York Times took no notice of the affirmative action doctor's grisly liposuctions, except a brief notation in his obituary years later, after he was gunned down in an attempted carjacking. In paragraph 7, the Times extravagantly described Chavis' medical malpractice thus: "He was accused of mistreating eight liposuction patients, one of whom died."
Or, as Lemon repeated on autoplay: "There's no actual evidence of what you're saying."
Then there was Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in South Central Los Angeles -- or "Killer King," as the locals dubbed it. A "symbol of justice and political power to many black people," as the Los Angeles Times put it in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, "the majority of its staff has always been black."
"Entire departments," the Times investigation found, "are riddled with incompetence, internal strife and, in some cases, criminality. Employees have pilfered and sometimes sold the hospital's drugs; chronic absenteeism is rampant; assaults between hospital workers are not uncommon."
Despite having "abnormally high salaries for ranking doctors," Killer King paid out "more per patient for medical malpractice" than any of the state's 23 other public hospitals or medical centers.
So there's loads of "evidence" that affirmative action kills, despite the best efforts of our universities, medical system and media to hide it. Of course, if you mention the evidence, you'll be called a "white supremacist."
See? No evidence.