The leftist meltdown over the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling over affirmative action, striking down those protocols in the college admission process as unconstitutional. Unlike the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe, this decision has been chiefly curtailed to the confines of liberal newsrooms and the most left-wing faculty lounges in higher education. To be blunt, no one cared about it because most agreed with the Court’s decision, even Black Americans. While a short emotional outburst, we’ve moved on, though liberals probably have not recognized that the nation, overall, doesn’t feel that race and ethnicity should be considered in these applications. Still, even some on the Court penned nonsense, like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent that contained statistical figures that didn’t comport with reality—literally.
Only in Willy Wonka’s laboratory could this piece of data fly in the face of reality. Justice Jackson recused herself from Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College but would hear arguments for a separate related case: Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. Of course, Jackson dissented, but one line stood out, and it’s a whopper. Ted Frank, a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in the Harvard case (via WSJ):
Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”
A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.
How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.
The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).
The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)
Justice Jackson isn’t the only one afflicted with this condition that has impacted most liberal Americans: making stuff up. There is no middle. Even when the Left is ranting about real things, they’re so trivial and niche that it portrays them as suffering from ‘boy, who cried wolf, or, if you will: ‘non-gender specific person crying wolf.’ It’s why most of the time, leftist advocacy doesn’t move beyond their circles. You can’t be credible if you lie, manufacture statistics, or, even worse as a sitting Supreme Court justice, misread a study that forms the core of your dissenting opinion, which may or may not be revisited years from now to revise existing law. The Left conjures up fake studies and figures because many of their priorities, which they’re most passionate about, aren’t popular. You can add affirmative action to that list.
In the meantime, the Left will drool over her dissent even though it's flawed.