Why The Media Will Never Tell You 85 Percent Of Americans Oppose Race-Based College Admissions

Why The Media Will Never Tell You 85 Percent Of Americans Oppose Race-Based College Admissions

Mainstream media conveniently downplay or even ignore this fact in story after story on the ins and outs of race-based admission processes in colleges.

 Warren Henry By Warren Henry

This week, Harvard University went to trial over the claim it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. Affirmative action moved back onto the main stage of American politics, particularly as this is an issue where replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy with Justice Brett Kavanaugh could make a difference at the Supreme Court. Yet the political discussion of this hot-button issue again proceeds with little recognition of a basic fact: racial preferences in college admissions are wildly unpopular.

Eighty-five percent of Americans oppose considering race in the college admissions process, according to “Hidden Tribes,” a recent report from the left-of-center group More in Common. Of the seven “tribes” identified in the report, racial preferences were supported only by progressive activists, the furthest-left 8 percent of Americans. Ironically, progressive activists are almost the least diverse of the tribes, except the furthest-right 6 percent.

Only 40 percent of progressive activists oppose racial preferences in college admissions. But among traditional liberals (a group comprising 11 percent of Americans), 72 percent oppose racial preferences. Passive liberals (15 percent), who have more African-Americans, women, and younger people than average, are several points even less supportive.

Nor is the “Hidden Tribes” polling an outlier. In September, public television’s WGBH published a poll finding 72 percent of adults disagreed with prior Supreme Court rulings allowing colleges to consider race in making admissions decisions. Indeed, racial preferences were disapproved by majorities of black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents in the survey.

As the disapproval from minority groups suggests, the rejection of the policy does not appear to be solely the product of prejudice. In the WGBH poll, 86 percent of respondents opined that campus diversity is at least a somewhat important goal. Similarly, in the “Hidden Tribes” polling, 81 percent of Americans believe there are serious problems of racism in the country, with 75 percent agreeing that acts of racism are at least somewhat common.

In short, there is a broad consensus among Americans that racism remains a problem and that campus diversity is important. Yet there is an even broader consensus that racial preferences in college admissions should not be the solution to that problem.

Of course, the fact that only 15 percent of Americans support affirmative action policies at institutions like Harvard does not necessarily make these schools wrong. What is popular is not always right, and vice versa.

However, it is fair to say that a position as unpopular as using racial preferences in college admissions should be considered a controversial, non-mainstream position. Instead, however, the public discussion of affirmative action, particularly in the media, tends to follow the tired convention that a “controversial” position is one held by conservatives, not by establishment journalism.

The New York Times, for example, will describe affirmative action in college admissions as “a major – and highly contentious – legacy of the civil rights era, and one that white conservatives have opposed for decades.” The broad and increasing unpopularity of the policy is rarely, if ever, news that’s fit to print. The Washington Post’s supposedly “straight” news coverage similarly insinuates that opposition to racial preferences is largely an exercise in white identity politics.

When The Washington Post, NPR, or CNN publish features purporting to tell their readers what they need to know about racial preferences in education, somehow they never get around to mentioning that the vast majority of Americans now oppose them. Accounts of the dueling rallies ahead of the Harvard trial, from the Boston Globe to The Atlantic, similarly avoid this inconvenient truth. Instead, given the nature of the allegations against Harvard, it is common to find – from The New Yorker to Vox to Teen Vogue – articles by Asian-Americans defending racial preferences.

The effect of this extensive web of denial in American journalism is to completely invert the public discourse. The typical media consumer would tend to conclude racial preferences in education are not merely legal, but also broadly popular, opposed only by a narrow faction of closet Klansmen who run the Republican Party.

In reality, this distortion of public opinion empowers a small number of progressive activists, inside and outside the establishment media, in their attempt to short-circuit honest debate. If opponents of racial preferences can be dismissed with ad hominem attacks of racism or racial insensitivity, progressives are never required to answer the sorts of questions they otherwise would be required to face.

The initial question progressives get to avoid is why Americans now oppose racial preferences in education. Is it simply the moral sense that racial discrimination is wrong, even when the left might see it as benign? Is it the sense that such preferences often stigmatize their beneficiaries?

Progressives would also be forced to answer questions about the efficacy of racial preferences. Do racial preferences mismatch minority students and schools in ways that set up students to fail? Do they stoke the growing grievance culture on American campuses? If schools like Harvard are using race as “only one factor among many” in the admissions process, why do they simultaneously argue that removing this marginal factor would have apocalyptic effects on campus diversity?

In a more honest debate, we would hear more from critical legal theorists like Randall Kennedy, who is skeptical of the social science rationale for diversity on campus and wonders how it can be a “compelling state interest” for legal purposes only “so long as the demands and expectations imposed on it are not too onerous.” Kennedy argues for affirmative action as a form of reparations – a rationale long rejected by the Supreme Court, but one far more consistent with the policy as originally promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

As Joy Pullmann recently wrote: “It says something about the left that they are not confident enough in their ideas to subject them to a free and open hearing aimed at honest persuasion, but instead seek to coerce people into compliance through political correctness and other social manipulations.”

Political correctness is the theory. The establishment’s warped discussion of racial preferences is the practice.

Warren Henry is the nom de plume of an attorney practicing in the State of Illinois.

Academia affirmative action Asian Americans Brett Kavanaugh discrimination Harvard University higher education minorities quotas race quotas race-based admissions Racial Discrimination racial quotas Supreme Court The New York Times The Washington Post

Global warmists predict disaster in 10 years... again

By Jay Baler



Cooling, exonerating, slowing down, recanting and forswearing the most warmist, blaming, blowhardest, assaultive and attention-seeking fakeries in the week's fake news.

Global warmists predict disaster in 10 years… again

The nonsensical histrionics of the global warming alarmists are apparently nearing critical mass. In its Sunday edition, the fake news Washington Post greeted us with this alarming headline: The world has just over a decade to get climate change under control, U.S. scientists say. 

The article states:

The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take "unprecedented" actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change. With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world's second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a "rapid and far-reaching" transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found. "There is no documented historic precedent" for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in a report requested as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

The article went on to tell us that we had no more than 10-14 years to do something — but left unsaid was that that something meant stripping America of its wealth and making it a Third World backwater. Otherwise, global temperatures will rise 1.5-2 degrees, which will make parts of southwest Asia "literally uninhabitable," decrease the availability of food crops by half, bleach coral reefs, melt the Arctic, destroy the Amazon rain forest, melt the Siberian tundra which would release planet-warming methane from its depths, melt Greenland and Antarctic glaciers and, of course, flood the coastal regions.

That would be horrible news if true. Unfortunately for the U.N., this is simply a repeat of a U.N. prediction from almost 30 years ago. One, we note, that shows no signs of being remotely true.

Headlined, U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked, the article appeared in The Associated Press on June 30, 1989.

Back then, a senior U.N. official said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if "the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000."

Noel brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP), said coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ?eco- refugees," threatening political chaos.

Brown predicted melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, flooded coastal regions, ecological refugees and 1930s Dust Bowl-like conditions.

The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth's temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

Yet here we are, 29 years later, and none of Brown's predictions have come to fruition. And, as we told you before, global average temperatures are the same today as they were in 1988. And temperatures in 1988 were the same as they were in the early 1800s. We said it then. We'll say it today. There. Is. No. Global. Warming.

That temperatures are rising and man is the cause is fake news. Anyone telling you any different is either an ignoramus or is scamming you.

But it's Trump's fault

The Los Angeles Times couldn't resist taking the afore-mentioned U.N. report on global warming to take a potshot at President Donald Trump. In its reporting on the U.N. global warming scaremonging, The Times zinged Trumpas a "global outlier in terms of climate change" because he "rejected the 2015 Paris agreement signed by 195 nations to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, expressed skepticism about human-caused climate change and vowed to increase coal-burning."

But as the New York Post notes, the U.S. is the country that has reduced carbon emissions the most since 2015. U.S. carbon emissions are down by 0.5 percent, even though the American economy grew by 3 percent over that time.

Of the 25 nations that signed onto the treaty, only five have managed to reach even 50 percent of their pollution-reduction promise.

After seeing the report, French President Emmanuel Macron — a major champion of the Paris accord — sent out an interesting tweet.

It said, "The report is #GEIC scientifically proven: we have all the cards in hand to fight global warming. But everyone has to act now!"

By "everyone," Macron apparently means everyone but France, which hasn't come close to meeting it's climate promises under the accord. In fact, all the European Union countries are failing to meet their promises under the accord. Funny that the Times didn't mention that.

But that's precisely why Trump declined to participate. He accurately predicted that all the other countries would cheat, leaving Americans saddled with higher taxes and higher energy bills and an uneven playing field in the global economy.

Hurricane Michael was fake news

No, not the hurricane itself, which was very real. Especially if you were in its path. But claims that it was the third most powerful hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast are turning out to be fake news.

As it approached landfall we were told repeatedly that its winds were sustained 150-155 mph, ranking it near the top for fiercest storm to hit the U.S. But recorded wind gusts in the storm's path don't bear that out.

The top wind gust reported at Tyndall Air Force Base was 129 mph (or 119 mph, depending on whether you're using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chart or The Weather Channel's graphic. Panama City's top wind gust was 116 mph. At Mexico Beach, said to be in the storm's bullseye at landfall, the top recorded gust was 104 mph. Other stations in Panama City recorded top gusts of 94 and 78 mph. And NOAA reported these gusts while simultaneously stating sustained winds were 150 mph. That's impossible.

In saying this we're not trying to diminish the hurricane's impact — which is incredible — but to point out that what you're being told is not and cannot be true.

Our hearts and prayers go out to those whose property was damaged or destroyed and those who were injured, and especially to the family members of those who lost their lives.

What we learned from the Kavanaugh hearing

If there's one thing we learned from the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, it's that girls don't lie about sexual assault and should be believed whenever they make accusations against a man. After Christine Blasey Ford "credibly accused" Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her, the FBI couldn't find a single solitary bit of corroborating evidence for her story. On top of that, she contradicted herself — and her legal team and her therapist — during her testimony. Still, the MSM — and most politicians — determined her story was "credible."

So given that we know that girls don't lie, we find the story about the Seneca Valley "mean girls" who were named in a lawsuit for falsely accusing a boy of multiple rapes to be fake news and proof that the patriarchal American society exists and all women are victims and boys don't have to be from wealthy families to be exonerated of rape.

If you missed the story, last week the parents of a teenage boy in Pennsylvania filed suit against five "mean girls," alleging they "conspired in person and via electronic communication devices to falsely accuse T.F. of sexual assault on two occasions."

According to the lawsuit, one girl accused the boy, identified in the lawsuit only as T.F., of sexually assaulting her at a pool in July 2017 where T.F. worked as a lifeguard. The girl's story was corroborated by another girl who also worked as a lifeguard and who claimed she was present when the assault occurred. After the charges were made, T.F. was fired from his lifeguard job. The next March, T.F. was charged with sexually assaulting a girl that he had walked home from school. Three girls corroborated that girl's story.

T.F. was subsequently charged with multiple crimes, spent time in juvenile detention and later confined to his home.

But this summer the girls' stories began to unwind. They finally recanted. All of them confessed to making up the story because they didn't like T.F. and "would do anything" to get him fired from his job and "expelled from school."

In other words, the one thing we learned from the Kavanaugh hearing turned out to be fake news.

But they said girls don't lie…

Not only do straight girls sometimes lie, but so do lesbians.

Ohio University student Anna Ayers, who is also a member of the OU Student Senate, was arrested this week and charged with three counts of "making false alarms" after she told campus police that she had received three threatening messages because she was a lesbo and member of the LGBTQ community. The messages she received were said to have included death threats and "expressed extreme hatred… because of who I am." They came to her at the Student Senate office and her residence.

The OU campus newspaper played up the story, and the school of journalism expressed support for her in her time of distress.

But it only took the campus police a few days to determine the story was fake. Ayers had sent the notes to herself prior to making the report to police.

According to a news release from the OU police department, making false claims is a first degree misdemeanor carrying a maximum penalty of six months in jail and $1,000 fine.