Another Day, Another Leftist Fraud [With Comments by John on the Democrats’ “One Drop” Rule]

In what could be practically a daily feature, another case of Liberal Ethnic Identity Theft (LEIT-skinned??) has been uncovered. The Daily Caller has the story:

Andrea Smith, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, has started to draw attention in the wake of the Dolezal incident from those who say she has for years falsely claimed to have Cherokee blood. The case is arguably much more significant, though, because while Dolezal was a relatively undistinguished academic at Eastern Washington University, Smith is recognized as a significant scholar in her field. She routinely appears as a featured scholar at major events and has written books that were well-received by her colleagues (though others may question the broader worth of works like Conquest: Sexual Violence And American Indian Genocide).

Her career has largely been defined by her supposed American Indian identity. Besides her academic work, she also helped create the organization INCITE!, which describes itself as a collection of “radical feminists of color.” She’s also been active in the Indian group Women of All Red Nations (WARN).

There’s more, but you know the rest: the dissembling, the claim that it really doesn’t matter, etc. How long before we get the new cliché that Smith “presents” as native American? Three, two. . .

Meanwhile, I had missed the news from Retraction Watch a couple weeks ago of another major retraction by Nature magazine, once again for faked data:

A team of Columbia University biologists has retracted a 2013 Nature paper on the molecular pathways underlying Alzheimer’s disease, the second retraction from the group after a postdoc faked data.

An April report from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found the a first author, former Columbia postdoc Ryousuke Fujita, responsible for “knowingly and intentionally fabricating and falsifying research in seventy-four (74) panels” in three papers: a 2011 Cell paper retracted in 2014, an unpublished manuscript, and this now-retracted Nature paper, “Integrative genomics identifies APOE e4 effectors in Alzheimer’s disease.”

I also skipped noting the growing case that sociologist Alice Goffman, author of a widely acclaimed book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, may well have fabricated much of her story—or worse: she may have been complicit in the commission of some felonies. The New Republic is on this one:

A careful reading of On the Run, however, leaves me with vexing questions about the author’s accuracy and reliability. There are just too many incidents that seem unlikely to have occurred as she describes them. One must try to keep an open mind about such things—especially regarding someone as obviously gifted and dedicated as Goffman—so readers may disagree with me about the extent of her embellishments. In any event, there is a bigger problem. As I will explain below, Goffman appears to have participated in a serious felony in the course of her field work—a circumstance that seems to have escaped the notice of her teachers, her mentors, her publishers, her admirers, and even her critics.

The New Rambler offers addition problems with Hoffman’s book.

Oh, and more trouble for Michael LaCour. (The underlying paper this story is based on is here—PDF file).

The intellectual left: fakes and frauds all the way down.

JOHN adds: One might think that if you are going to make a career out of being an Indian, you would have to look like an Indian. Not so. Andrea Smith looks considerably whiter than Rachel Dolezal:

andrea_smith-e1436204666747

In this respect, Smith resembles the Left’s darling, Elizabeth Warren, who claimed, apparently falsely, to be 1/32 Indian. The real question is, why on Earth should anyone care whether one of Warren’s great-great-great-grandparents was a Native American? What significance could that claim have to Harvard, whether true of false, so as to justify counting her as one of its “professors of color”? And, since the term is obviously meaningless, why should anyone care how many “professors of color” Harvard has?

The same goes for Andrea Smith. How does having, ostensibly, a remote Indian ancestor make her an authority on all things Native American? Why should anyone take her more seriously than another scholar, because one great-great-grandparent (or whatever) allegedly was a Cherokee? The concept is frankly disgusting.

In the 19th century, the Democratic Party adhered to the “one drop” rule–one drop of African blood was enough to contaminate a person. Apparently the Democrats never changed their racist minds, it’s just that now the one drop is a ticket puncher. Could this party get any sicker?

Higher education is intellectually bankrupt in a number of ways, but this must be one of the worst.

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