There is a strange pattern among liberals: over and over again they seem compelled for some reason to embellish their personal stories with exaggerations and falsehoods, apparently in an effort to make themselves seem more authentic. Like Hillary Clinton claiming she had been named for British mountaineer Edmund Hillary after his conquest of Mt. Everest, even though that event occurred after Hillary was born. Or claiming that she landed “under fire” in Bosnia. Or Bill Clinton claiming first-hand recollections of fires at black churches when he was growing up in Arkansas, when a check of the historical record finds there were none during the time period he claimed. Or NBC’s Brian Williams. About Al Gore’s serial exaggerations an entire book could be written, and Joe Biden’s falsehoods would require several volumes, with a separate appendix for his plagiarisms.
The latest such example is President Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Turns out she’s a fan of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, and I certainly hope she is asked in detail about these views in her confirmation hearings.
Never mind the issues of her views on CRT for the moment. Two years ago she gave a lecture embracing CRT at the University of Michigan Law School, which includes a curious detail in this passage:
Dr. Janet Bell’s late husband, Professor Derrick Bell, who was a civil rights lawyer and the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard Law School, wrote a book in the early 1990s about the persistence of racism in American life that he entitled “Faces At the Bottom of the Well.” My parents had this book on their coffee table for many years, and I remember staring at the image on the cover when I was growing up; I found it difficult to reconcile the image of the person, who seemed to be smiling, with the depressing message that the title and subtitle conveyed. I thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years when I started preparing for this speech, because, before the civil rights gains of the 1960s, black women were the quintessential faces at the bottom of the well of American society, given their existence at the intersection of race and gender — both of which were highly disfavored characteristics.
The boldfaced passages are the odd part. Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well was published in 1992, when Judge Jackson was 22, when she was working at Time magazine. It is impossible that her parents had the book on their coffee table “when I was growing up,” unless she was still “growing up” at age 22. It is also impossible that she “thought about this book cover again for the first time in forty years” when the book is only 30 years old today. Judge Jackson is 51 years old; the math doesn’t add up here. Judge Jackson even notes the book was written “in the early 1990s,” yet somehow this basic chronology doesn’t interfere with her subsequent claims in the same paragraph.
Perhaps she simply mis-remembers, in the same way that Joe Biden mis-remembered that he was not, in fact, descended from coal miners, or mis-remembered that Robert Kennedy had said the same things Biden did 20 years later. Funny how these kind of “mis-rememberings” among liberals all skew the same direction—toward aggrandizing their personal “narratives.”
Or maybe people who embrace the creed that truth is relative, and that the world can be bent endlessly to our own good will and idealism, who think the most important thing is “the narrative,” don’t think it’s a big deal to make stuff up in service of their cause. The point is, Judge Jackson appears to be another phony.
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