Affirmative action
February 4, 2025 — Scott Johnson

President Trump has only been in office for two weeks, and yet the world seems to have turned upside down. Among other things, the Trump administration has done everything in its power to advertise to the world that illegal aliens are not welcome. Woo hoo! Duly noted. President Trump has promulgated an executive order repealing the program of racial discrimination that goes under the rubric of affirmative action. Christopher Caldwell
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January 22, 2025 — Scott Johnson

With the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, equal treatment without regard to race became the law of the land — for about 30 seconds. As he shepherded the bill through the Senate, then Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey declared on the Senate floor: “I will eat my hat if this leads to racial quotas.” Humphrey served as vice president at the time President Johnson began the great undoing
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December 22, 2024 — John Hinderaker

Oxford University is undertaking affirmative action, and meeting with resistance. The London Times headlines: “Oxford accused of lowering standards to meet diversity target.” The university intends to admit ten percent of its incoming class on the basis of an “Opportunity Oxford” program that favors applicants from postal codes that are deemed disadvantaged. It is not clear to what extent postal codes are being used as a proxy for race, or
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October 23, 2024 — Steven Hayward

It is a given in the press that as this is the first presidential election since the Dobbs decision struck down Roe v. Wade, it should be a major focus of the campaign. And sure enough the media asks Trump and Vance about abortion as often as possible. But this is also the first presidential election since the Harvard and UNC cases struck down race-based college admissions at long last.
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September 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward

After Brown vs Board of Education was decided in 1954, the Democrat-run segregationist South engaged in “massive resistance,” requiring years of follow-up court cases and Department of Justice action to enforce desegregation. It was understood that after the Supreme Court ruled against race-based affirmative action admissions last year in the Harvard and UNC cases that Democrat-run institutions would engage in massive resistance once again. And already we have the circumstantial
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June 21, 2024 — John Hinderaker

The Wall Street Journal reports that corporate America is backpedaling away from “diversity”: White-collar companies that once championed programs to recruit diverse employees are now tiptoeing away from them. PricewaterhouseCoopers and JPMorgan Chase are among those that recently removed or altered descriptions of their programs for underrepresented students. The shift came after an “anti-woke” movement took aim at U.S. companies and a Supreme Court decision overturned affirmative action in college
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March 16, 2024 — John Hinderaker

This is by David Leonhardt of the New York Times, in that paper’s daily email of yesterday. It is a good example of a liberal confronted by facts that refute his ideology, who can see truth off in the distance but can’t quite get there: Two economists — Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton — embarked on an ambitious project more than a decade ago. They wanted
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January 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson

Speaking of identity politics, as I do in the adjacent post on Claudine Gay, we should note that the left never gives up. That is what occurs to me and it is the place where William McGurn begins his Wall Street Journal column “Making discrimination okay again.” In the column McGurn recounts the efforts of California Democrats to make discrimination by race legal after its apparently decisive legal defeats: Do
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July 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Of course not. The Supreme Court has held that race discrimination in university admissions violates the 14th Amendment and, where it applies, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It isn’t a leap to apply the same principle to faculty hiring and promotion. But that won’t bring an end to racist practices by universities, any more than Brown v. Board of Education automatically ended racist practices in the
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July 16, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Those were the topics for my appearance last night on Sky News Australia’s excellent Outsiders program, as I continued my effort to explain the inexplicable to Aussies. Note the frequent Power Line plugs:
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July 12, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Black “leaders” and their white liberal allies masters are outraged by the Supreme Court’s Harvard and UNC decisions, but this Economist/YouGov poll indicates that more blacks support the decisions than not: Do you approve or disapprove of Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action? White: 65% approve, 23% disapproveHispanics: 45%-30%Blacks: 43%-36% Both sexes, all races, every age group, every level of income. All reject race-based governance. https://t.co/a74PiCnGBh pic.twitter.com/VF2qDVBZ0p — Richard Hanania
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July 10, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Many members of the Biden administration are overmatched in their jobs, beginning with Slow Joe himself. But perhaps no member of the administration is as out of her depth as Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Poor Ms. Jean-Pierre thinks the Constitution guarantees some ethnic groups the right to discrimination in their favor: This is really, really important and I know the American people are really tracking this, as they should be.
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July 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the UNC race discrimination case. Her dissent was a political screed, not a legal argument, and it contained at least one howler that we and many others pointed out. Jackson argued that universities need to discriminate in favor of blacks so that there will be more black doctors. Why? Jackson wrote: For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood
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July 3, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Democrats should take action so they can get back to getting Supreme Court decisions they approve of. How might they do that? Investigate justices (conservative only) for bogus “conflicts of interest,” for one. Impeachment for another: “There also must be impeachment on the table.” Not sure how that is going to happen with Republicans controlling the House, but practicality has never been a concern for AOC. The
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July 1, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer

Liberal reactions to the high profile decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court this week read like a parody account. On Thursday, the Court dealt a blow to affirmative action by invalidating race-based college admissions programs in favor of a merit-based system and the responses from many on the left were downright racist. Rev. Al Sharpton said the decision was “tantamount to sticking a dagger in our back.” He’s saying that blacks
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June 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Scott and Steve have already commented on today’s historic Supreme Court decision, finding that both Harvard and the University of North Carolina have engaged in illegal race discrimination through their affirmative action policies. I will add a few observations, which perhaps will be supplemented when I have had time to read all of the opinions. * The Grutter decision has always been an anomaly. It expressed considerable distaste for affirmative
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June 29, 2023 — Steven Hayward

The Supreme Court’s long expected ruling on the Harvard and University of North Carolina race-based admissions practices was just released. A 6-3 vote, along predictable lines, backs up Chief Justice John Roberts’s very strong opinion, which relies on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. I’m still making my way through the concurrences (Thomas decided to write a long concurrence giving the originalist ground for the ruling, as well
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