OPINION:
In 1954, author Darrell Huff published a pithy bestseller, “How to Lie With Statistics.”
Huff’s most notable observation? That “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because two events occurred in tandem, it doesn’t necessarily establish a cause-and-effect relationship.
More generally, Huff cited examples of the misuse of statistics, errors in interpretation and the flawed conclusions that necessarily result from them.
That brings us to the specious assertions from the political left that a Supreme Court remade by President Trump has somehow ushered in “historic defeats” for civil rights.
Those on the left who make this claim arrive at their erroneous conclusion via interpretative errors of the sort that Huff sought to caution against.
Interestingly, Googling “Supreme Court remade by Trump” produces an artificial intelligence “overview” that concurs with the left’s spurious assertions about defeats for civil rights.
“President Trump significantly reshaped the U.S. Supreme Court by appointing three conservative justices … establishing a 6-3 conservative majority. This shift has resulted in a historic rightward turn, frequently siding against civil rights claims for women and minorities.” (Emphasis mine)
You might call that the AI-era equivalent of the cautionary computer adage about “Garbage in, garbage out.”
The left asserts that the Trumpian high court is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in most cases involving women and minorities.
Citing an analysis by three college professors of 1,140 cases since 1953, it claims that since Mr. Trump’s three appointees joined the high court, the share of cases won by the side advocating for an expansion of civil rights has dropped to 44%.
That was said to be down from 74% during the liberal Earl Warren Supreme Court of the 1950s and 1960s.
With all due respect, however, that is at best an apples-and-oranges comparison, because the civil rights issues and legal cases of the 1950s and 1960s bear hardly any resemblance to those of today.
High court cases from that period that rightly challenged segregated schools, literacy tests for voting, separate water fountains and the like are not remotely comparable to today’s so-called civil rights cases. Modern cases involve abortion rights or transgender faux females interloping in girls’ and women’s sports, invading their restrooms or getting themselves transferred to women’s prisons.
Just because the left designates such legal battles as involving “civil rights” doesn’t make them so.
For example, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling against “separate but equal” school segregation in 1954 has nothing in common with 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the supposed constitutional right to an abortion.
Similarly, the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, invalidating state bans on interracial marriage, is not remotely comparable to the high court striking down, in 2023, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, which sought to compel a Christian website designer to create a website for same-sex couples in clear violation of her First Amendment free speech rights (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis).
In the left’s view, the web designer’s civil and First Amendment rights apparently should have taken a back seat to those of same-sex couples.
Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which established a criminal suspect’s rights to remain silent and to have an attorney, is likewise in no way analogous to modern culture war disputes. For instance, the left viewed it as a civil rights defeat when the Supreme Court held that a Maryland county could not prohibit religious parents from opting their children out of public school lessons using LGBTQ books (Mahmoud v. Taylor, 2025).
Nor should a ruling upholding a Tennessee ban on transgender medical treatments for minors in United States v. Skrmetti (also 2025) somehow be considered a loss for civil rights.
Most recently, the left has been denouncing the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down as unconstitutional racial gerrymandering of electoral districts, contending that the ruling represents a “gutting” of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It is no such thing. It is just the opposite.
Ensuring, by law, the election of Black candidates for office through gerrymandering of districts is no more a “civil right” than it would be if it were done to ensure the election of White, Asian or Hispanic candidates.
All told, to suggest parallels between civil rights cases then and now is to diminish those who fought to correct the legal and societal wrongs of six or seven decades ago — and to cheapen those hard-won, legitimate civil rights victories.
In short, the left’s claims of a collective U-turn on civil rights hinge on an “all other things being equal” premise, when in fact they are not equal. Those making such claims would do well to read Huff’s book.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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