Supreme Court challenge to Harvard's affirmative action relies on Holocaust denier: report

A U.S. Supreme Court challenge to Harvard University's affirmative action program is based in part on flawed analysis by a Holocaust denier who publishes neo-Nazi content on his personal website, according to a report.

The six right-wing justices in the majority are widely expected to back the challenge, which draws heavily from a 2012 article by Ron Unz arguing that Jewish applicants were given preferential treatment at Ivy League schools, and rule against the longstanding practice using race as a factor in evaluating students, reported The Guardian.

“The arguments he used about Jews being given favorable admission to Ivy League schools were already being promoted by antisemites and white supremacists to attack affirmative action as discriminating against whites,” said Marilyn Mayo, senior research fellow at the ADL’s Center on Extremism.

The lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) cites the Unz article, The Myth of American Meritocracy, to argue Harvard systematically discriminated against Asian undergraduate candidates by applying a quota system, and that article published in his American Conservative magazine claims Jewish university presidents were biased "in favor of less-qualified Jewish applicants."

Unz, who is ethnically Jewish and also a Harvard graduate, now carries columns from avowed neo-Nazis and other extremists on his Unz Review website and went on Iranian television to complain about "Holocaust worship" and downplayed the number of Jewish people murdered by the Nazi regime.

The SFFA lawsuit doesn't mention his controversial record, statistical experts and mathematicians have criticized the methodology Unz used to support his 2012 article, such as concluding the proportion Jewish participants in the U.S. Math Olympiad team had dropped drastically by counting the number of team members with Jewish-sounding last names.