Leftwing talk show host Bill Maher invited UNC anti-rape activists Andrea Pino and Annie Clark to his program last Friday. The two were central in getting UNC to reconsider its Title IX complaint response policies, though UNC didn’t resist very hard. They also started a group called End Rape on Campus, and are featured heavily in a controversial new documentary called The Hunting Ground.

Predictably, Clark began by misleading with the thoroughly, completely, tediously debunked statistic that one in five college students are raped on campus. She correctly cited the Department of Justice as the source of that hopelessly flawed statistic, but conveniently omitted much newer data from the same department showing the ratio to be much lower.

She admitted the numbers have been questioned, but that doesn’t really matter, because:

Even, say that statistic’s wrong, and it was one in 20 or one in a hundred. Imagine if one in a hundred students were shot or one in a hundred students had their Apple laptop stolen on campus, what would we be saying about that?

Clark may have had a point here, had she not continued to exaggerate the problem. The DoJ found that the rate, from 1995 to 2013, was actually 6.1 per 1,000, or 0.61 in 100 (or 0.03 in five).

That’s nitpicking, you might say; six people out of every 1,000 students is way too many. But while it is true that even one rape is too many, we have to remember that these activists are particularly concerned with campus rape. The DoJ study found that 7.6 out of every 1,000 nonstudents were raped during the same period. So is there a good reason for policymakers to focus on campus rape? According to the numbers, only if you are more concerned with emotional or politically motivated alarmism than actually solving the problem.

Clark and Pino’s other major concern was that universities are likely to hide rape incidents because it looks bad to prospective students. That’s certainly possible, but the point is diminished when muckrakers, the uncritical media, and the president refuse to put to rest the bogus stat.

See the Real Time interview here: