# The Good, the Bad, and the Trumpy ![rw-book-cover](https://wsrv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmegaphone.imgix.net%2Fpodcasts%2F1fccde54-6a35-11ef-93fe-d795ffc11fb1%2Fimage%2Fe288fc0cb8ba60d7ddd4ce5fa749c1ab.jpg%3Fixlib%3Drails-4.3.1%26max-w%3D3000%26max-h%3D3000%26fit%3Dcrop%26auto%3Dformat%2Ccompress&w=100&h=100) ## Metadata - Author: [[The Commentary Magazine Podcast]] - Full Title: The Good, the Bad, and the Trumpy - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2cd8565c-c017-4382-96d0-bc3876cbd40b ## Highlights - **Affirmative Action Quiet Period** - Affirmative action in higher education has been the subject of major litigation and public debate. - It quieted down for about 25 years due to private sector consensus to avoid the culture war. Transcript: John Podhoretz And that to the extent that it could humor and satisfy activists on the affirmative action side, it would do so. And therefore, a lot of the heat and force kind of dissipated. And the only place that you saw litigation, have seen litigation over the last 20 years, is in higher education, led by my dear Fred Ed Bloom, who has been the key leader of this, from the Michigan case in 2003 to the Texas case in 2010 and to the affirmative action case in 2023 that was the Harvard and North Carolina cases in which the idea is, no, you are not allowed, particularly If you are a state school, but even if you're not a state, you are not allowed to make these decisions based on race. It is a violation of the – that was the argument, and it wasn't fully implemented as an argument until the Asian students' decision in the Harvard case. But this has been very quiet after literally 25 years of it being a central issue. But as Abe says, just because it stopped being a central issue because nobody talked about it and because Americans lost the vocabulary to say hey you know what this is not fair like ([Time 0:40:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1035c409-a03f-4914-bcae-06e4d5f13ce6))