The left often attacks Tucker Carlson as a demagogue, but I find that he is mostly on target.  This infuriates the left, as his audience dwarfs its mainstream media outlets, including the sought-after younger viewer demographics.

This spells trouble for Democrats, who have been able to pull the wool over the eyes of younger voters for decades (myself included, in my teens and 20s, with a very brief relapse 10 years ago).  Most young, college-educated people haven't experienced the real world of taxes, inflation, affirmative action, and other challenges of adult life.  The Biden administration's incompetence and wokeness at all costs have thrown cold water on their idealism and naïveté.

That said, it appears that Tucker has had an epiphany spurred on by a far-reaching "equity" policy introduced by Biden last week.

I welcome Carlson's critique of this disgraceful and discriminatory policy, but it's a little late to make a goal-line stand.  Fifty-plus years too late.  Racial and sex-based preference policy is now decades old, and Biden's latest "equity" policy is just the final result of this collective idiocy.

Image: Affirmative Action pricing sign by Eddie~S.  CC BY 2.0.

I submit that my hometown of Rochester, New York, was at the forefront of this movement in the 1960s.  Then-Rochester-headquartered Xerox Corp. was "woke" well before it was fashionable.  In fact, founding CEO Joseph C. Wilson directed Xerox managers to hire unqualified minorities in 1968.  Remember the left's canard that told us that all affirmative action recipients are qualified?  Wilson's memo disproves that lie.

Extreme "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" policies were a long time in the making, much like a slow-moving train wreck.  In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ruling that using race as a criterion in admissions decisions in higher education is constitutionally permissible even though rigid quotas are illegal.  This provided a convenient workaround for admissions officers to give disproportionate weight to race as long as it was considered among other criteria.

Then, in 2003, the Court revisited racial preferences in college admissions in Grutter v. Bollinger.  It's almost laughable today to read what Justice O'Connor stated near the end of the majority opinion: "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest" in student body diversity.

Anyone who follows the preference issue closely knows that racial preferences will not go away without a relentless (and often violent) fight from the left.  Not in 25 years or 250 years.  And in 2023, it appears we were right as advocates double down on the policy.

Today we're told that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is poised to overturn racial preferences in college admissions via two cases: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina.  Let's hope that will come to pass.

Unfortunately, woke university administrators stand ready to disregard the ruling and are working on sleight-of-hand policies that will effectively render the Court's decision toothless.  And that would indeed be a tragic blow against actual equal opportunity for all, in the spirit of the 14th Amendment.

Michael A. Bertolone, M.S., of Rochester, N.Y., is a freelance writer focusing on workplace issues.  His eBook The War on Equality: How Equity is Destroying Our Society is available on Amazon.