Terrific explanation of the social pendulum swinging back one way in response to the prior excessive swings in the other direction:
"In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic's editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life."
"The fact that there existed for 10 years an active campaign of discrimination against young white males is no doubt politically radicalizing for some of them.""The fact that there existed for 10 years an active campaign of discrimination against young white males is no doubt politically radicalizing for some of them."
This is all very bad. The last thing our country needs is a young, white, male conservative movement that argues for identity-based revanchism. As the hangover from the decade of DEI finally wears off, we should get back to the libertarian/classically liberal approach to hiring, admissions, and the like: colorblindness and the rejection of affinity group-based characterization in favor of individual merit and achievement.
I get the concern: when people feel targeted, it can push them toward reaction politics, and that’s bad.
But the article (and this comment) makes a jump: big shifts in who shows up in a few elite, gatekept industries don’t prove a coordinated “10-year campaign” to discriminate against white millennial men.
Even in Soave’s telling, the people who actually ran things mostly didn’t lose their seats. The “corrections” got concentrated at the entry level: internships, junior roles, first breaks.
And “just go back to colorblind” isn’t neutral at all. After SFFA, some elite schools saw sharp demographic swings, not because “merit changed,” but because old advantages snap back when rules designed to even the playing field change. #1311550
Related labor data point: White unemployment ~3.7–3.9 while Black unemployment moved 6.4 → 8.3 over the same window. #1347880
I know you and @Undisciplined had a back and forth about how to explain those employment numbers.
But I also think that if it is due to Trump policies, then this is a good argument for why we shouldn't rely on policy for building a fairer society. If one group relies on policy to improve their situation, well that policy can change at the drop of a hat.
In general, in almost all aspects of life, I think people should stop looking to government as a solution. Government's role should be very limited, primarily restricted to the arena of preventing violence and theft as a means for people to get what they want.
I agree policy can change fast, and betting your whole future on government is not a good idea. It can backfire hard. We saw that with the crack vs. powder era: harsh sentencing and enforcement fell hardest on Black communities while other drug use was framed and treated very differently.
But that’s not an argument for “stop using policy.” It’s an argument for fighting for durable, fair rules and protections, building laws and institutions that don’t collapse the moment power flips.
The whole “Second Reconstruction” point is that fairness required policy: federal enforcement and voting protections are why rights became real in practice. And when the Court removed those guardrails, the result wasn’t “neutral freedom”. It opened the door for states to rewrite the rules. #1288677
Also, “colorblind” language has often been used as moral cover to roll back civil-rights protections while claiming it’s just equality.
So yes, we don’t worship government. But “government should only stop violence and theft” is too thin: rights can be stripped without a punch being thrown, just by changing rules. And we know how that goes.
Fair, I think there's room for reasonable disagreement on the necessary extent of government intervention.
Awww those poor little white men, they're so abused and disadvantaged!! Maybe they need a hug and a safeeee spaceee??
I guess you missed the point.
no, they don't need a hug and a safe space and neither does anyone else, and neither do you but you seem too afraid to use a real handle to write your comments.
fuck off bro
Let him cook. He's a better source of motivation than anything we could write.
Its more broad than just hiring. I remember when it started in my field, tech. In the early 2010s I realized what was going on.
Most people had no problem with women or "diverse" people being encouraged to enter STEM and with those who had something to share from their experience speaking at events. Of course I saw some discrimination and poor behaviour. The thing was, I had seen it in much worse conditions in other industries.
Never the less, I supported diversity efforts in the beginning before it became clear what it was really about for the loudest and most hateful. Control.
I was on committees where no women applied to speak at events. Even when we reached out to them. When we didn't have many women even applying for jobs. Did that matter? Nope. Organizer were shamed and called names. Those that defended themselves were attacked even more.
It became clear that there was an anti male, anti white group that wasn't driven by a desire to have fairness. They wanted to dominate.
Initiatives to encourage diversity turned into quotas. Any event or company that practices non-discrimination was shamed. I was opposed to the small minority of female hating men in tech, but I recall making a prediction back then.
These radicals are going to create what they claim to hate. I don't believe the tech industry is especially discriminatory or sexest. Sure, it has people in it so that does exist. But it was much worse in industrial workplaces and other industries. Tech was actually pretty good considering.
When you start calling well meaning men sexists, homophobes, and racists a certain percentage of them will just say, OK. If this is what I get for being nice. Then why be nice. There people are not good actors. These groups should be excluded.
Of course this is just the mirror of the DEI movement. Many times I have heard nonsense like minorities can't be racist. Having grown up in a very diverse community I knew that was nonsense. Everyone has prejudices and every group has their stereotypes. The urge to be reactionary is hard to resist. That's what the author is pointing out here. Pendulums swing and when you go to far and are uncharitable you poison the well. You often create what you claim to hate.
Decided to make this its own post with more thoughts.
#1367050
I don’t want that any more than Robbie does, but the whole bundle of hysterical left-wing bullshit was “the last thing this country needed”.
The overcorrection is still a welcome correction.
Indeed. It will mellow over time.
that's correct(!)
I wrote about the source article by Jacob Savage in my newsletter, but to recap, this overt discrimination against young white men explains for me why Gen Z men have turned so hard right and why the outputs from those industries he mentions (academia, hollywood and media) are such crap these days.
Two other points.
First, this has been happening for middle and lower class white men for decades already. Adam Carolla talks about how he had to wait 7 years to get an interview to become a firefighter in California back in his 20's, which a black woman got one in a few days. It took a talented writer from the upper class getting screwed for this unfair practice to get truly noticed.
Second, this is how institutions crumble and I don't think there's anything that will save these industries suffering from self-inflicted wounds. Fewer people go to college, fewer people watch hollywood slop and fewer people watch the news. The alternatives where the talented go will become much more prominent in the next decades.
Indeed. It is so obvious to me and has been for over a decade. I remember where I was when I really got it. It's a pattern in human behaviour.
the old institutions/centers of intellectual power just wither away, and we rebuild them elsewhere...?
I mean, haven't they been for the last decade? And it's going to get worse when the leftover talented old white men retire or die in these institutions.
If you want a preview of the economic consequences of DEI, check out South Africa's race-based hiring laws and it's economic trajectory.
72 categories of employers each with their own race-based and gender-based hiring quotas.
Every business with >50 employees has to comply or face large fines.
view on www.youtube.comThe author of the original piece "The lost generation", Jacob Savage, wrote a similar article a few years ago but from the jewish perspective (title: The erasure of Jews from American life).
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing
I witnessed it with my own eyes, in not just one but two academic departments. Straight up identity based discrimination... probably illegal behavior.
The thing is, I don't think the DEI-people won this battle because they were so persuasive. I think they won it with mafia tactics, taking advantage of the cowardly cover-your-butt behavior of institutional administrators and the natural tendency for lower level staff to hide from conflict.
@delete in 24 hours
I've observed this across several European universities where it's fairly common to see husband and wife both hold research positions at the same institution. Professors can use DEI to promote the careers of their spouse, bypassing meritocratic hiring practices. Other Professors are happy to help as it means their spouses can also get hired. That's how you solve 50/50 gender quotas.
Yes, this does happen, but it's not very common and I don't think it can explain the total trend towards fewer white male hires.
I did as well.