Economic genocide: The generation of white men lost to DEI prejudice. By Jacob Savage at Compact Magazine.
The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. 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. …
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man — and then provided just that. … “On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you — in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”
Age is critical:
As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI.
But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.
This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet.
The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s — you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.
Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.
Example, at a prominent New Media organization:
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”
The pipeline hadn’t changed much — white men were still nearly half the applicants — but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions. …
Andrew … objected when [there were] demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like … emergency hires of black people,” he said. When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.” …
At The Atlantic, Andrew didn’t even get an interview. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, had described his hiring philosophy back in 2019: “By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. There’s no quota system here.”
Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable reality. “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said in that same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.”
With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The Atlantic’s hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color. …
The irony was, where older white men remained in charge, especially where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. …
At the very bottom of the ladder, the picture is little different. Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. …
“If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar,” Andrew told me. “You can’t help feeling like no matter how good you are, you were born in the wrong year.” …
Andrew finally made senior reporter in 2023, but by then it felt less like recognition than a consolation prize. He was coming up on 40, unmarried, with little room for forward or lateral movement. When the next round of buyouts hit, he decided it was time to leave. …
White men don’t even try any more:
By the early 2020s, many journalists I spoke to noticed something else: The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had simply stopped applying. Gen-Z men had absorbed the message that journalism was not for them.
“The femaleness is striking,” a well-known Gen-X reporter with impeccable liberal bona fides confided. “It’s like, wow, where have the guys gone?” …
Why it matters in the culture industries:
The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the stories, but which stories got told. …
“Newsrooms were center-left places in 2005,” the prominent Gen-X reporter told me. “Now they’re incredibly left places…”
Bigotry rules in academia:
The one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. …
So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.
“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-PhD, and — quite frankly — I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”
The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”
It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”
As in other industries, what mattered were the optics. When people looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them. …
Of the men who managed to pass through [Brown University’s] gender gauntlet, almost none are white. Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent). …
How much is too much?
Without any actual quotas to achieve — only the constant exhortation to “do better” — the diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down and bottom-up pressure. No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had. …
Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines. Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013 alone—the same as the total number of white male millennials who’ve won since. …
The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. …
The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent … “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships — each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”
Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024 …
“For a lot of guys in their mid-thirties, around 2017-2018, it was a quite dramatic shift,” one tech-adjacent journalist told me. “They’re all like, whoa, suddenly every door is closed, and I am just not going to move ahead at this company at all. Because it’s been lightly and sometimes not-so-lightly communicated to me that there’s just no way the job I want is going to be given to a white guy.” A whole generation found their path was blocked. …
The refuges that young white men did find — crypto, podcasting, Substack — were refuges precisely because institutional barriers to entry didn’t exist …
Who was responsible? Who benefited?
The DEI departments have mostly shut down or quietly rebranded. The mountains of reports and glossy PDFs have been quietly scrubbed, as if to hide the evidence. What was the justification for gutting the American meritocracy? No one seems to know.
It’s tempting to wave it all away as secular decline—white men abandoning fields that were losing status or economic value. But the timing doesn’t line up. The sharpest declines in opportunity for younger white men didn’t happen during the rolling crises of the past few years—they were baked in during the mid-2010s,when New Media was expanding coverage, universities were growing, and Hollywood was at Peak TV. …
DEI wrecked industry after industry with incompetence and enshitification:
Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort — or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline? …
Who, us?
The entire liberal establishment insists that nothing actually happened, that the “mild” correction was in fact no correction at all, and that any white man harmed in the process was in fact “mediocre.”
Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t supposed to notice.
Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white male millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and resentments. To a man, they insisted on anonymity. …
Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting. We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy, which for all its faults — its naïveté about human nature, its optimism in the American Dream — was far superior to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.
DEI was the conveyor belt to MAGA for white males, but the express lane to the crazy bigoted left for many women and people of color. Money talks.
One of the unspoken reasons for the decline in marriage and births: young men of marriage age had their careers derailed in favor of diversity hires.
DEI is economic genocide.
It never seems to occur to people in the favored groups that someone else is being disfavored, and even hinting at it raises the tension, like you’re the reason it has to happen.
And meanwhile the boomers seem completely blind.
As someone who graduated college around this time I can confirm a lot of this. Every woman in my program got hired no problem. Many of the white men were not as lucky unless they were a nepotism hire.