“White men are evil” — that was the justification for gutting American meritocracy. This has left predominantly Millennial and Gen Z men in the lurch with virtually no path forward.

If it were merely that other races were being “oppressed” and needed an opportunity to succeed, then we wouldn’t have seen the full court press against American white men across all major fields for the past decade. This wasn’t just due to the overfeminization of American culture, although that is a large part. It’s also due to the massive DEI and LGBT surge that really took off in the early 2010s, where nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Jacob Savage, a Millennial white American man, has written an extremely well-researched article for Compact that has deservedly garnered attention, discussing what he calls the “lost generation.” He wrote that he noticed that doors seemed to close everywhere all at once for men his age: “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.”

By 2014, DEI had become institutionalized across American life, and that is when industry after industry became laser-focused on race, gender, and sexual orientation to the point that they were deliberately rooting against white men. “For white male millennials,” Savage explains, “DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.” The mandate to diversify didn’t affect the older white men who were already established in their careers; it fell on the men who were about 30 and younger.

The data demonstrate this drastic shift in various fields.

For instance, in journalism and news media, in 2014, the majority of newsrooms and leadership were white men. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed, and The Huffington Post. Then 2020 hit, and the wheels came off. Savage reports that by 2021, “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.” In less than a decade, the entire face of an industry changed. Savage states, “The New York Times newsroom has gone from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. Condé Nast today is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. BuzzFeed, a media operation that had been 52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52 percent white by 2023.”

And the field’s femaleness is striking. Where did the guys go? We now know why podcasting is so popular among American white men.

Academia has seen a similar shift in numbers. “For tenure-track positions — the pipeline for future faculty — white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent),” Savage says. There were simply too many old white men in higher education, and the optics were “bad.” Since 2018, Yale’s history department has hired four older white men as full professors, but among 16 tenured or tenure-track Millennials, just one is a white man. “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). … UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men.”

There’s a vast group of talented white men who can’t get tenure-track jobs because the institutions that are so obsessed with bias are entirely blind to their own. Has higher education improved with this push for diversity?

The entertainment industry hasn’t been any better. Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door. “The studios had these quotas they felt pressure to fill,” a veteran talent manager told Savage. “It was always the lower and midlevel people.” Savage elaborates, “The Writers Guild lists more than a dozen studio-run initiatives for emerging ‘diverse’ writers. The Disney Writing Program, which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade — none to white men.” In 2011, white men were around 60 percent of TV writers; by 2025, according to the WGA’s own diversity statistics, they accounted for just 11.9 percent of lower-level writers.

Savage relates many other stories and facts throughout his article, but you get the picture. One key takeaway is that when you throw meritocracy out the window, things will inevitably get worse. In the fields discussed, academia, media, and TV, we have seen a marked decline in excellence, in diversity of viewpoint, and in innovation. We have seen an increase in poorly filmed and written movies and shows that push agendas and moral depravity, an increase in indoctrination and activism on college campuses instead of education, and a propagandistic media that doesn’t inform but tells people what the “right” thing to think about everything is. America was built on meritocracy, and we need to continue to root out the DEI nonsense before it destroys everything.

Another key takeaway is that when you purposefully disenfranchise an entire group of people who happen to be white and male based on “diversity,” that is in itself discriminatory, racist, and sexist. The same people who are screaming that it’s “racist” not to hire a black or brown person are using that to justify their discrimination against white men. This is the dominant fact of life for millions of young white men and explains why many have become Groypers, Nazi fans, and nihilists who listen to Nick Fuentes. A disenfranchised people becomes a desperate people who will look to just about anything for a way out. As David Strom at Hot Air writes, “If one is defined by race, pious talk about racism sounds worse than hollow: it seems weaponized to make you shut up.”

The boys are rebelling against a culture that labels them the problem, destroys their heroes, and demands that they stop being men, all because of the color of their skin.