'Enough white guys already': The war on white men because of DEI in the working world exposed in damning report

Jacob Savage, a Los Angeles-based writer, looked at the phenomenon of the "vanishing white male writer" earlier this year in an eye-opening piece for Compact magazine.

He noted, for instance, that whereas the New York Times' "Notable Fiction" list included seven white American men under the age of 43 in 2012, not a single white male Millennial made the list in either 2021 or 2022. In each of the subsequent two years, only one individual from that particular demographic made the list.

'The phenomenon of white male dispossession strikes at the core of what’s been going on over the last decade.'

Savage stressed that the Times' list was hardly exceptional in its exclusion of white Millennial men. Last year, nobody from that particular demographic was apparently featured in the year-end fiction lists for Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, and Vulture. Of the 53 Millennial fiction writers featured in Esquire magazine's year-end book lists since 2020, only one was a white American man.

Savage — who concluded in March that "white male Millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition" and that "in some ways that inability is their condition" — is back with another damning piece about the "lost generation" and the fallout of the DEI war on meritocracy.

In response to the viral article, which was published on Monday, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairwoman Andrea Lucas stated, "This is a story chock full of unlawful discrimination. There’s no DEI exception to the bar on race and sex discrimination. We need courageous employees/applicants to speak up to help attack and remedy this misconduct."

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon echoed Lucas' post and wrote, "Step up!"

RELATED: University of Minnesota faces backlash over project that seeks to cure the 'Whiteness Pandemic'

Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images

At the outset of the article, Savage provided several indications that the world of literary fiction was not the only place where the institutionalization of DEI proved to be bad news for white men.

He noted, for instance, that white men represented 48% of lower-level TV writers in 2011 but only 11.9% last year. At Harvard, members of the same cohort held 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities in 2014 but only 18% in 2023.

"In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn't a white man — and then provided just that," wrote Savage.

While some older white men, specifically those in the Boomer and Gen X camps, may have mistakenly concluded that DEI is a relatively benign practice — especially since the "mandates to diversify" apparently tended to impact their younger fellows — Savage suggested that for white male Millennials, "DEI wasn't a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed."

A man identified only as Andrew who experienced this shift firsthand in a new media environment told Savage, "With all the declarations these newsrooms had been making, the imperatives — 'enough white guys already' — seemed to me to be the mantra."

An unnamed senior hiring editor at a major media outlet told Savage that "the hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate," adding that a competent black woman "would get accelerated to the New York Times or the Washington Post in short order."

While most major media outfits such as the Times and the Post had by 2019 gone out of their way to make sure their offices were majority female, Savage noted that "in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a 'reckoning.'"

'It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.'

Savage highlighted an apparent aversion beginning in 2020 at various companies to hiring men and whites from an American population that U.S. Census Bureau data indicated was 49.1% male and 57% non-Hispanic white.

For example, women reportedly made up 75% of the new hires in 2022 at Condé Nast — a mass media company that set a goal in 2020 to have 50% of the candidates on its hiring slates to hail from a "wide range of backgrounds and schools" — and only 49% of new hires identified as white. The following year, men and whites made up 34% and 50% of new hires at the company, respectively.

The Atlantic, another operating theater in the campaign against meritocracy, boasted in its 2024 DEI report that roughly 46% of the individuals the magazine hired between July 2023 and June 2024 were non-white and that 71% were women.

Savage indicated further that at the Los Angeles Times, only 7.7% of interns have been white men since 2020; that between 2018 and 2024, "just two or three" of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at the Washington Post have been white men; and that only 10% of the nearly 220 fellows who have participated in the New York Times' yearlong fellowship since the program replaced the paper's summer internship in 2018 were white men.

Various other publications including Indy Week have no white men left on their editorial staff to displace or replace.

"For a typical job we'd get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys," one hiring editor told Savage in reference to this so-called racial "reckoning" championed by academics, activists, and others bad actors. "It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person. ... It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys."

According to a November 2022 ResumeBuilder.com survey, one in six hiring managers across the United States indicated they were told to deprioritize hiring white men; 48% said they were asked to prioritize "diversity over qualifications"; and 53% said they believed their jobs were in danger if they didn't hire enough "diverse employees."

Andrew — who was apparently teased for months with the promise of a senior reporter position at a well-known publication only to later learn the job went to a non-white homosexual 10 years younger — said, "If you're a white man, you gotta be the superstar."

Savage underscored that this anti-white misandry is alive and well in the entertainment, medical, and tech industries but also in the academy, where the severity of the problem is partly hidden by the continued employment of elderly white male faculty members behind whom the doors to entry were closed.

"White men may still be 55% of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63% a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen X employment patterns," wrote Savage. "For tenure-track positions — the pipeline for future faculty — white men have gone from 49% in 2014 to 27% in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39% to 21%)."

The situation is similarly bleak for the cohort at other institutions, including Brown University, which has hired only three white American men as tenure-track professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2022.

"For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. 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," wrote Savage. "No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had."

BlazeTV host Lomez said of the incredible response online to Savage's article, "6 million views on a political article is insane. The phenomenon of white male dispossession strikes at the core of what’s been going on over the last decade. Any politician, anyone with any ambition to influence, must take on this fight. The time is now."

Gene Hamilton, the president of America First Legal who previously served as Trump White House deputy counsel, noted, "If you are a person who believes in merit and wants to restore merit to hiring/firing/admissions/etc, you must understand that it is not enough to sit quietly and hope things get better. If you know someone who has been harmed, encourage that person to take legal action now."

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