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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

And his examples are: TV writing, editorial staff of swanky East Coast publications, and tenure track humanities professors at Ivy League schools (not just tenure track professors at Ivy League schools; tenure track humanities professors). I'm sorry, but if your professional success rides on getting any of these positions, you need to reevaluate how realistic your goals are. These are high-paying positions in competitive fields; there's a good chance that you're not getting the job regardless of what the DEI policies of the employer are. Why doesn't he talk about budget analysts for a regional logistics company, or Civil Engineer II at a national contractor that mostly does electric transmission infrastructure, or purchasing agent for a company that manufactures forklift parts? You know, the kinds of jobs that most people apply for with a realistic chance of getting.

  • -16

Pretty sure it's not just those, also generic govt office jobs and generic white collar jobs at PWC or similar.

Key findings include:

52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring

1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men

48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications

53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees

70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake

Once we get to 40-50% then it's more than just prestigious university jobs? For clarity, I'm quoting another report not OP.

Looking at the actual survey:

This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022. In total, 1,000 participants in the U.S. were surveyed. All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace.

Pollfish is a site that pays people ridiculously small amounts of money to take commissioned surveys. The way it works is that the kind of people who are induced by exchanging 5 minutes of their time for 25 cents will take the survey and are then asked questions at the end to do the demographic filtering. If they don't meet the demographic criteria they don't get paid, but from what I can tell a lot of these people just take the survey again and answer the demographic questions differently. In other words, what happened here is Resume Builder paid Pollfish to conduct a 1,000 person survey. Rather than polling known hiring managers at random, they put the poll on their website for people to opt into and did no meaningful verification that these were actual hiring managers. When they got 1,000 responses they closed the poll. I wouldn't take the results too seriously.