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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7620 thread views

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

Savage frames this as generation warfare rather than the racial/feminist Culture War. He and his sources cannot bring themselves to blame the women and minorities (he said he used to); no it has to be the old (Boomer/Gen X) white men who are keeping him out, and he says he doesn't even blame them any more. He has not yet learned to properly hate.

In this case, I think you're correct, and the bulk of the energy behind these particular movements comes from their beneficiaries.

But it occurs to me that this isn't always true, and some movements are made up almost entirely of "allies," with the beneficiaries playing a very small role. At the extreme, if some much-needed infrastructure project is canceled due to its potential impact on the habitat of the Desert Tortoise, this clearly isn't a power-grab by the tortoises.

The particular case I'm thinking of is the trans movement, which some (mainly feminist) opponents think is powered primarily by the force of will of XY-chromosomed trans people, when from my perspective, the main energy comes from (mostly XX-chromosomed) allies.

I'd suppose that, the fewer or less-capable the beneficiaries are, the more a movement is likely to be primarily driven by allies: I'd posit the order of some examples to go (from most beneficiary-driven to most ally-driven) feminism -> anti-racism -> gay rights -> trans rights -> animal rights/pro-life.

I actually do think there is significant room to blame white stakeholders for pulling up the ladder behind them. The most significant part of the support for affirmative action has always been from existing stakeholders, who want to reduce competition.

A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.

Imagine as a model an elite selective law school where 800 new students are admitted every year. First 400 students are admitted on "pure merit" for LSAT scores, the top scorers are brought in automatically. Then those 400 students vote on the rules used to choose the other 400 students. The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit. The kid with a 179 LSAT doesn't benefit from making sure that the kid with a 172 LSAT makes it in. The kid with a 172 is quite likely to compete with him in class for the top spots, the gap in ability isn't that large. But if he votes to admit kids on affirmative action grounds with a 160 LSAT, those kids aren't likely to compete with him. The same applies for any situation where incumbents are choosing the rules for those coming after him.

For a young white man applying to school, trying to get a job, trying to make partner, affirmative action harms him. For an old white man who already made partner, affirmative action helps him maintain his power, no young up-and-comers are coming for his crown because he makes sure that the lower levels are full of undeserving sycophantic incompetents. As corrupt leaders choose unqualified lackeys and promote them above their competence level, knowing that the lackeys will be forced to remain loyal to the leader because they can't survive on their own, so incumbents elevate diversity picks knowing that they won't threaten the current leadership, and will remain loyal to the institutions, because they owe their success to those leaders and institutions and values.

We saw this dynamic play out in the Democratic party over the past ten years. An emphasis on affirmative action in their choice of candidates left them with a thin bench, and allowed Joe Biden to become President. Joe Biden was always incompetent, but he had tenure, and by supporting minority candidates he protected himself against the rise of anyone ambitious and competent enough to supplant him. We didn't see ambitious young whites rising in the Democratic party, we saw affirmative action picks everywhere, and as a result in 2020 we wound up with the only half-competent white guy in the race winning, despite his being older than cable television. Nor would Joe have lasted as long as he did in the presidency with a competent vice president breathing down his neck.

Stunting the rise of competent competitors benefits boomer incumbents, protects them from being pushed out on an ice floe when they should be.

The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit.

That's fine, so long as it stays "a few kids on college campuses". Let them vote on a single set of criteria for admission, scholarships, hiring, and promotion, and I bet they'd change their tune real quick.

The same process that puts racially-preferred students will be used again in hiring, and the top merit-based grad will be placed at the same level as the top diversity-based grad (or more likely: The top pure-merit grad will simply lose out to the top combined-merit-and-racial-preference grad). And again when it comes to promotion time: The top performer will be placed at the same level as the top racially-preferred worker.

It might be beneficial to pull the ladder up behind you, but I'd be very, very wary of doing it, even as a maximally-cynical move. The people ahead of me might start getting ideas and pull the ladder up behind them, and I'd be left behind if I can't climb faster than the trend spreads.

Imo he basically has to frame it this way to make it fit for public consumption. The normies aren't ready to turn against females and minorities, but this will shift the Overton window.

It'll shift the lines towards Millennials v. Xers (and Boomer remnants). So it'll be white male Millennials and younger plus all women and ethnic minorities working to get rid of the remaining old white guys (who will mostly be called "boomers" even if Savage is more precise). This won't work out well for the younger white guys of course, but maybe it'll be satisfying to Savage.

Yeah, that was definitely a weak point in the piece. Minorities and women clearly benefit from these discriminatory hiring practices and are often fervent advocates for their continuation and expansion, they share at least some responsibility for this situation. Old white men didn't just suddenly wake up one day and decide to throw young white men under the bus for no reason at all.

There was actually one part of the piece where he mentions it in passing:

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-Ph.D, 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.”

So maybe there is some space to hate Nikole Hannah-Joneses of this world, who adopt sneering and mocking attitude toward plight of straight white millennial men? It was probably closest the author came to blaming somebody other than Boomer/Gen X executives implementing these DEI policies.

Also I can somewhat respect self interest from the actually diverse, but few found themselves in positions of actual genuine power so the whole thing has to be facilitated by senior white males.

Indeed. He claims that them merely making use of new opportunities available to them is their only role in this whole thing, which is clearly not the case.

The fever pitched he described in the media rooms to hire not white men was coming from the women and minorities they hired because in part the women and minorities understand they were hired because they are women and minorities.

But it explains why these institutions are failing hard.

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