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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7762 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.

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 the 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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