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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:
Edit: typo
That's a fantastic article, thanks for sharing.
It really does feel like an inflection point was crossed then- there was always affirmative action and PC stuff, but suddenly a huge cohort of people in power were aggressively pushing queer women of color at the expense of white males. You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.
It's funny. They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity." Well, now they're getting it... I just don't think it's the one they wanted. I feel like there's a sea change where even the most clueless white guys are starting to wake up and realize that woke liberals are a danger to them. And we're all becoming hyper-conscious of our race in a way that would have been unimaginable to me as a 90s kid.
I agree. One example is that as of 2025 Hollywood experienced the lowest grossing October since 1997. And that is in nominal dollar terms not counting for inflation. And even that is worsened by the phenomenon of runaway production, where a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California and it is even worse for other productions such as TV shows. This is the result of years of bad movies, which has huge impacts for other professions - stuntmen, people constructing sets, technicians and thousands of other people completely outside of Culture War origin of the current malaise in Hollywood.
This looks more like a covid effect than anything else.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/?srsltid=AfmBOor6tecObPA5tRc_JKDIPNPgPpqw1hZkfT697In9AZWdB5RYJdJL
He said October 2025, that's not included on your chart. How is covid supposed to affect that anyway?
Box office revenues have been dropping since covid (as seen on the chart). Assuming the trend continues past 2024, it's hardly surprising that one month would turn out abnormally bad and be the worst such month for a long time.
How does covid affect box office revenues? I don't know man, the last movie I saw in a theater was Oppenheimer. Perhaps people, having not gone to the movies during lockdown, simply decided that it's overrated.
In any case, I don't think that a priori you would expect that Hollywood's wokeness would only catch up to it only in 2020, although I'm sure a sufficiently motivated reasoner could make the case.
Looking at netflix subscriber numbers, there is no drop like we see in box office sales despite the median Netflix release generally being way more shitty and pozzed than the median theatre movie. So I really don't think this is a story of "get woke go broke" at all.
There was a massive acceleration of wokeness in 2020, related to George Floyd. You don't need much motivation to see that.
I included the next paragraph to (futilely) head off such sufficiently motivated reasoners.
Somehow, the theory is that people are disgusted by wokeslop in theatres, but happy to gulp it down at home. Perhaps the counterclaim will be that people pay for Netflix but don't watch it, or only watch it in the background.
Netflix has a lot of eg older shows people bingewatch, or dirt-cheap apolitical 'reality' brainrot that premiered on boomer cable networks to fill airtime. And, demonstrably, people like that stuff.
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People watch a lot of stuff on netflix besides their bespoke wokeslop. Box office numbers are entirely dependent on their new releases.
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