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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

I read things like this and remain grounded by the successful young white men in my family buying homes and having kids. Are they in prestige jobs? Partly. One is a corporate lawyer in San Francisco. Blonde, blue-eyed. He hasn't been shut out. My other brethren aren't working in anything prestigious, but they're doing something even better: starting families.

It's amazing how bad humans are at understanding probabilities. The existence of some successful white men doesn't mean there is no widespread discrimination against white men, any more than the existence of successful black women tells us that racism against blacks is fake.

Affirmative action's impact is by its nature stochastic, but as the old Democratic campaign line goes when you are out of work the unemployment rate is 100% for you. It's not that every white man makes 20% less, it's that some percentage of white men will be unable to get a job or a promotion or a project completed, while the rest move through their lives normally. If I'm at a law firm that commits itself to diversity in the partner ranks, it's not that I'll be paid less because I'm white when I'm an associate, or paid less if I make partner, it's that when I come up for partner I might draw the short straw and be up as the same time as a black guy or an Asian girl and get shafted.

Sure, but no white man is all white men simultaneously. Additionally, people getting blackpilled reading this kind of shit need to keep things in perspective.

These are fully generalisable arguments against ever caring about anything ever, though.

Holocaust? Well, the Jews in Israel are fine.

Rwanda? Some of them make it, no Tutsi can be all Tutsis.

Fired without cause? Well, my brother still has a job.

The whole point of the article is that actually a lot of people are having serious difficulties. You can decide how much you personally care, and to be glad for your own good fortune, but you are not rescuing people by persuading them that their troubles don't exist. There is a spectrum between 'full blackpill' and 'this is fine', and the clear proof for massive discrimination at all levels really ought to be nudging you a bit further along IMO. I have personally seen people I care about fail to launch because of exactly this kind of stuff.

"Massive discrimination at all levels."

But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist. And it certainly doesn't involve MURDER per your examples, where it does. Most of us are exposed to non-prestigious jobs where actual merit does in fact apply. Got a clean driving record? Voila, you're a pizza dude. It's a big, complicated, growing, non-zero sum economy where there's lots of opportunity.

I think my lack of professional success - or even much caring about it - is why I'm less bitter than the software engineers on this site who feel hectored by women of color with soft degrees.

But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist.

I don't get how you can think that unless you ignore every single official pronouncement about how hard they're working to employ 'diverse' candidates, the massively changing demographics of your society as foreigners are bussed in to drive down wages, being told by practically every single person here that they've seen this stuff...

Some blackpills are very definitely up for interpretation: for example the people worried about the covid vaccine have to interpret certain things about the evidence, how pharma works, how vaccines work, etc. to come to the conclusions they have. Anti-white discrimination is different. They boast about it on every channel possible! People can't wait to tell you how hard they're discriminating against white men! I can't help thinking you are so keen not to be blackpilled that you're putting your fingers in your ears.

Beyond that, let's say you're right. Maybe the pizza dudes are fine. (I doubt it, I've seen the demographics.) It still means that white people are being given an incredibly hard time in better paying areas. Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job. And at every stage, they clearly and loudly said that it was a shame they had so many white men, and they discussed what could be done to make sure that people like me weren't doing the kind of stuff I'm doing. You couldn’t see the noticeboards under signs about women’s mentorship groups and women’s leadership groups and female-only funding opportunities.

All indications are that it’s starting to work. My friends and colleagues are really struggling to get new jobs. The cohort under me, including my own relations, are having huge trouble and some of them are failing to launch completely. Good for you if you’ve found another way to live your life, but ‘just deliver pizza, bro, it’s not hard,’ frankly isn’t good enough.

Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job.

Yea, see, I didn't. I'm not of that class, so I don't see what you're talking about. It's been a unified front of multiracial peons railing against a multiracial management my whole life, in jobs that are easy to get, for anyone, and easy to dispose of. Or put it another way: the generalized shitty, Kafkaesque labor experience from behind a colorblind Rawlsian veil is far, far more salient for me as I suspect is for most.

I don't find this an impossible to understand perspective, I do find it a rather odd perspective for someone hanging around this place to have. If you truly can't be bothered about systemic discrimination against your racial group then I'm tempted to say "don't worry about it kitten". Like what are you even doing here? Go have a slice and a brew and let the rest of us sort the big problems out.

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