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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 agree it is racist. I agree there is rank hypocrisy. I agree DEI aware hiring is tantamount to gay/race grifting.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product. It might not even be the best way to go at 50% male writers.

As long as you're not hiring less qualified people to meet a DEI quota, this is the right move.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already? I fully believe you can limit yourself to black lesbian female artists and writers only for a wide breadth of jobs and ship. You'll explode spectacularly if you try that in a hard science, but humanities? Probably fine.

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Not the first time I've seen this claim, and my response is the same. If you think white males have a lot of money, you're going to tailor your product to them.

The alternative is that you think there are a lot of suspiciously wealthy black women, in which case this argument might hold water and it's worth throwing away the white male audience to cater to black female money.

Does it 1:1 trade white men in the audience for black and female audience though? Some of the white men may complain about the black elves and all of the girlbosses in Starfleet command but they still buy it.

Nothing in sales is ever 1:1. However, ask Jaguar how their rebrand went.

Counterpoint: people have been complaining about woke garbage and DEI and ESG capturing corporate America for at least a decade now but the S&P 500 has been racking up ATHs the entire way.

(I would love to see a counter-factual world where there was no DEI and ESG and press play and compare the S&P 500 in that world to this one though)

I too would love to have a Multiverse Viewer, but I don't think the stock market is a particularly good measure of economic performance.