A lengthy exposé highlighting the negative effects DEI has had on white males, in particular millennials, has gone mega viral on social media.
The Compact piece “The Lost Generation” by Jacob Savage goes into detail about how white men have been discriminated against over the past decade, especially in the fields of entertainment and academia. The statistical truths laid out plainly have struck a chord with the general public, leading to the article being viewed on X more than 11 million times.
Beginning in 2014, prestige industries decided they urgently needed to diversify. They didn’t purge established Boomers. Instead, they did everything possible to avoid hiring white millennial men.
This is the story of a generation derailed by DEI. https://t.co/kUfmpHfaMH
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) December 15, 2025
Savage, who tried to make it as a Hollywood writer, reported that in 2011, “white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent.” He further noted that The Atlantic’s editorial staff “went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024.” Also, “white men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.”
The author points to the death of George Floyd as a major turning point for industries that were already trying to “diversify.”
“In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color,” he wrote.
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A hiring manager told Savage, “For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys. It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person. … It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”
White male writers have been kept out of other major outlets, too, including The New York Times and Buzzfeed. The article noted that Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white in 2013. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership was 73 percent female.
Savage said while the problem looks less stark in academia, he believes that Boomers are occupying all the tenure positions at elite institutions while millennial white men are being ignored for jobs they’re qualified for.
One notable statistic Savage found was that since 2022, Brown University “has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).”
The article points out similar situations in other industries, such as tech, publishing, and management. Savage notes how white men were pushed to crypto, podcasting, and Substack because “institutional barriers to entry didn’t exist” there.
His exposé was met with support and commiseration on social media.
“The phenomenon of white male dispossession strikes at the core of what’s been going on over the last decade,” one commenter wrote. “Any politician, anyone with any ambition to influence, must take on this fight. The time is now.”
“Truly extraordinary,” said another. “Impossible to fathom all that’s been lost.”
Some argued that Savage’s piece didn’t go far enough and that it placed too much blame on the established Boomers who were also subject to discrimination.
“People complaining about the rise of radicalism need to realize the number one thing they could do to contain it is to speak up,” political commentator Jeremy Carl wrote.
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