A Viral Piece the Christian Right Needs to Read
Jacob Savage’s recent think piece in Compact, “The Lost Generation,” is being lauded as the top long-form essay of 2025. And for good reason.
Savage confirms what the Right has known for quite a while: cultural institutions spanning from Hollywood to America’s top universities took part in a very public, systematic effort to discriminate against young white Americans for at least the past decade. If you want to understand the material causes that have been fueling the rise of insurgents like Nick Fuentes, look no further than the rise of the DEI regime.
According to Savage, for “white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.” Just as Total Boomer Luxury Communism has redistributed wealth away from younger Americans toward seniors, DEI has redistributed positions in virtually every American institution, public and private, from young white males to people of other races. Not only is this a violation of employment law, but it’s a profound rejection of the American way of life. Class membranes in America have been porous enough for people to rise and fall throughout our history based on their talents, skills, and personal networks.
Though all of this should sound very familiar, Savage’s essay was not written as a sop to the Right. Conservatives have covered the disastrous effects of DEI for well over a decade—and more dissident voices have pointed out the clear bias against white conservative men for far longer than that. Instead, the importance of Savage’s essay lies in its being hopefully the first major sign that the establishment Left might be coming to grips with the rolling disaster that they’ve been aiding and abetting.
Just the Facts
Savage’s essay is effective because it is a well-written, polished, and descriptive personal account of how his hopes of joining a Hollywood writer’s room were derailed over and over again because of his race. After graduating from Princeton and moving to L.A., he ended up having to make a meager living for 15 years by scalping tickets. Then, Savage and his best friend finally got the opportunity they’d been dreaming of—but their hopes were quickly dashed.
The only time they saw the inside of a writer’s room was after an executive said he couldn’t hire them—explicitly because they were white. As Savage recounts, the “Gen X white guy” manager explained that “the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.”
Savage soon discovered that this wasn’t simply a one-off problem or limited merely to the entertainment industry. It affected the commanding heights of all of our cultural institutions. Younger white men were being systematically locked out of entry-level positions where they could establish themselves as screenwriters, actors, or journalists.
Savage supplements his narrative with an overwhelming set of data that makes his case virtually unanswerable.
When he moved to L.A. in 2011, he notes that “white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent.” White directors went from directing “69 percent of TV episodes in 2014” to “just 34 percent by 2021,” which “went overwhelmingly to established names, leaving little space for younger white men.” Savage points out that since 2011, no white male directors under 40 have been even nominated for an Emmy.
Across print media, the same thing was happening. Since 2018, Savage emphasizes that just “10 percent of the nearly 220” young people who have participated in the New York Times’s year-long fellowship have been white men. Vox, the left-wing site for policy wonks co-founded by Ezra Klein, was not spared. Back in 2013, “Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white,” Savage writes. “By 2022 the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership was 73 percent female.”
“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,” Savage details. This all happened mostly under its current editor-in-chief, that regular purveyor of untruths, Jeffrey Goldberg. (It’s been reported that Savage originally pitched his essay to The Atlantic, whose editors turned it down because he wouldn’t cut his larger points about the prevalence of anti-white animus in America.)
To no one’s surprise, the universities were ground zero of the DEI menace. “White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023,” Savage notes. “Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure-track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).” Savage points out, however, that white men still make up “55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago)”—“a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns.”
In other words, older generations of white men sawed off the rungs on the ladder below them, ensuring that younger white men had little to no hope of rising to the same positions. Absolute fealty to the racial zeitgeist was more important than showing a bit of backbone.
At West Coast universities like Berkeley, Savage states that “white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty” as late as 2015; “in 2023, they were 21.5 percent.” At UC Irvine “64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences” were hired since 2020. “Just three (4.7 percent) are white men.”
James, a Yale graduate student, told Savage a story that likely has been repeated millions of times in universities throughout the U.S.:
James spent nearly a decade, first at Yale Law, then at a top classics program, watching his professional pathways narrow until they seemingly disappeared. He saw people he knew—as long as they fit the right demographic profile—bypass open searches and receive tenure-track offers before they even finished their Ph.Ds. “My own advisors would say, very openly, they’re just two completely different hiring schemes,” he told me. “They’re just two completely different categories of person.”
DEI’s fundamental transformation of American universities was accelerated by what’s termed “cluster hiring.” This happens when a group of minorities is hired simultaneously to fill open positions. As an Ivy League professor told Savage, “A cluster hire in Latinx studies will gain you several Latinx faculty. A professor of transgender studies will, in all likelihood, not be a straight cis man. And a white male assistant professor of black sexualities is closer to an SNL sketch than to any lived reality in 2024.” This, of course, further shuts young white men out of pathways to elite status.
“If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar,” recounted Andrew, a person who once worked in a New Media organization. “You can’t help feeling like no matter how good you are, you were born in the wrong year.” Savage quotes another young man in the film industry: “You’re crawling through broken glass, and it’s still not enough.”
Contrary to the falsehoods commonly tossed around by the establishment press and our leading public institutions, DEI wasn’t about equality or equity: it is pure, unadulterated revenge clothed in the trappings of justice.
Lessons for the Right
For the Right, one of the many takeaways from Savage’s essay should be how he recounts the story of DEI’s project of devastation. While he marshals numerous, eye-opening facts as cited above, the appeal of Savage’s article is based ultimately on pathos—not logos. The personal stories make the facts he cites both striking and compelling.
Similarly to how Aaron Renn has pointed out how evangelical pastors like to maintain the fiction that “godliness is sexy,” the political version of that might be Ben Shapiro’s famous “facts, not feelings” slogan. But that sentiment couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to political matters.
The human mind is not a computer; computers are simply an attempt to replicate the wonders, beauty, and depth of the mind. And that mind is part of an ensouled being that is far more than an Excel spreadsheet. Since politics is so deeply connected to humans as created beings, one noble expression, one dramatic turn of phrase, often matters far more than all the charts, graphs, and data one can compile—and that’s not a flaw.
Ronald Dodson explained last week at The American Mind that “ideas endure not merely because they may be correct in the abstract, but because they are memorable, vivid, and intelligible to the moral imagination.” He made the case that people remember Plato’s allegory of the cave “not because it proves an epistemological claim step by step, but because it dramatizes the human condition in a way no abstract argument ever could.”
One aspect of this lesson is that the Right not only needs op-ed writers and investigative journalists but also talented people who can craft long-form essays that can capture a phenomenon in all of its human dimensions and distill its essence. The Left has had a monopoly in that space for quite some time. Philanthropists on the Right need to invest in individuals and institutions that can exceed what the Left has done on that front.
And funders are likewise needed to boost Reformed scholars and institutions that are dedicated to an unflinching project of ressourcement and resurrecting the Protestant identity of the United States. The obsequiousness the DEI regime fosters is likely the culprit behind why, per Renn, a “group of Millennial Reformed thinkers in the ‘Reformed Irenics’ community never got much traction, institutional support, or funding—all but one of them were white men.”
Finally, as Jeremy Carl has noted in what’s so far the most incisive critique of Savage’s essay, the Right needs to double down on its efforts to reform or replace the current institutions that govern American life—the institutions that help form the bedrock of our small-c constitution.
Those who are still lauding our supposed “meritocracy” while railing against DEI exhibit possibly the most galling contradiction of our age. Whatever merit-based hiring may still exist on the margins, the institutions at the center of American politics and culture have very publicly defenestrated the very idea of merit, as the data in Savage’s essay demonstrates.
Savage himself reflected on this problem in his essay:
We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its optimism in the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.
This is exactly why the Right needs to take advantage of the Left’s open doubts about its project. We must work together to rebuild a country and a people that can have many golden ages yet still to come.
