Jacob Savage

December 15, 2025

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes, a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building momentum.

Success felt close. Back then it always did.

We’d written a pilot script that a veteran showrunner had agreed, in a very theoretical, very Hollywood sort of way, to “come on” to. That project had fizzled, so we were surprised when an executive emailed us out of the blue to meet. The showrunner explained he’d submitted us for an upcoming writer’s room he was going to run—the exec had loved our pilot and wanted to hire us.

This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.

But of course, by 2016, we were already too late.

The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”

We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and 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.

They never did.

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. 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. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513199)

It may be hard to remember now, but a decade ago the prevailing critique of American journalism was that it was woefully lacking in gender and racial diversity. There had been hope that New Media would be different, that the internet might bring in a wider range of voices. But by the mid-2010s that optimism was waning. “New-media ventures like Vox, BuzzFeed and Politico are trying to shake up the way people get their news and entertainment online,” NPR reported in 2014. “But critics say… those newsrooms and leadership roles are overwhelmingly made up of white men.”

The critics were mostly right: Gawker was still 57 percent male and 79 percent white; Vice was majority male and 70 percent white. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver complained about a gender gap so severe that only 15 percent of applications were from women.

It was into this world that Andrew arrived in 2015. He took a job at a prominent New Media organization and was put on the general assignment desk, monitoring breaking news and cranking out overnight write-ups. “It was rewarding,” he told me. “But if you can imagine working a full-time gig—nights, weekends—and then, on top of that, trying to build up a beat on the side that could eventually propel you into something sustainable, it’s always difficult.”

He enjoyed the work, and developed a beat. There was still a general optimism in the air, especially around New Media. “I had very well-regarded deep dives and occasionally scoops,” he said. “I had credibility as somebody who had come from a more left-leaning perspective, was well sourced on the left, but was willing to give them a kick in the teeth every now and then. At the time it felt really about holding power to account and giving new ideas a fair airing.”

After college, before he’d moved into journalism, Andrew had worked in the non-profit world. Ambient talk about diversity and power structures had been part of the general atmosphere, and he’d never much thought about it. “In any progressive space, there was always at least some concern about representation,” he explained. “I did not see that in any way impeding my advancement for … the first six or seven years of my career.”

But that view became harder to sustain. In 2019, David Haskell, who had just been named editor-in-chief of New York magazine, was asked to respond to staff disappointment that “another white man” had been elevated to the role. “I understand that reaction. Part of me shares it,” he told his staff. “The most effective way to move the needle on diversity hiring is for a strong, loud commitment to come from the very top of the masthead. I … plan to do exactly that.”

Andrew didn’t work at New York, but he watched similar pressures reshape his newsroom. He’d been there for five years, a beat reporter who couldn’t seem to move up, and suddenly all anybody could talk about were diversity metrics. Management was, as he put it, “obsessive about recruiting people of color.” But the pool was small, and anyone promising was quickly poached by The New York Times or cable news. “With all the declarations these newsrooms had been making, the imperatives—‘enough white guys already’—seemed to me to be the mantra,” he told me. “And you couldn’t help but wonder if that meant you were being passed up for opportunities, even in your own organization.”

Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would be no backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or person of color, the expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of color. “The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate,” a senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me. “If there was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone… but if she was any good you knew she would get accelerated to The New York Times or The Washington Post in short order.”

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”

These weren’t empty slogans, either. 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.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions.

Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.

When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.”

Desperate for advancement—he’d had the same job, the same title, for nearly six years—Andrew looked elsewhere. “I applied for positions at The Atlantic, Politico, CNN, The Washington Post, three different desks at The New York Times,” he told me. But newsrooms were contracting, which only made the competition more intense. “When scarcity sets in, you start to worry about these things a little bit more,” Andrew reflected. “This was a business model problem that was exacerbated by the racial [and gender] preference problem.”

At The Atlantic, Andrew didn’t even get an interview. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, had described his hiring philosophy back in 2019: “By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. There’s no quota system here.”

Goldberg was candid about another, less comfortable reality. “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story,” he said in that same interview. “There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males.”

With or without quotas, The Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of The Atlantic's hires have been women, along with nearly 50 percent people of color. In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

The irony was, where older white men remained in charge, especially where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. “If you hired a team of white guys around you, you were putting a target on your back,” recalled the hiring editor. At The New York Times Magazine (one of the few prestige magazines with a public masthead), Jake Silverstein, a Gen-X white man, serves as editor-in-chief, and Bill Wasik, another Gen-X white man, serves as editorial director. But of nine millennial senior editors and story editors below them, there’s just one white guy—and he’s been there since 2012, effectively grandfathered in.

At the very bottom of the ladder, the picture is little different. Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men (in 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post’s intern class had seven white guys—numbers not seen since way back in 2014). In 2018 The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the nearly 220 fellows have been white men.

Other pipelines dried up as well. The alt-weeklies that gave misfit young men their start have shed them entirely. There are no white men on the editorial staff of the Seattle Stranger or on the staff of Indy Week. As late as 2017, there were six white men atop the masthead for the Portland Mercury. By 2024, there was just one: the Boomer editor-in-chief.

By the early 2020s, many journalists I spoke to noticed something else: The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had simply stopped applying. Gen-Z men had absorbed the message that journalism was not for them.

“The femaleness is striking,” a well-known Gen-X reporter with impeccable liberal bona fides confided. “It’s like, wow, where have the guys gone?”

In less than a decade, the entire face of the industry changed. The New York Times newsroom has gone from 57 percent male and 78 percent white in 2015 to 46 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. Condé Nast today is just 35 percent male and 60 percent white. BuzzFeed, a media operation that had been 52 percent male and 75 percent white in 2014, was just 36 percent male and 52 percent white by 2023.

But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his start-up’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022 the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025 leadership was 73 percent female.

The demographic shift reshaped not only who told the stories, but which stories got told. After George Floyd’s death, Andrew’s colleague Lucas was assigned a piece about why you should never call the police. “I remember having to interview one of these abolitionists for a story about how if somebody breaks into your car or your home, it’s white supremacy to call the cops—even if you need it for an insurance report,” Lucas told me. “That always made me feel gross. I think back on that with a lot of regret.”

“Newsrooms were center-left places in 2005,” the prominent Gen-X reporter told me. “Now they’re incredibly left places… I imagine one reason newsrooms have gotten more explicitly lefty is that you have white guys and white women adopting a kind of protective coloration, allyship mindset, to get through the door.”

Andrew, for his part, was unable to adopt the performative allyship that had become expected. “I always thought I was an effeminate nerd growing up… but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the most masculine end of men in media,” he told me. “I started to pick up on the fact that there wasn’t much room for people who even speak in my timbre.’”

He was recruited for a senior reporter position at a more prestigious outlet, “jumping through hoops every step of the way,” as he told me. But by the end it felt like a cruel joke: extensive interviews, writing tests, endless meetings with various editors, only to find out months later that the job had gone to someone a decade younger than him—a gay man of color, who’d managed to go from intern to assistant editor to senior reporter in less than two years.

“If you’re a white man, you gotta be the superstar,” Andrew told me. “You can’t help feeling like no matter how good you are, you were born in the wrong year.”

As he saw it, the industry had its super-successful white guys who’d made it before 2014 and so were functionally Gen X—but for everyone else, moving up in a contracting industry was nearly impossible. (“I was kind of grandfathered in during one era, and had achieved a level going into 2015–2024 where it just didn’t really affect me,” one of these superstar journalists told me.)

After surviving years of buyouts, Andrew finally made senior reporter in 2023, but by then it felt less like recognition than a consolation prize. He was coming up on 40, unmarried, with little room for forward or lateral movement. When the next round of buyouts hit, he decided it was time to leave.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513201)

II. THE IVORY TOWER

There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a millennial professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” said another.

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”

As in other industries, what mattered were the optics. When people looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them.

“A big part of why it’s hard to diversify is the turnover is really slow,” a tenured millennial professor explained. “And that’s become worse now, because Boomers live a long time.” Many elite universities once had mandatory retirement at 70. But in 1994, Congress sunsetted the academic exemption for age discrimination, locking in the demographics of the largely white male professoriate for a generation.

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).

The pipeline and the cohorts haven’t changed much—newly-minted humanities Ph.Ds have been evenly split between men and women for over a decade now, and white men outnumber other groups in most applicant pools—but who was getting hired certainly did. At Berkeley, white men were 48.2 percent of faculty applicants in the Physical Sciences—but just 26 percent of hires for assistant professor positions. Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent).

The white men who do get hired are often older and more established—or foreign. Several people I spoke with noticed that European white men don't seem to face these barriers. The reason, one professor suggested, is they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an administrative sleight of hand: Federal education statistics (IPEDS) classify foreign nationals outside racial categories. In other words, a white European on a work visa doesn't register as “white” in diversity metrics. Among new Ph.Ds with definite academic employment plans, white temporary-visa holders are nearly twice as likely as white U.S. citizens or permanent residents to secure tenure-track positions (61.0 percent versus 33.1 percent in 2023).

“Senior hiring still is very often white men,” Will, an Ivy League professor, told me. His humanities department had hired two higher-level white men, then conducted a search for a junior professor. There was one white man among the finalists. “On paper, he was so clearly the strongest candidate,” Will remembered. “It really kind of did feel like, well, we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.” He had been told, “If we’re on the fence here, we should not go with the man again.”

Yale’s history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in hiring. Since 2018, they’ve hired four older white men as full professors—but among sixteen tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a white man. At 84, the Cold War historian John Gaddis isn’t even the oldest in the department. “The Yale history department at the time I arrived in 1997 was overwhelmingly white and male, if not yet millennial,” he told me in an email. “Some remedial action was long overdue.”

This remedial action can take many forms. Berkeley commissioned regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would produce the fewest number of white male job offers. At Dartmouth, the Mellon-to-postdoc program provided ten tenure-track positions for “new hires with a demonstrated commitment to addressing racial underrepresentation in their disciplines.” None were white men.

Cluster hiring, which began in the ’90s as a way to expand interdisciplinary research, was transformed in the 2010s as a shortcut to achieve diversity goals. Entire groups of underrepresented candidates could now be hired at once, working around the often byzantine tenure approval process.

“The way you try to demographically diversify without making it explicit is searching in areas where the areas are strongly correlated with [gender or] ethnicity,” an Ivy League professor explained to me. 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.

All this left little oxygen for anyone else. 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.”

Hanging over it all was an invisible curriculum, the political assumptions about what should and should not be studied. James recalled a fellow graduate student he met at Yale, a white man oblivious to the latest academic orthodoxies. “He went on this long, passionate monologue about military history. He knew all sorts of details of Roman military history, he really wanted to study it. And I just thought you are hopeless, there is no way anyone is going to hire you… He almost wasn’t schooled properly. If he had been—without anyone ever needing to tell him—he would just drop all that about military history, because he’d know that’s white and European and male and dead.”

Only one person from James’s classics cohort wound up with a tenure-track offer. “He’s gay, Asian-American, exceptionally conversant in the language of critical theory,” James said. “And he got his job on the merits. He’s extremely good, but he’s into stuff that’s also very in.” James, on the other hand, applied to just a couple of tenure-track jobs in classics before he gave up. “Most people didn’t even try,” he told me. For young white men doing dead white male stuff, “it was just totally hopeless.”

“I operated under completely false assumptions,” Ethan, an Ivy League-educated social scientist, told me. He’d always had the vague and naive (and frankly privileged) idea that professionally everything would work itself out. “I was gonna be a tenure-track professor,” he said. “That was my expectation.”

Like so many middle-class millennials in the Obama era, Ethan believed he was on the right side of history. He had entered academia after an unsatisfying stint in the corporate world precisely because he was interested in issues of inequality—he wanted to make the world a better place. “I came in wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, but I felt like in the early 2010s, there was good reason to feel that way,” he told me. “Society was moving in a direction that felt more fair, less caste-oriented.”

After Ferguson and Black Lives Matter and then #MeToo, as talk of diversity and representation and privilege swept across campuses, universities responded with a host of new initiatives. While faculty diversity programs had been in place for decades—Penn and Columbia committed tens of millions of dollars to address the issue in 2012, Harvard in 2006, and Yale had launched efforts as early as 1999—these had been mostly ineffective. This time would be different. The new initiatives may have had ethereal, non-specific names like Inclusive Excellence and Toward New Destinations, but they had very concrete goals.

“Things changed really quickly,” Ethan said. “I think I was just a couple of years off in terms of what the opportunities looked like.”

In his first year on the academic job market, Ethan applied to nearly 50 jobs. It was a slog. He was thrilled when he was a finalist for a tenure-track position at Brown University. He was flown out to Providence, where he toured the campus and met with faculty. But Brown, like much of the academic world, had other institutional priorities.

Back in 2016, Brown had pledged to double faculty diversity within six years. “There is significant work to do in the coming months and years to implement the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan,” Provost Richard Locke, himself a white male Boomer, said at the time. A diversity representative was installed on every job search committee. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity reviewed all hiring advertisements as well as faculty short and long lists (in tenure-track hiring, the longlist is a collection of potential candidates, and the shortlist is a selection of the most qualified to consider for the interview phase).

To give a sense of what this meant on the ground: In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the humanities at Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the process the male share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent male, the short list 42 percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made it to the interview round were male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were ultimately offered to men. A similar dynamic played out in the social sciences: 54 percent of the 722 applicants were men; 44 percent of the shortlist was male, and just 32 percent of job offers were tendered to men; in the physical sciences, women were 23 percent of applicants, but received 42 percent of job offers.

Ethan made it to the final interview round at Brown. After a long back-and-forth with the search committee—a sign, he believes, of internal dissension—he lost out. “They wanted everything through the prism of race,” Ethan recalled. “Unless you place [race] squarely at the center of your research, you’re vulnerable, especially if your identity doesn’t fit the desired profile.”

Of the men who managed to pass through Brown’s gender gauntlet, almost none are white. 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).

Over the next three years, Ethan applied to dozens more positions, including at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. As elsewhere, the UC schools required DEI statements, in which prospective faculty were asked to detail “future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.” Ethan had to write dozens of these statements in the course of his job search. But the UCs took it a step further. Under an $8.5 million state program called “Advancing Faculty Diversity,” UC administrators used DEI statements as a “first cut” to winnow down applicant pools before faculty were even allowed to consider candidates.

Ethan didn’t make any UC shortlists—but why would he have? The program had achieved its intended effect. At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).

All in all, Ethan was a finalist for a tenure-track position five times. He was flown out again and again for interviews and meet-and-greets and departmental dinners—always the bridesmaid, never the bride. At a certain point, he began to see himself the way the search committees did. “Other identifiers or other things I valued about myself have receded,” he explained. Being a white man, meanwhile, “moved into the foreground in a way that I didn’t expect.”

It’s taken a toll on Ethan’s personal life. He’s been with his partner for seven years, but they’ve spent much of that time treading water. They want kids, but without the financial security of a tenure-track position, it’s daunting. “That decision is on hold and may never happen,” he said. He’s always anxious the grant money might dry up. “I don’t feel like my career path is leading anywhere. It feels like a dead end.” Occasionally he surrenders to anger and bitterness. “There’s a huge group of talented white men who can’t get tenure-track jobs,” he told me. “For a set of institutions so obsessed with bias, they’re completely blind to their own.”

As for Richard Locke, the provost who spearheaded Brown’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan? In 2022, Locke left to accept a sinecure as dean of Apple University, Apple’s in-house personnel training facility. “In all searches, there has been consistent attention to diversity and inclusion,” he bragged in a valedictory interview. His replacement at Brown was—who else?—another 60-year-old white man.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513205)

III. PEAK TV

Matt is the sort of smart, slightly manic cinephile who’s been a fixture of Hollywood forever—the guy at the bar who can explain why a project was greenlit (“a buyer with lots of money and little experience”) or why a director got hired (“background as a playwright—and it was Scott Rudin”), and dismiss the latest Netflix release with a wave of his hand (“dogshit… a story that shouldn’t be a movie”).

Like me, Matt moved out to Los Angeles in 2011—but unlike me, by 2014, he’d landed a job as a staff writer on a network TV series. “I thought I would be one of those mediocre white jabronis who just floats to the top and works forever,” he said. He earned more money from that single episode of network TV than he’d seen in his life. He felt he was on a familiar trajectory: write some specs, network around, get your break, and then work steadily until you get your own show.

But he couldn’t outrun the culture. In the fall of 2014, the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite was born. The New York Times ran story after story. The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In 2015, Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story editor. “I couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate… There was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a while.”

It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As #OscarsSoWhite bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified. “You could read a white guy’s script,” a former assistant to a Gen-X white male showrunner told me. “But there was no way in hell that person was going to get staffed on the show. Showrunners only had a couple of spots for white people, and they kept those for the 40- or 50-year-old white guys they’d known for years.”

A whistleblower sent me a document from early 2017, an internal “needs sheet” compiled by a major talent agency, that shows just how steep the headwinds were. Across the grid, which tracks staffing needs for TV writers rooms, the same shorthand appears dozens of times: “diverse,” “female,” “women and diverse only.” These mandates came from some of the most powerful names in television: Noah Hawley (“prioritizing women”), Dean Devlin (“prioritizing women … ideally hire ethnic/African American”), Ryan Murphy (“want female and diverse, emphasis on African American”).

This was systematic discrimination, documented in writing, implemented without consequence. It’s striking how casual it all was. “Chicago Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs [staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others.

“The studios had these quotas they felt pressure to fill,” a veteran talent manager told me. “It was always the lower and midlevel people.”

Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door. The Writers Guild lists more than a dozen studio-run initiatives for emerging “diverse” writers. The Disney Writing Program, which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men. Nearly every capsule bio for these programs is an attempt to communicate, with as little subtlety as possible, that the writer is not a white man (“a Korean and Polish American writer from Seattle”; “a comedy writer with Cuban, Puerto Rican, and New Mexican roots”).

Another prestigious venue for up-and-coming screenwriters was the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, which proudly lists Darren Aronofsky, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino among its alumni. “The Lab was just amazing,” Quentin Tarantino recalled in 2017, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Reservoir Dogs. “They took us really seriously. I couldn’t believe how altruistic it was. Their whole point was to just help us… to refine our aesthetic.”

In the 2010s, Sundance came under fire for producing a disproportionate number of white male auteurs. The organization decided that would never happen again. In 2016 and 2017, 27.5 percent of applicants to the screenwriters lab were white men, but they were just 14.7 percent of participants. That figure turned out to be relatively high. Since 2018, just 8 of 138 (5.8 percent) of the fellows selected have been white men. Notably, nearly all have either had some other defining characteristic (disabled, gay) or were partnered with a woman or a person of color. Today, just one in ten millennial programmers at Sundance is a straight white man.

These programs, originally established to open a closed pipeline, turned into their own exclusionary infrastructure. Matt never bothered applying. “At a certain point you realize the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” he said. “You’re doing everything you can to break through, and the goalposts keep moving.”

After striking out in TV for almost five years, Matt transitioned into features, which were less identity-driven. “I thought not working for that many years would break me, but it actually made me better,” he told me. “I had to figure out how to write stuff that would pop and get me back in.” When we spoke, it was a real point of pride how much he’d been able to improve his writing, how at least temporarily he’d succeeded in overcoming the odds.

By the end of the 2010s, that work paid off: One of his scripts landed on the Black List, the prestigious annual ranking of un-produced screenplays voted on by Hollywood development executives. This gave Matt much-needed momentum—he sold multiple spec scripts and was finally able to quit his day job—but it was hard to translate into steady work.

Even after he managed to get A-list showrunners attached to a couple of projects, when staffing season came they never offered him a position on their own shows. “Hiring me was never even in the conversation,” he said. In other words: Matt had a better chance of getting his own show on the air than of getting staffed. (Dan Erickson, the creator of Severance, who sold his pilot in 2016, wasn’t able to land a job in a TV writer’s room until his own show began production.)

In 2020-2021, Matt’s agent submitted him for a prestige series. The showrunners liked his sample; they wanted to talk about availability. But the offer was abruptly pulled. One of the showrunners—a Gen-X white guy—had blocked it. The room already had too many white guys.

“You’re crawling through broken glass and it’s still not enough,” Matt reflected. “I kind of just choose to ignore it out of self-preservation, because if I’m bitter or angry then I’m even further away from what I want. Nobody wants the guy shaking his fist.”

Throughout our conversations, Matt never blamed the women or people of color who’d gotten opportunities he hadn’t. He blamed the older generation of white men who pulled up the ladder behind them. And he was right to. Between 2004 and 2013, over forty Gen-X white men received Academy Award nominations for screenwriting. In the following decade (2014-2023), more than fifty Gen-X white men were nominated—alongside just six white male millennials.

Over Matt’s fourteen years in Hollywood, the changes have been staggering. In 2011, when he (and I) moved to California, white men were around 60 percent of TV writers; by 2025, according to the WGA’s own diversity statistics, they accounted for just 11.9 percent of lower-level writers; women of color made up 34.6 percent. White men directed 69 percent of TV episodes in 2014, and just 34 percent by 2021. But that remaining third went overwhelmingly to established names, leaving little space for younger white men. Since 2021, 11 directors under 40 have been nominated for Emmys. None have been white men.

“I saw this graveyard of people not too dissimilar from me,” Peter, the assistant to the Gen-X showrunner, told me. Peter, who graduated from a Top-5 college in the early 2010s, watched slightly older millennial men wait for a break that never came. “They were like: Hey, I’m gonna take this kind of shit job for two years. Oh, wait, I can do it for three more years… Suddenly they’re married, having kids. They just didn’t get the deal—it was never gonna happen for them. Ever.”

Peter eventually left for the tech world. “It’s a lot better to actually know you’re about to get hit by a car than not know,” he told me. “The tragedy of our generation is just thinking the world is a certain way and all.”

That single episode of network television from 2014 remains Matt’s only produced credit. When we last spoke, he was commuting to his menial day job. Newly single, with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, he has recurring fantasies of changing his name and moving to Thailand to escape his creditors.

“Sweet one-bedroom, VPN to access American TV/film content,” he texted me. “The Dream.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513206)

IV. EVERYWHERE ELSE

For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. Without any actual quotas to achieve—only the constant exhortation to “do better”—the diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down and bottom-up pressure. No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.

The boundaries shifted depending on the industry and the moment: A white woman might be favored in some contexts, disfavored in others; an Asian-American man might face extra obstacles in tech or medicine, but if he wanted to be a screenwriter or an English professor, the system worked in his favor. 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. Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013 alone—the same as the total number of white male millennials who’ve won since.

In 2014, two white male millennials were National Book Award finalists, including one winner; that year nine white male American artists under 40 appeared at the Whitney Biennial. But of the 70 millennial writers nominated for National Book Awards in the decade that followed, just three were white men. The “Big 4” galleries represent 47 millennial artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.

The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024.

The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”

Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon, entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were 42.3 percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d advanced normally over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers of today. But mid-level Amazon managers fell from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of nearly 40 percent.

“The pipeline was never 50-50,” a former management consultant explained—elite business schools remained around 60 percent male and predominantly white throughout the 2010s. “But we were hiring as if it were 50-50 anyway.”

“For a lot of guys in their mid-thirties, around 2017-2018, it was a quite dramatic shift,” one tech-adjacent journalist told me. “They’re all like, whoa, suddenly every door is closed, and I am just not going to move ahead at this company at all. Because it’s been lightly and sometimes not-so-lightly communicated to me that there’s just no way the job I want is going to be given to a white guy.” A whole generation found their path was blocked.

The refuges that young white men did find—crypto, podcasting, Substack—were refuges precisely because institutional barriers to entry didn’t exist. A friend who’s now an executive at a major crypto company scraped by as a freelance film editor for years. He applied to Netflix five times; eventually he was told, explicitly, that they didn’t need more white guys. He didn’t go into crypto because it was high status—Hollywood, the high-status industry, wouldn’t have him.

The DEI departments have mostly shut down or quietly rebranded. The mountains of reports and glossy PDFs have been quietly scrubbed, as if to hide the evidence. What was the justification for gutting the American meritocracy? No one seems to know.

It’s tempting to wave it all away as secular decline—white men abandoning fields that were losing status or economic value. But the timing doesn’t line up. The sharpest declines in opportunity for younger white men didn’t happen during the rolling crises of the past few years—they were baked in during the mid-2010s, when New Media was expanding coverage, universities were growing, and Hollywood was at Peak TV.

Which raises some uncomfortable questions: Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline?

The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced worse discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not itself an argument. Especially when the entire liberal establishment insists that nothing actually happened, that the “mild” correction was in fact no correction at all, and that any white man harmed in the process was in fact “mediocre.”

Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t supposed to notice.

Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white male millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and resentments. To a man, they insisted on anonymity. There were frenzied pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy.

Even the successful white men I spoke to understood that something had fundamentally changed. They expressed gratitude and relief—a recognition that success was contingent, easily disrupted by circumstances beyond their control. “There was so much fragility to things going well in the first place,” one tenured professor told me, “that it’s natural to think a slight perturbation would have meant things went worse.”

Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting. 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.

“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white millennial men have had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave liberal America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me. “I don't want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone says, this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513209)

Back in that office in early 2016, after the executive had explained why he couldn’t hire us, the meeting continued like any other. We talked about what we were working on; he told us about his company’s upcoming slate: some Shanghai detective show, an adaptation of a novel about the early Dutch settlement in New Amsterdam. Like most Hollywood meetings, we concluded by promising to find a way to work together soon. And then, as we were leaving, the exec asked if we wanted to go down to the writer’s room and say hello to the showrunner.

The room was modest, as far as these things go: a big whiteboard, a long table, people snacking in the back. The showrunner introduced us to the show’s creator, and they immediately returned to the debate they’d been having before we arrived: whether two people who take two different time machines from different points in the past into the same fixed moment in the future could then switch time machines upon their return.

Were there any hidden paradoxes involved? What were the implications?

We gave our feeble input. The rest of the staff slouched silently in the back—three comfortable Hollywood lifers in their forties and fifties, white guys with IMDb bios from an alternate universe (“His writing career began on the CBS crime series Martial Law, after which he served as a writer and producer on several series through the late 1990s until the early 2000s, including FreakyLinks, Roswell, John Doe, Boston Public, LAX and Smallville… In 2005, he joined the writing staff of the medical mystery series House…”), along with the two younger women who’d gotten the jobs we’d been up for.

Eventually—the time machine conundrum unresolved—we said our goodbyes. There would be other screenplays, other projects, visits to studio lots and major pitches, but that was the last time either of us saw the inside of a writer’s room; that was the moment we came closest to a career. Had the political environment been different, one job might have led to another, and today I might have colleagues, work friends, a whole range of professional and personal experiences—an entirely different life.

At the time, I blamed those women. Of course I did. They’ve since ascended the TV ladder and work as co-executive producers on major shows. On some level, even today I can’t help but think: That could have been me. That should have been me.

But those women didn’t take our jobs any more than the 50-year-old Hollywood lifers had. The lifers were still there. They’re still there. And I’m not angry at the women and people of color who made it instead of me—people have the right, in most cases the responsibility, to take the opportunities that are offered them—or even at the older white guys who ensured that I didn’t.

Mostly I’m annoyed at myself. Because instead of settling down, proposing to my then-girlfriend (now wife), and earning a steady income that might support a family, I spent a decade insisting the world treat me fairly, when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so. I could see what was happening—I was being told point-blank what was happening—and still I thought I’d be the exception, that if I wrote one more script, took one more meeting, I’d slip through. But very few people get to be the exception.

It’s strange and more than a little poisonous to see yourself buffeted by forces beyond your control. But there’s also a comfort in it. Because it’s less painful to scroll through other people's IMDb pages late at night, figuring out what shortcut—race, gender, connections—they took to success, than to grapple with the fact that there are white men my age who’ve succeeded, and I am not one of them. I could have worked harder, I could have networked better, I could have been better. The truth is, I’m not some extraordinary talent who was passed over; I’m an ordinary talent—and in ordinary times that would have been enough.

There’s a wounded pride here—how could there not be? I have two sons. I used to imagine, long before they were born, that I would take them to film sets, that I’d bring them along to exotic locations. Instead their father spends most of his working day in his bedroom, scrolling through spreadsheets and ticket listings.

What do I say when my boys ask about my old hopes and dreams? What do I tell them when they ask about theirs?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513212)

yeah, that part near the end gave away his fundamental cuck psychology and drained away any sympathy he may have merited. a psychologically-healthy male with normal hormones should be simmering with rage at personal injustice and should want to punish those who did him wrong. old white male gatekeepers who implemented all of this committed a crime against their own kind; they should not be spared from the anger of their victims. treason being the lowest rung of hell, etc.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513220)

===

The Vanishing

The erasure of Jews from American life

by

Jacob Savage

February 28, 2023

Kyle Ellingson

Kyle Ellingson

Editor’s note: This piece is part of Tablet’s top 10 of 2023. Find the full list here.

Suddenly, everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing.

You feel it like a slow moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace. Or maybe it hit when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the Netflix splash page. It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.

For many Jews, the first instinct is to look inward: We blame intermarriage, assimilation, the loss of the immigrant work ethic. This is, of course, a cope. Because the most significant cause of the decline isn’t Jews themselves, but that American liberalism, our civic religion, has turned on us. Where Jewish success was once upheld as a sign of America’s strength and progress over its prejudices, Jewish “overrepresentation” is again something to be solved, not celebrated.

A tenure-track humanities professor at a prestigious public university tells of the finalists for her department’s next graduate school cohort. Of the 20 or so candidates, four to five are Jews. One is a working-class yeshivish applicant with an incredible backstory and even better recommendations. He is passed over for not being “diverse” enough. Of course our professor doesn’t complain— her own tenure is at risk. In the end, not a single Jew is offered admission.

Another Jewish professor applies to work in the UC system. In his mandatory diversity statement, which he describes as “the most shameful piece of writing I’ve ever done,” his sole aim is to convey the impression that he hopes to be the last Jewish man they ever hire. He still doesn’t get the job.

And why would he? Using YouGov data, Eric Kaufmann finds that just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21% of boomers). The steep decline of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review (down roughly 50% in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.

The same pattern holds across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s—likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors—and then a purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.

Museum boards now diversify by getting Jews to resign. A well-respected Jewish curator at the Guggenheim is purged after she puts on a Basquiat show. At the Art Institute of Chicago, even the nice Jewish lady volunteers are terminated for having the wrong ethnic background. There’s an entire cottage industry of summer programs and fellowships and postdocs that are now off-limits to Jews.

In 2014 there were 16-20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message. The 2022 biennial featured just 1-2 Jews.

Comb through the dozens of Jewish names for the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship (I count 30-40). You’ll have a much harder time finding them 10 years later (14-16).

From 2010 through 2019 there were at least three Jews in every MacArthur Fellowship class, sometimes as many as five or six. The Forward would write effusive columns celebrating the year’s Jewish geniuses. Since 2020, just 0-1 Jews a year have been awarded grants. The Forward hasn’t bothered to take note.

Today American Jews watch with Solomonic bemusement as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard is argued before the Supreme Court. On some level we sympathize with the Asian American plaintiffs, who are suing Harvard for using admissions criteria that discriminate against them on the basis of their race. Maybe they really are the new Jews, facing the same barriers—insidious racism, personality scores, rural geographic preferences—that we once did.

On the other hand, fancying ourselves to be high caste members of a beneficent elite, we pretend not to notice that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians and Jews. Desperate to maintain their waning status within the liberal coalition, Jewish communal organizations ignore these contradictions. Once a protector of specifically Jewish interests but now secure in its new role as handmaiden to power, the Anti-Defamation League filed an amicus brief—in support of Harvard.

In the 1940s, the ADL took a different tack. For decades unofficial quotas at most Ivy League universities limited Jews to around 10% of the student body, despite evermore qualified Jewish applicants. Jewish organizations made it their mission to break this invisible barrier and by the end of the 1950s the quotas were a dead letter. The long summer of American Jewish success had begun.

But the seasons always change. A FIRE/Yougov survey found that self-identified Jews now number just 7% of Ivy League students, compared to 10% during the height of the antisemitic quotas.

In his gripping podcast Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews in the Ivy League, Mark Oppenheimer describes the troubled state of Jewish campus life. Harvard has gone from being 25% Jewish in the 1990s and 2000s to under 10% today. “In theory it could be the case that Jews are the same percentage of whites at Harvard as they always were,” he explains. “But Harvard has not shrunk the number of athletes it admits […] and they’ve kept their geographical diversity. So if you’re a Jewish kid who’s not an athlete and not a legacy and not from Wyoming … then there’s not much room left for you.”

According to the Hillel College Guide, Penn’s Jewish population declined from 26% in 2015 to 17% in 2021; NYU’s dropped from 24% to 13%. Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell have seen smaller but significant declines (Brown and Dartmouth, with different institutional priorities, are by all accounts happy exceptions).

Data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office—which appears to be the only Ivy League university that still tracks religious affiliation—shows a similar trend: The Jewish population went from 19.9% in the 2000s to 16.4% in the 2010s. A couple of years ago, the school’s chaplain told Meir Chaim Posner, the Chabad rabbi at Yale, that around 11% of Yale undergraduates were Jewish. “It’s dropped slightly since then,” Rabbi Posner told me in November.

“The university has decided that DEI is the overarching principle of admissions,” one Hillel director told me. “There’s a general consensus that it’s more difficult for Jewish students to get into top tier schools.” Nor is this difficulty confined to secular Jews—the modern Orthodox population has also crashed. A college counselor at a top Jewish day school reports that as universities have revamped enrollment and gone test-optional, the number of Orthodox students has decreased. “Every year has been harder,” he said. “Our ability to thoughtfully predict the likelihood of admission has gone way down.”

An uneasy omertà settles in. The Ivies skip college nights at Jewish day schools they visited for decades. At Penn there used to be two daily minyans—now there’s one. There are hushed whispers that if current trends hold, some of these colleges might no longer be able to support an Orthodox community at all.

The 1999 Hillel College Guide now reads like a map to a lost civilization. Harvard and Yale have 1,500 Jewish undergrads apiece. There are 5,000 Jewish students and grad students at Columbia, 6,000 at Penn, 14,000 at NYU. It’s hard to imagine that as recently as 2008, articles were being written about the “race” to attract Jewish students.

What was normal less than two decades ago sounds like a siren call from a distant golden age. To even suggest that a 15%-20% Jewish undergraduate student body might be acceptable in a country in which Jews make up 2.4% of the total population is anathema in today’s liberal society.

The 1999 Hillel College Guide now reads like a map to a lost civilization.

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In New York—the seat of American Jewish political power—there are almost no Jews left in power. A decade ago the city had five Jewish congressmen, a Jewish mayor, two Jewish borough presidents, and 14 Jewish City Council members. Today just two congressmen and a single borough president remain. Only six Jews now sit on the 51-person City Council. Shelly Silver, the corrupt Orthodox former State Assembly leader, was replaced by Yuh-Line Niou, a pro-BDS “progressive” whose oligarch father was featured in the Panama Papers. Not even the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is recognizably Jewish anymore.

“What you have is a lack of identity of Jews as Jews,” the Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf told The Washington Post. “And they don’t have the power to ensure that there’s more than one Jewish congressman. It’s astounding.”

Younger Jews are being excluded from the liberal organizations their parents and grandparents helped create. Identitarian meltdowns roil the progressive world. The Women’s March, the ACLU, and the SPLC all get rid of Jewish leadership. There will be no more “Mighty Iras” in our lifetime. Not even the Jewish president of the Audubon Society is safe.

There are still powerful Jews in Washington—neo-Nazis on Twitter like to post photos of Biden’s cabinet—but the influence is waning. Is it a coincidence that in the U.S. Senate (a handsy group of old men if ever there was one) the only senator forced to resign during the #MeToo panic happened to be Jewish? Or that activists pushed for Dianne Feinstein’s resignation for the explicit reason that she be replaced by someone who isn’t Jewish?

Of the 114 federal judges appointed by Joe Biden (as of this writing), just 8-9 appear to be Jewish—in a field that’s historically been at least 20% Jewish. Liberals worship Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a magical Jewish Teletubby, but they wouldn’t dare nominate another “white woman” to the highest court anytime soon. We are back to the single Jewish seat on the court.

Apparently Jews have so much power and influence that the highest-ranking Jewish senator in history finds it too politically difficult to hire a 22-year-old version of himself. There were at least 15 Jews on Chuck Schumer’s staff of 64 in 2014. After facing pressure for not being diverse enough, and despite an enlarged staff of 89, he can no longer make a minyan.

In Los Angeles—America’s second most Jewish city—there are now just two Jewish City Council members, down from six in 2000. In last year’s infamous dustup, Nury Martinez, the sharp-tongued council president, had despicable things to say about Black people, Oaxacans, even Armenians—but Jews were barely a footnote. “Judíos cut their deal with South LA,” she said. “They are gonna screw everybody else.”

It’s gauche to count but you can’t help yourself: In academia, Hollywood, Washington, even in New York City—anywhere American Jews once made their mark—our influence is in steep decline.

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Speaking of LA, a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.

Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.

The decline is so rapid—and the golden age so close to living memory—it’s a running joke. On the latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David meets with a group of younger non-Jewish studio executives to convince them to cast a Mexican American girl as Young Larry’s Jewish love interest. On Reboot, Steve Levitan’s Hulu show, an old guard of Jewish sitcom writers clash uncomfortably with their younger and woker—and noticeably non-Jewish—colleagues.

Not even Hollywood’s Jewish history belongs to Jews anymore. The new Academy Museum, dedicated to “radical inclusivity” and paid for with Haim Saban’s Jewish money, couldn’t bring itself to include Hollywood’s Jewish founders. In Babylon, Damian Chazelle’s epic flop about Hollywood’s golden age, the director follows an ahistorical Mexican studio executive and an Asian American lesbian rather than any of the very real Jewish moguls or screenwriters or directors of the era. What’s telling isn’t that Chazelle ignored Jews (anyone can do that) but that not a single reviewer bothered to notice this “erasure.” The culture has moved on.

What remains of Jewish Hollywood lives on borrowed time. Spielberg can make his Fabelmans, James Gray his Armageddon Time, but only because these are nostalgia pieces. Soon there will be no more RBG’s, no more Spielbergs, just a few off-brand Seinfelds doing a heritage act. There will certainly never be another Larry King or Andy Borowitz, Jews of such astounding mediocrity you wonder what was in the water.

In the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, after the purges, the Politburo turned to another pressing issue: the overrepresentation of Jews in Soviet life. Proportional representation (3% Tajik! 2% Uzbek! 12% Ukrainian!) became official policy, and the next decade saw the quick erosion of the Jewish nomenklatura. Soviet Jews—who had disproportionately contributed to and benefited from the building of the communist state—had outlived their usefulness.

A 1964 New York Times article explained that because Soviet republics assigned a certain number of students “preferential admission” based on their nationalities, other nationalities—aka Jews—were excluded. “A higher percentage of Jewish students was permitted to attend universities in Czarist Russia than is enrolled in the USSR today,” an outraged American Jewish Congress declared. “The 8.2% of university graduates who are Jews contrasts sharply with the present Jewish university enrollment of 3.22%.”

As true believers in the postwar liberal project, American Jews spent decades advocating for tolerance and equality of opportunity, not least because we were the prime beneficiaries. The ADL didn’t fight the quotas in the 1950s so Jews could matriculate in proportion to their percentage of the population. But there’s a tension between meritocracy and representation. The new DEI regime treats any disparity between groups as evidence of unfair advantage—and yet we’re supposed to think it’s a coincidence that Jewish representation plummets at the exact moment America frantically pushes to racially rebalance all high-status industries.

Because what is framed as a backlash against America’s “white” centers of power is in many cases a clever sleight of hand. Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions.

When activists and journalists and executives talk about how Broadway or NPR or publishing is “too white,” what they really mean is “too Jewish.” When The New York Times says it wants to make its internal demographics look more like New York City’s (excepting the Hasidim, of course), what this means is “fewer Jews.” Twenty years ago, if Pat Robertson spoke along these lines—making the same complaints about the same people and industries and institutions—there would have been a rush to condemn it as antisemitic. Today it passes for social justice.

In the 1960s and ’70s, facing hard barriers to their professional advancement, Soviet Jews lost the faith. The children and the grandchildren of the revolution tried to emigrate. When the authorities wouldn’t let them, American Jews rallied to their cause, created brand-new communal organizations, petitioned Congress, rallied thousands-strong outside the United Nations. Ours was a community confident in its power and confident in its future.

Asian Americans have the dignity of looking at admissions practices and demanding fair representation. The Jews, as ever, are a people apart. From civil rights to Vietnam to the spectacular bounty of their cultural and political achievements, liberal Jewish boomers always managed to be on the right side of history. It is a supreme irony that they’ve helped empower a movement that now places their children and grandchildren on the wrong side.

If Putin or Orban reduced their universities’ Jewish populations by 50%, the ADL would be howling. But Harvard and Yale can magically lose nearly half their Jewish students in less than a decade and we’ll take it on the chin. That this is occurring with the full acquiescence of a terrified liberal Jewish establishment should tell you just how much power Jews in America still have.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49512312)

everyone on RW twitter is ooh'ing and aah'ing at this article, but it sucks imo. written by a jew who very craftily shifts the blame from the actual perpetrators of this phenomenon to white boomers

fucking lol at pretending that academia and journalism(!) only became anti-white in the 2010s. give me a fucking break. if you read the article closely and carefully, the jewishness oozes out between the fucking words

fuck this guy

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49512323)

A lot of people are getting tricked by this. This is the best piece of Jewish sophistry I've seen come out in a while tbh. I'm impressed

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513427)

When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49512610)

“Sweet one-bedroom, VPN to access American TV/film content,” he texted me. “The Dream.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49512763)

Also we have AI now so everyone is fucked

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49512909)

not a single thing you've ever written about your life here is true except for you being a midget and being jewish

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513259)

“ the thing about calling DEI 'economic genocide' is that it undersells it

yes, young White men were systematically excluded from careers during their peak marriage years, but that's just first-order effects.

second-order: marriage market collapse. women date across and up. men without careers become invisible to the women who would have married them and disappear. the "eligible bachelor" pool shrinks.

third-order: fertility crisis. fewer marriages, fewer children. but it's worse than just men not marrying or having families. the women who "won" the DEI lottery got careers instead of families, delayed fertility until it was too late. DEI attacked family formation from both sides, excluded men from provider roles AND diverted women from their fertility window. everyone lost.

fourth-order: psychological. young men couldn't even name what was happening to them. the same institutions that excluded them told them they were "privileged", that complaining was proof of weakness. so they internalized failure as personal inadequacy rather than systemic rigging, retreated into depression, video games, porn. the symptoms we then pathologized as "male failure". the system broke them (on purpose) and blamed them for being broken.

fifth-order: institutional trust gone. once you know positions are filled by demographics rather than competence, every credential becomes suspect (if not a priori worthless). is your doctor qualified or a diversity hire? your pilot? your engineer? you can't prove any individual is incompetent, but you can't trust any individual is competent either. medicine skepticism, academic failure, media skepticism, none of this emerged organically. it was manufactured by the DEI hire you can't be sure is qualified to treat you.

sixth-order: reality became unspeakable. noticing any of this was a fireable offense. pointing out the obvious got you called a bigot, deplatformed or fired. pure totalitarian censorship and the problem couldn't even be acknowledged (until now, finally)

men knew they were being cheated but couldn't say it. women sensed something was wrong with the men but couldn't identify it. relationships poisoned by a dynamic neither party could name.

seventh-order: the feedback loop. fewer eligible men means more women competing for a shrinking pool, more women losing the marriage market, more resentment, more "men are trash", more support for DEI, fewer eligible men and the system accelerates itself.

and the worst part is that DEI was just the economic arm. the same people and institutions pushed the complete package

"toxic masculinity" to pathologize male identity

"the future is female" as explicit zero-sum framing delusion

"believe all women" to weaponize trust against men

"men are trash" to normalize open contempt

a coordinated ideological assault on family formation.

and it even had a business model. HR departments exploded (millions of jobs invented to administer the regime). DEI consultants became a multi-billion dollar industry. politicians got voting blocs dependent on racial grievance. established boomers kept their positions while their competition was eliminated.

the architects knew what they were doing

you don't accidentally build a system that specifically targets men during peak marriage years, tells them they deserve it, makes it unspeakable to complain, attacks their identity as toxic, promotes women into career tracks that burn their fertility, then acts confused when society collapses

if you wanted to suppress the fertility of a specific demographic, engineer the breakdown of trust between the sexes, and make it illegal to notice, the playbook would look exactly like this.

DEI should be held responsible for the fertility crisis, the marriage collapse, the epidemic of male depression and suicide, the destruction of institutional trust, the atomization of society, and the manufactured war between men and women

but DEI was the weapon

the people who designed it, funded it, made it mandatory, enforced it through HR, fired anyone who resisted, called all opposition hate and racism, built careers and industries on its maintenance, they knew. and they're the ones who should be remembered as the architects of one of the worst crimes against humanity”

https://x.com/iterintellectus/status/2000846259645514219

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513247)

lmao, this shit has been an ongoing trend for decades. this is just cope bullshit to try to make it seem like fixing DEI will be a panacea to all the ills of society so reptiles can pat themselves on the back. "welp, DEI is gone, our job is finished! future secured! now back to running 7% deficits so our inverted population pyramid scam can perpetuate itself for another couple years."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513263)

stopped reading there. get a real fucking job in a non shitlib industry/city if you don't want to deal with shitlib bullshit (you still will but it won't be quite so much).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513296)

But the ultimate takeaway of this article is that media and academia went 10x harder than the rest of the economy (which is as much because it’s easier for boomer white guys to continue to hang around past 70 and going HAM on diversity as a white boomer is self-interested/protective) and those industries did basically cancel white male millennials, which seems fucked but also largely accurate and unsurprising, see also South Park’s Kathleen Kennedy takedown.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5810738&forum_id=2.#49513319)