DEI and the “Lost Generation”
How white millennial men were purged from elite institutions
I like to think of myself as a fairly jaded news consumer. As someone who lives it all day, every day, it is hard to shock me. But every once in a while, my faith in journalism is redeemed by a serious investigation or long-form essay that cuts through the noise, summarizes a problem, and forces the reader to grapple with the consequences.
I had this experience this week with a long piece in Compact magazine, “The Lost Generation,” which is a firsthand account, backed by deep reporting, on discrimination against millennial white men in the institutions of elite culture, academia, media, publishing, and entertainment.
The phenomenon it describes is not new. Affirmative action, a euphemism for anti-white-male discrimination, dates back to the mid-1960s, and, in the 1990s, Claremont University professor Frederick Lynch was already documenting systematic discrimination against white men in corporate environments in books such as Invisible Victims and The Diversity Machine. But Jacob Savage, the author of the Compact article, makes a persuasive case that this trend accelerated dramatically in the ten-year period between 2014 and 2024—the decade of the so-called Great Awokening.
The facts in the story are astonishing. Here are some of the representative numbers:
In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower-level TV writers. By 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%. The Atlantic‘s editorial staff went from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024. White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.
Since 2020, only 7.7% 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 to three were white men. In 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post 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% of nearly 220 fellows have been white men.
The reaction to the piece was interesting, too. The Left spent the “woke” era denying the basic facts about DEI, but now they are starting to admit it. Now, even some journalists at publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times are cautiously acknowledging the reality, although many have done so with a heavy dose of feigned ignorance: “This is awful, we didn’t know this was happening.”
This, too, is a lie. Of course they knew this was happening. Anyone who has spent time in these institutions knew it all along. What changed is not the reality, but the risk calculus. We might think of this moment as an American version of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the Soviet era, everyone understood the corruption of the system. They joked about it privately and whispered about it at home, but repeated official doctrine in public. The woke era produced a similar dynamic. Those of us who reported aggressively on DEI discrimination were told our work was racist, false, misleading, or immoral. But now that the social mania has subsided, people feel comfort acknowledging the basic reality we documented years ago.
