You don’t usually come across long-form articles that resonate with millions of people these days, mainly because nobody knows how to read anymore. For as long as everyone’s owned a cell phone, pretty much every form of media has been locked in an arms race to make content shorter, more attention-grabbing, and more conspiratorial. So it takes a lot for a 10,000-word essay in a tiny, little-known publication to break containment.
But that’s exactly what happened with a new article in Compact magazine, titled “The Lost Generation.” It was written by Jacob Savage — a white man who aspired to be a big player in the entertainment industry, before he had to settle for a much less glamorous career scalping tickets from his bedroom.
It’s not hard to see why Savage’s article has been so well-received. It’s a well-researched, well-written explanation of how major institutions in this country — particularly the media and Hollywood — have systematically discriminated against white men over the past decade. It’s definitely not a perfect article, for reasons we’ll get into in a second. And it reaches a conclusion that’s obviously wrong (and frankly embarrassing). At the same time, if you’ve been looking for reasons why every aspect of society seems to be falling apart — as we’ve been doing on this show for the past few weeks — this piece in Compact magazine is a very good jumping-off point.
In particular, the article includes the following statistics on writing jobs in the entertainment industry, which help explain why every streaming show and movie, virtually without exception, is now terrible.
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. … 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.
The article goes on to describe a white man who wrote a screenplay that made it on Hollywood’s “Black List,” which is a “prestigious list” of unproduced screenplays, as determined by Hollywood executives. But despite that achievement, he couldn’t land a full-time staff job from any showrunner. At one point, he was told to his face by a showrunner — a “Gen X white guy” — that they already had too many white people on staff. The author also notes that Dan Erickson, the white man who created the AppleTV show “Severance” — which is the best show on TV today, and one of the best this century — “wasn’t able to land a job in a TV writer’s room until his own show began production.” And in some cases, the discrimination was put in writing. One higher-up at a talent agency wrote, “Chicago Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs [staff writers].”
Savage also points to the “Disney Writing Program,” which is basically a boot camp that leads, in most cases, directly to full-time staff writing jobs on major shows. And over the past decade, Savage notes, the writing program has awarded “107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships” — none of which have been given to white men.
Here’s the webpage for the current crop of fellows in the Disney Writing Program. See what you notice.
Credit: Disney.com/ctd/writingprogram
There’s only one person who can plausibly be described as a white male in the entire cohort. And when you look at that guy’s bio, he informs you that he’s a “Tejano comedy writer” who’s proud of his “queer crime comedy pilot.”
Every single one of the bios on this webpage begins with a statement about the person’s ethnic origin.
Neda is a “first-generation Iranian-American drama writer.”
Alie is a “Lebanese-American writer from Detroit, Michigan.”
Monib is a “first-generation Afghan-American writer.”
Jason is a “first-generation Korean-American drama writer.”
Ananya is a “first-generation Indian-American dramedy writer.”
Fatima is a “Sudanese-American “traumedy” writer based in Los Angeles.”
It’s pretty obvious that, in the eyes of Disney and the rest of Hollywood, it doesn’t actually matter if you’re a good writer. Your most important attribute is your ethnicity. And if you look even vaguely white, then you’d better be writing “queer comedies” about your “Tejano heritage.”
I’m not going to summarize all of Savage’s findings, but this should give you some idea. He goes on to describe, in much the same way, how other fields — from academia to the corporate press — practiced the same kind of anti-white discrimination, particularly for entry-level jobs.
The statistics from the university system in California, in particular, are actually so over-the-top, they’re hard to believe. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the liberal arts since 2020, and only three were white men. And for its part, UC Santa Cruz only hired two white men out of 59 assistant professors in the humanities in that time period.
Savage’s thesis is that, starting around 2014, in response to political and social pressures, older and more established white men — the decision-makers and hiring managers — began openly discriminating against younger white applicants who were starting their careers. Rather than stand on principle, Savage writes, the boomers effectively sabotaged younger generations. 2014, he writes, “was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.”
And then we get this conclusion, which is where things go off the rails:
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.
So he’s not angry about the people who discriminate against him on the basis of his skin color. He’s angry at himself. This was the moment, in reading this article, that I decided to look into Compact Magazine a little more closely. And in doing so, I found the following tidbit of information, per Vanity Fair.
“At a recent get-together, lefty mags were roiled to learn that George Soros’s foundations are supporting Compact, a publication that’s flirted with authoritarianism. “It was weird to me the whole f—ing time,” says one attendee.”
The article goes on to note that Soros’ Open Society Foundations have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Compact. Now, I have no idea why that donation was made, or what it may have purchased. The Leftists at Vanity Fair weren’t sure, either. But I can say that, having read this article, I find myself agreeing with commentators like Auron MacIntyre, who have called Jacob Savage’s article a “permission piece.” It’s a way to finally admit something that the Left had previously described as a “conspiracy” — except the admission is done in a way that lessens the impact and frames the narrative in a way that’s beneficial to the Left. Meanwhile, all of the Leftist journalists can act shocked by the findings, even though everyone on the Right has known all of it for years.
Think of the mainstream articles that finally acknowledged COVID came from a lab in China, or the articles that acknowledged that the COVID shot can cause serious heart problems. These were all “permission pieces.” Audiences on the Left were finally told a semblance of the truth — but there’s never any accountability for the liars, nor is there a full explanation of what actually happened. Basically, you get a “permission piece” when the Left’s hand is forced. They can’t deny reality anymore, because the truth has become too obvious. So they spin it.
In the case of the piece in Compact Magazine, there are a few elements of obvious spin. The first is the article’s implication that systematic anti-white discrimination only really took hold in 2014. In fact, Savage even writes that, if you were born in 1974 or earlier, then “you were already established” and didn’t hit the “wall” of anti-white discrimination. But that’s a claim that makes the generational divide seem much starker than it really is. In reality, the Left’s efforts to systematically discriminate against white males have been in place for many decades.
Back in 2003, there was a major Supreme Court case about the University of Michigan’s application process, which was similar to the process used by many other schools. If you were black, Hispanic, or Native American, then your application automatically received 20 points. By contrast, if you earned a perfect SAT score — something only a few hundred students do every year, out of millions of test takers — then you only got 12 points. And an “outstanding personal essay” would only get you 3 points. In other words, a white student from a middle-class background with a perfect SAT score and a flawless essay received fewer points than a black applicant would receive, simply for being black. And even after the Supreme Court struck down this kind of quota system, it persisted, as we all know. The universities just stopped admitting they were doing it.
And long before that, in the 1960s, there was the “Philadelphia Plan,” where federal contractors were required to start hiring so-called “minority workers” in the trades — a practice that continues today, with a fairly explicit quota system. For tens of thousands of white construction workers, beginning in the 1970s, it became more difficult to get an apprenticeship — not because they weren’t skilled, not because they didn’t have potential, but because of the color of their skin.
We could talk about many more examples, but put simply, the idea that DEI and anti-white racism only became a systemic barrier to white education and employment in 2014 is not remotely true. Savage is probably correct to point out that, in the industries he’s talking about — mainly media and entertainment — things accelerated in 2014. But plenty of people in other industries hit this “wall” before then.
The other element of the story that’s being de-emphasized here is that, when white men are passed over for jobs because of their skin color, there are plenty of downstream consequences. It’s not simply the fact that white men have to settle for worse salaries and less fulfilling careers. They’re also less likely to ever own a home, or to get married, start a family, and have kids. They’re more likely to become depressed and turn to drugs, which explains why overdose rates are so high. And through it all, as fertility rates plummet and men are forced to work jobs that they’re overqualified for, men realize exactly what’s happening to them. It’s not some great mystery. And that leads to justifiable rage, as millions of working-age men come to realize that their lives have been sacrificed for a Leftist experiment.
The biggest and most important downstream consequence of this open discrimination against white men is that everything in society gets worse as a result. That’s the second-order effect that the Compact piece doesn’t get into. It’s the third rail — the part you’re not supposed to talk about. But the truth, which everyone intuitively knows, is that things were a lot better back when white men weren’t being discriminated against by every institution in the country, but instead were running most of them. The fact of the matter is that a hugely disproportionate number of our greatest leaders, innovators, pioneers, explorers, philosophers, and so on were white men. Without white men, we wouldn’t have airplanes or spaceships or trains or phones or lightbulbs or computers or the internet or batteries or X-ray machines or jet engines or rockets or a thousand other things that our society depends on to exist, and to flourish. We never would have had a railway system or the printing press. We wouldn’t have this country, which was founded by white men, and led by white men, and expanded from coast to coast, and settled, and built up mostly by white men.
These are all facts. Historical realities that cannot be denied by reasonable people. And while black women are encouraged to be proud of the historical achievements of black women, whatever those might be — and Asians to be proud of Asian achievements — and Native Americans of Native American achievements — white men are the one group on the entire face of the planet who have been forbidden to even acknowledge what other white men have accomplished, much less to express any pride in it. Instead, our society set out on a campaign to punish, exclude, and alienate this very group. That is their reward for having carried the weight of Western civilization on their shoulders.
But white men, as it turns out, aren’t just good at building and flying spaceships. They’re also good at writing television shows, covering the news, teaching students at the university level, and so on. In fact, in the aggregate, based on every existing piece of available evidence, white men are much better at all of these tasks than the allegedly “underprivileged communities” that are replacing them.
If that sounds harsh, I really don’t care. It happens to be true. And the “underrepresented minorities” I’m talking about, in many cases, are some of the most vindictive, evil people in the country. Back in 2015, as the author Wesley Yang pointed out, BuzzFeed published one of their insufferable “listicles” titled, “23 Writers With Messages For Straight White Male Publishing.”
Here are some of those messages:
Credit: BuzzFeed
Credit: BuzzFeed
Credit: BuzzFeed
So you have girlbosses of various ethnicities, saying things like, “Sit down and let us abolish you,” and “She’s coming for you,” with the middle finger extended. These are explicitly hateful, deranged messages directed at white men, and they were published — enthusiastically — by a major news outlet. This kind of race-hate was commonplace in 2015.
Well, guess what? The girlbosses were right. They did abolish white men in the entertainment industry. The writers are mostly women and “minorities” now. And all of their shows are garbage — almost as if they’re intentionally bad. Television peaked before these people took over. The only conclusion you can draw, realistically, is that girlbosses shouldn’t be allowed to write shows. They’re not good at it. Bring back the white men.
If that ever happens, it will only happen if — unlike this Compact article — we’re honest about what white men have achieved in the past. The Left can only ever tear down what has been built. And white men are the primary builders of Western civilization. Make a list of the 1,000 greatest and most influential figures of the past two millennia, and like 975 of them will be white men. It’s suicidal to target this group, of all groups, for ostracizing and alienation. But that, of course, is the point.
The Compact piece is the “tell” that lets you know what’s going on here. You’re finally being allowed to say, out loud, that white men have been discriminated against for many years. But you’re not allowed to talk about the extent of the discrimination. You’re not allowed to talk about the full effects of it. And in polite company, you’re still expected to elevate mediocrity in the name of “racial justice.” Call this article whatever you want — a “permission piece,” a “limited hangout,” whatever — but it’s not the way to course-correct the self-inflicted collapse of our country. The way to fix it — or to have any hope of fixing it — is to admit that white men aren’t simply victims. They were also the key to building Western civilization. And by the same token, they’re also key to saving it.
