Original Article By Natalie Sandoval
Something funny happened in the mid 2010s.
Normal people — some persuaded by argument, more cowed by implicit social repercussions — turned on white men. Many of the fiercest detractors were white men themselves. Often, older white men, for whom the consequences of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives were fairly benign.
“This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI,” Jacob Savage writes for Compact Magazine. “But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed.”
“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.”
one of the most egregious cases I know was at intel where a friend has worked for 15 years. women promoted above him too fast and he and her other subordinates had to cover for her but superior above her explained they needed more women at her rank… out of his hands https://t.co/ncM5L1E7Ie
— Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️ (@razibkhan) December 16, 2025
Savage tells a familiar tale. Managers overlooking qualified male candidates on the basis of those characteristics. The percentage of white and male staffers at publications conspicuously plummeting in less than a decade. Doors, everywhere, slammed shut.
But Savage hasn’t stumbled upon a well-guarded, or even open, secret. He’s simply identified the explicit goal of DEI. The term “DEI” means, “less white people, but especially less white men.”
As publisher and commentator Jonathan Keeperman, aka “Lomez,” notes, “As this was happening it was made very explicit what was going on. Some exceptions were made if you were gay, otherwise ‘no more white guys.’ No one tried to hide this.”
Savage cites a 2019 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
“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 says.
In the same interview, Goldberg admits, “It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. 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.”
Savage spoke to an Ivy League professor identified as “Will.” Will recalls screening finalists for a junior professor position.
“On paper, [the white man] was so clearly the strongest candidate,” Will told Savage. “It really kind of did feel like, well, we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.”
Will was told, according to Savage, “If we’re on the fence here, we should not go with the man again.”
Where was the outrage at this explicit, unwarranted discrimination?
This is a blistering and remarkably unflinching account about how entry-level opportunities and early-career advancement for white men in media, Hollywood and academia all but slammed shut in the mid-2010s. Gen X white men, the article asserts, pulled the ladder up behind them,… pic.twitter.com/f4S6aIiylI
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) December 16, 2025
I’ll return to Keeperman: “The prevailing response in the moment was shame. Say nothing. Don’t acknowledge it. Don’t dwell on it. Don’t ever admit you got screwed. That would be too self indulgent. It would admit to a much larger set of problems you might then be obligated to do something about. I understand this. Complaining about this sort of thing brings no sympathy and only points to your own helplessness.”
That, and the sense that white men needed to be taken down a peg. Resentment cloaked as justice.
All this is still far too embarrassing for the legacy media to admit, so they’re resigned to pretending DEI was not a machine for disenfranchising white men.
“Trump’s attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men,” The Washington Post claimed on Dec. 4. Note the framing, which suggests that DEI was actually buoying white guys all along!
The New York Times (NYT) zeroed in on a deaf and blind 3-year-old, claiming the little girl is “Caught in Trump’s Anti-Diversity Crusade.”
DEI is not an initiative aimed at uplifting white men or blind children.
Both stories ignore the Trump administration’s intent — and overall effect — in disassembling institutionalized DEI: Uprooting entrenched anti-white, anti-male discrimination.
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