What was it he wrote that made them – risking a thrashing in the waters of the online moment – share, and thus acknowledge, their shock and discomfort?
Savage explains, in a way more devastating for being regretful rather than vicious, what the impact of DEI policies looks like. He describes the rather obvious fact that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies might better be described as Discrimination, Entitlement and Injustice. It also comes from an insider, a signed-up fellow traveller. Savage is a screenwriter who ticks all the boxes in terms of the politics and ideology now demanded in his industry.
This is a writer who ‘cared about social justice’, voted Democrat, and subscribed to all the uniform opinions and highly delusional leftist self-image of themselves as bringers of justice, righters of wrongs, and champions of the poor, the oppressed and the vulnerable.
Savage begins his critique with personal details of hardship, referencing his poverty as he struggled in his career and talking about a specific incident when a screenplay and a writing post were denied to him because he is a white male (explicitly stated to him by the industry figures involved in the decision). He doesn’t phrase this in an angry or even annoyed fashion, but almost wistfully, like a man describing a beloved girlfriend he let go.
The use of personal experience is of course entirely in line with woke prioritisation of emotion and feeling, especially in ‘lived experience’ narratives of discrimination and the tendency towards ‘my truth’ accounts. What makes it so effective is that Savage knows this literature and has spent much of his life agreeing with it, but turns its devices back upon his own treatment and that of white millennial males generally.
He writes: ‘The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 per cent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 per cent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 per cent male and 89 per cent white in 2013 to 36 per cent male and 66 per cent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 per cent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 per cent in 2023.
‘In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalised 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”.’
What grounds this complaint in reality is those stark and significant drops in white male representation.
DEI could only artificially advance the interests of ethnic minority or female candidates by unjustly crippling the chances of white males.
This is an obvious point that every rational person realises, but leftists like Savage had a whole host of dishonest propaganda telling them that somehow you could massively increase ‘under-represented groups’ by discriminatory selection and that this was just and fair and wouldn’t harm them.
What people like Savage were told and believed was that society was racist and sexist and homophobic and that this was the reason that, for example, there were more straight white male CEOs in company boardrooms, or more white male screenwriters even in left-leaning film companies.
That starting assumption was a lie but it was the foundational myth of the DEI movement, and the lie that allowed two things to happen at once. First, it provided an excuse to do unjust and discriminatory things, because hurting white male chances was described as enabling social justice and more equal representation. Second, especially in creative fields, journalism and academia, it put millennial white males who were leftists in the position of strongly believing that measures taken to harm them were justified and that it would be wrong to protest.
Part of the reason why Savage’s exhaustive laying out of the evidence of the harms of DEI works is because he remains something of an innocent, a person who dutifully did what he was told, believed what he was expected to believe, and deferred rather meekly to the injustices he received.
His article shows that white male millennials were complicit in the removal of people who matched their innate characteristics from entire industries where their politics were dominant. It’s hard to tell in his piece if Savage has ever read or encountered Thomas Sowell for instance, whose work destroyed the basic premises of the progressive worldview a quarter of a century before millennials were born.
For a conservative, a fan of Sowell, or simply a more informed person who has never been caught in the bubble of woke idiocies, it might be difficult to sympathise with leftist writers like Savage when they tell us how hard it suddenly became to get jobs writing screenplays about white racism or black suffering when DEI hiring policies were now picking staff on the basis of skin colour.
There’s a temptation to laugh at Savage for his prior foolishness, or to think that being unable to find work as a screenwriter is a very minor order of suffering anyway. To an extent these reactions are true, and I retain far more sympathy for blue-collar workers who saw their jobs outsourced to China by the same class of politicians and executives who collectively decided that every writer’s room would be barred to new talent that happened to be white and male.
The kind of discrimination Savage describes was real, was pervasive, is still going on, and has much wider social effects once it is normalised and once it decides that racial and sexual discrimination is perfectly fine so long as the victims are white.
This didn’t just happen to a generation of screenwriters and novelists. Advancing an entire new genre of racial grievance fiction posing as political fact has had a devastating impact on race relations, with even many classical liberals acknowledging that.
Race relations have worsened, not improved, thanks to writers like Ash Sarkar in Britain or Ibram X Kendi in the US being given priority on the basis of skin colour and divisive, hypocritically racist ideology.
Our screenwriters, novelists, educators and academics do have a disproportionate impact in shaping the attitudes we consider normal and the politics of our society, including whether it is considered normal or even good to treat one category or race unfairly.
Savage obliquely references this later in his piece. He writes: ‘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 centre-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”.’
In other words what DEI ideology did, particularly following the George Floyd death in 2020, was not only to make excluding people for being white, straight or male normal but also cemented disproportionate and unrepresentative political bias in institutions and professions.
Environments that were already discriminating against right-wing views were inclined even more in that direction by hypocritically racist hiring policies.
People were excluded and denied careers they could have competently performed while DEI accelerated greater leftist extremism. Much of this might explain the rampant bias, delusion and uniformity we still suffer from in mainstream media and academia.
Astonishingly, Savage manages to provide a wealth of evidence in both anecdotal and statistical form that confirms his central thesis without acknowledging the process as actually evil and blaming anyone for it. There is some genuine pathos and despair in what Savage says, and truth too, that demands respect, but his refusal to condemn the architects of DEI policy grows frustratingly tiresome and gives evidence of just how strong the leftist grip on people like Savage is. Savage has accurately seen that people like him were harmed and eloquently expresses a sadness about that.
He wrote: ‘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 40 in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s — you were already established. If you were 30 in 2014, you hit the wall . . .’
What Savage’s Lost Generation experienced was sustained discrimination against them, sustained entitlement and preferment for others, and sustained racial injustice posing as the opposite of these things.
But as someone who also experienced the manner in which the kind of professions he describes behave towards white males and towards non-leftist candidates far earlier than he did (I was born in 1974, came from the white working class, trained as an academic and found my PhD was utterly useless since I didn’t match the politics and identities required in British academia) the notion that these injustices have only really applied since 2014 is laughable.
The reality is that the DEI explosion after 2014 and the BLM hysteria after 2020, now both thankfully being addressed in the US at least by the Trump administration’s support for genuine equality and meritocracy, has roots much deeper than Savage imagines, is an injustice more heinous than Savage acknowledges, and requires much more than a sad lament to correct and address.
DEI hiring policies are just one part of a general, two-tier standard on racism that has included more grotesque injustices than the deliberate exclusion of white males from professional careers that would excel in.
Today Britain is experiencing a brain drain of people fleeing the country. Emigration levels are at extreme highs, just like immigration levels, which contributes to a rapid demographic shift in the UK populace.
A soft critic of DEI like Savage wouldn’t dare see a similarity in the orchestrated replacement of white males in the workplaces he is familiar with and the diminution of white majorities in Western nations.
Yet with emigration, one might wonder how many of those are wealthy people fleeing insane taxation levels, or if young white males in Starmer’s Britain are doing what Savage describes millennial white males doing in creative industries: no longer bothering to apply to, or be part of, systems rigged against them.
For the white working class to experience racial discrimination in their own county is surely a strong motive to look to live elsewhere.
