Hey Boomers and Gen X, if You Think DEI Has Been Bad for You, Ask a Millennial or Gen Z Guy

One point I have made about Affirmative Action is that, for many years, it was more of a conceptual problem than one that directly affects most people. 

When you are discussing admissions to prestigious universities or C-suite executives as beneficiaries of DEI preferences, you are referring to such a tiny fraction of the population that the number of people harmed asymptotically approaches zero. Over time, the drive to “diversify” the workplace, elite institutions, or even the police and fire departments would create problems, but the chances that anybody you know would be directly harmed seemed small. 

That’s not true anymore, and especially not so for the younger generations who are getting creamed in the job market, or for the rest of us as our important institutions become filled with incompetents or ideologically-driven nincompoops. 

The only thing left out was the filter of lgbtq.

Great piece. But I wander how may of those white guys that DID get hired were straight.

My guess: at or around zero

— Kale Zelden (@kalezelden) December 15, 2025

I’ve often written about the ideological dangers of DEI, alphabet ideology, and Critical Theory, but I haven’t considered enough the fact that younger people—especially white, heterosexual men—are now being denied opportunities en masse because of their immutable characteristics. What was a fringe problem as I moved up in the world is now the dominant fact of life for millions of younger men, and will even be more so for the kids who are being educated in schools and universities that are populated by the DEI-obsessed. 

Compact magazine has an excellent piece written by a millennial about how DEI has dominated his life and his attempt to build a career, and all I could think of is that his experiences tell us much about why there are Groypers who have become nihilists. 

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. 

As our economy has been transformed into one where advancement has depended on getting a college education, and prestige attaches to elite jobs, the establishment has been on a jihad to transform our institutions into ones where white men need not apply. This is partly because the elite consensus is that white men are bad by virtue of their “privilege,” and partly because these institutions are top-heavy with white men and the only way to reach “balance” is to focus current hiring on anybody BUT white men. 

If 80% of your old hires are white men and you want to “diversify,” hiring more white men, even if they are the best for the job, is a bad move. If a “diverse” person leaves, they must be replaced with a “diverse” person. If a position opens, it’s a prime opportunity to increase “balance” or even overcorrect. Many institutions that used to be dominated by white males have relegated them to minority status. 

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.”

We’ve all seen the results of the DEI culture, but most of us have watched the decline from afar or experienced the secondary effects as our government, our elite institutions, and our services decline in quality. But for young white heterosexual men the experience is much more direct.

They are being told in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome. 

“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.  

There has been a growing focus on what is called “elite overproduction,” and on the reality that more people are promised prestige and well-paying jobs than there are slots available. When this happens, political instability always follows as a highly educated class that was promised power decides that the system must be upended. Revolutionaries almost always come from such classes—highly educated and highly disaffected. 

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.

The excuse for going down this path is that it is necessary to correct past injustices, but that argument is total bunk. Giving a position to one person who never experienced injustice and taking it from another who never committed it does nothing to compensate a third person who did experience injustice. 

It is virtue signaling by stabbing an innocent person in the back. 

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.”

This shift in priorities has ruined the lives of many real people, and not coincidentally amped up the tensions between different identity groups who see themselves at war with each other because, for all practical purposes, they are. 

Academia is “diversity” central, and unsurprisingly it is as bad as you can get in pushing DEI. 

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 PhDs 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).

And, as with prestige journalism, white heterosexual men need not apply. There are plenty of “old white men” at the top of the pyramid, but any younger man who is too straight or too melanin-deprived should look elsewhere. 

Facing such discrimination, is it any wonder that young men are striking out and becoming ever more nihilistic and unashamed about racializing disputes? If one is defined by race, pious talk about racism sounds worse than hollow: it seems weaponized to make you shut up. 

As a white heterosexual man in my early 60s, none of this directly affects me except when I have to read an idiotic essay about “diversity” or deal with an incompetent person in a position of power. As a practical matter, my own life hasn’t changed much. 

But our society is changing for the worse around me, and it angers me to see it. It is so unnecessary, and so self-destructive. 

We were handed a country that, for all its flaws, was created on a foundation that promised ever-increasing social justice. I was born when the civil rights movement was making real strides, and have watched this country transform from one that suppressed “people of color” to one that now suppresses people of pallor. 

The latter doesn’t correct for the former. 

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