After graduating from Princeton, Jacob Savage moved out to Hollywood to chase his dream of becoming a screenwriter. To make ends meet while pursuing this career, he became a ticket scalper and an SAT tutor. For years he worked diligently, believing that a breakthrough in screenwriting was just around the corner.
After numerous opportunities fell through at the last moment, Savage finally came to a sobering conclusion: He had the wrong skin color.
“A couple of times in my career, I was brought into various spaces and told ‘we were about to give you this staff writing job, and we can’t because you’re a white guy, and we already have too many white guys on staff,’” he tells Glenn Beck.
In 2025, Savage gained significant attention for his essay in Compact magazine, “The Lost Generation,” in which he argued that aggressive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in media, academia, publishing, and Hollywood have disproportionately harmed Millennial white men by sidelining them in hiring and career advancement despite qualifications.
Savage tells Glenn that in 2011 when he first moved to Los Angeles, 48% of lower-level TV writers were white men.
“By 2024, that was 11%,” he says, noting that this number doesn’t even account for the “nepo hires.”
“It was not a slow change. It was not ‘we’re going to hire 1% less white guys every year.’ It was ‘we’re just going to stop.”’
Glenn emphasizes the importance of hiring based on merit: “Funny is funny; talent is talent.”
Savage agrees and suggests forsaking merit is largely why Hollywood’s industry health is rapidly declining.
“I think there are plenty of people who would have been releasing shows around now and been at that stage in their career who never got off the ground, and I think that is no small part of why Hollywood is struggling so much at the moment. They just sort of cut off a generation of talent,” he explains.
He speculates, however, that many Hollywood executives and showrunners didn’t actually believe DEI was good for show business but were essentially pressured and even forced through mandates into implementing it anyway.
“I don’t think that most showrunners really thought, ‘I really just don’t want to hire the best person for this job.’ I think a lot of people were frustrated,” he says.
That frustration has mounted over time, and now the tides are apparently turning.
“I spoke to this showrunner recently who was basically like, ‘We’re back to 2012 rules, which is don’t embarrass us with an all-white-male writers’ room, but other than that, you can hire whoever you want,”’ says Savage.
“They’re not going back to sort of ‘we don’t care at all,’ but they’re going back to ‘I think we can all acknowledge we went too far with this and we just want to make some money again.”’
To hear more, watch the video above.
Want more from Glenn Beck?
To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Read the full article here
