Aspiring Hollywood Author Rejected for Being White — however Nonetheless Doesn’t Blame Leftists

There’s a storm brewing, quite understandably, among millennial and Gen Z white men. Denied jobs over their race, they’re looking for remedy and reparation. Given this, it’s not surprising that a long essay documenting the problem with stories and stats has gained much traction. Appearing at the website Compact on Monday and penned by once-aspiring Hollywood writer Jacob Savage, it is informationally savage. It, as is said, brings the receipts. But does it bring the deeper reality?

After all, the essay, titled “The Lost Generation,” seeks to put an onus on diversity, equity, and inclusion’s (DEI’s) authors and abettors. Yet many touting the essay identify the culprits as certain generations, not as who they are: those advocating ideological degeneration. These critics bemoan the identity politics that denies people jobs over an immutable, birth-determined group identity. Yet they, and Savage to an extent, are blaming that discrimination on people based on an immutable, birth-determined group identity.

That is, the onus for DEI’s cultural depredations is being put on boomers and, in a measure, on Gen X. There is little if any mention of the fact that it is leftists, of all generations, who’ve enabled this rot. This is for an obvious reason:

Savage and the aforementioned critics don’t identify with boomers and Gen X. They do often identify with leftism.

Documenting Discrimination

Savage’s essay is very well written and presents stories about shattered dreams interspersed with anecdote-buttressing facts. He deserves much credit for penning the approximately 8,900-word work, too. As a fellow journalist, I appreciate how laborious it is compiling troves of stats and composing a compelling narrative. Savage does both splendidly.

He opens with his own story, stating:

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes, a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building momentum.

But their dreams of being the next Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David were not to be. Savage explains that after some more struggling, they got to meet with a Hollywood executive, “a Gen-X white guy.” The bigwig apologetically rejected them because the “higher-level writers were all white men,” Savage related. “They couldn’t have an all-white-male room.” And that was it: Wham, bam, thank you, (white) man.

Savage then added:

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. 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. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

The Other Damning Stats

Savage tells the stories of white men such as Andrew, David, James, Ethan, Mark, and others. (Fear often prevented their last names’ divulgence.) Then there are the statistics. What follows is a Grok AI summary of certain relevant ones. (Note: It’s in abbreviated format because at issue is a vast amount of information.)

• The Atlantic staff: hires since 2020: ~66% women, ~50% non-whites; 2024 hires: 75% women & 69% non-whites.
• Harvard humanities tenure-track: White men 39% (2014) → 18-21% (2023).
• 2021 new hires: Condé Nast 25% male & 49% white; California Times 39% male & 31% white; ProPublica 66% women & 58% non-whites; NPR 78% non-whites.
• Interns/fellows: LA Times since 2020: 7.7% white men; WaPo 2018-2024: 2-3 white men/30 annually (7 in 2025); NYT: just 10% of its almost 220 fellows have been white men.
• Vox Media: 82% male & 88% white (2013) → 37% male & 59% white (2022); leadership 73% female (2025).
• NYT newsroom: 57% male & 78% white (2015) → 46% male & 66% white (2024).
• Tenure-track/academia: White men 49% (2014) → 27% (2024); Yale since 2018: 14.6% white American men (7.9% in the humanities); Brown since 2022: 6.7%; UC Berkeley 52.7% (2015) → 21.5% (2023); UC Irvine since 2020: 4.7%; UC Santa Cruz 2020-2024: 3%.
• TV directing: White men 69% episodes (2014) → 34% (2021); under-40 Emmy nominees since 2021: 0 white men (out of 11).
• Sundance lab: White men 27.5% applicants but 14.7% participants (2016-2017); 5.8% since 2018 (8/138).
• Disney Writing Program: 0 white men (past decade, 107 fellowships).
• Medical students/law matriculants: White men 20.5% med (2025); 25.7% law (2024).
• Tech: Google white men ~50% (2014) → <33% (2024); Amazon mid-managers white men 55.8% → 33.8% (nearly 40% decline).

Missing the Target

Savage profoundly sums up how this is the result of a “never enough” mentality, writing of the DEI social engineering:

No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had.

Yet while he understands where we are, he misses the mark on how we got here. For example, he quotes a New Yorker writer as asserting that DEI is mostly a

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,” Savage then responded. “But for white male millennials…”

Wrong. And let me share here an illustrative story that I posted to X Thursday. To wit:

I’m of Gen X, and I attended the “prestigious” Bronx High School of Science. You have to “pass” an entrance exam to get in.

Now, I had a white friend from junior-high school who didn’t qualify; his entrance-exam score was just a bit too low. Well, on the first day of freshman year, I believe it was, we newbies were standing around talking about our scores. We asked this one black kid about his, and can you guess what the number was?

Exactly the same as that of my white friend who was rejected. Exactly the same.

Oh, this was back in 1980.

My entire tweet follows.

Goes Back Decades

My above-related experience is just one example, too. And consider:

Why did ex-president Barack Obama’s 1991 Acton & Dystel publishing house bio state he “was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii”? One interpretation is that he actually was born in Kenya.

The other is that he was trying to capitalize on having an exotic, non-white cachet. This was already highly advantageous 35 years ago.

Another example: Late New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. said in 1993 that we

can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight, male vision of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our job.

The reality is that DEI is actually an intensification of “affirmative action,” which originated in 1961. This means that it was already in full swing by the time I came of age in the 1980s. Yes, it has continued to metastasize; it’s more “in your face” than ever. But it’s nothing new.

Bottom Line

To sum up, Savage’s focus is the uber-left-wing realms of Hollywood, the legacy media, academia, and Big Tech. More shocking than the anti-white-male discrimination within them, however, is that anyone would be shocked by it. It’s what leftists do.

And why didn’t we “elder statesmen” protect the younger fellows from this DEI discrimination? I’ll explain it.

It’s because we (now older) white guys who rejected the DEI rot were shut out a long time ago.

We weren’t in the positions in question to make the hiring decisions because we were never hired ourselves. The left-wing white men (and others) were.

That’s the point, too. Many understand that the talk of “white privilege” is nonsense. Yet what some are construing as boomer privilege here is also nonsense. At issue is leftist social engineering.

Left-wing white males hired other left-wing white males, and other left-wingers, until the system became so left-wing that it wouldn’t even hire left-wing white males anymore. That’s the truth.

Know, too, that whatever your generation, if you’re voting for leftists, you’re part of this problem.

Of course, the left-wing demagogues would rather have the generations fighting with each other to distract from this reality. That way, they can ensure they’ll never, ever be held accountable.