Infographic: 10 Key Insights from "The Lost Generation"
Illustrating the viral article by Jacob Savage
“A lot of people think "DEI" is lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games. In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination… against white men.” — Vice President J.D. Vance
“The Lost Generation” by Jacob Savage, published in Compact magazine on December 16, 2025, went viral last week. Savage outlines how millennial white men have become a “lost generation” in key cultural and professional sectors due to the rapid implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in the 2010s. In short, DEI policies disproportionately blocked younger white men from advancing based upon merit.
The following infographic helps depict the layers of these devastating policies. Click to zoom in.
10 Key Observations from “The Lost Generation”
1. A Generational Dividing Line in 2014
The year 2014 marked a critical inflection point when DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) became institutionalized across professional America. White men who entered their careers before this point—Gen X and older millennials—were largely grandfathered into established positions, while those starting after faced dramatically reduced opportunities. This created a sharp generational divide where being 40 in 2014 versus 30 meant entirely different professional trajectories, despite identical demographics.
2. Dramatic Demographic Shifts in Media
The journalism industry underwent a radical transformation in representation. White men dropped from 48% of lower-level TV writers in 2011 to less than 12% by 2024. At The Atlantic, staff composition shifted from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024. The New York Times went from 57% male in 2015 to 46% male in 2024. These weren’t gradual changes but accelerated dramatically after 2016, and especially after the Democrat riots of 2020.
3. The Pipeline-to-Hiring Disconnect
Across industries, applicant pools remained relatively consistent—white men still comprised 40-50% of applicants in many fields—but hiring outcomes diverged sharply. At Berkeley, white men were 48.2% of Physical Sciences applicants but only 26% of assistant professor hires. In journalism, white men might be 80% of applicants but receive only 10% of job offers. This represented systemic filtering — a wholly unnatural shift in the talent pipeline.
4. The “Diversity at Lower Levels” Pattern
Senior positions continued to be filled by older white men (Gen X and Boomers), while diversity mandates were implemented almost exclusively at entry and mid-levels. At The New York Times Magazine, the editor-in-chief and editorial director are both Gen-X white men, but among nine millennial senior editors below them, only one is a white man. This created a generational bottleneck where younger white men faced barriers that their predecessors never encountered.
5. Academia’s Tenure-Track Collapse
In elite universities, white men fell from half of tenure-track positions in 2014 to 27% in 2024, and in humanities specifically from 39% to 21%. At Yale, since 2018, only 14.6% of tenure-track assistant professors hired have been white American men, and in humanities just 7.9%. Meanwhile, the professoriate overall remained majority white male due to aging Baby Boomers who eliminated mandatory retirement, creating a “locked-in” demographic at the top while blocking advancement below.
6. Hollywood’s Systematic Exclusion
Internal documents from 2017 showed major talent agencies tracking TV showrunners’ explicit requirements for “diverse,” “female,” or “women and diverse only” candidates. White men dropped from 60% of TV writers in 2011 to 11.9% of lower-level writers by 2025. Fellowship programs like Disney Writing Program (107 fellowships, zero to white men in a decade) and Sundance (5.8% of fellows since 2018) became exclusive pipelines that systematically excluded an entire demographic cohort.
7. The Reweighting of Prestige Mechanisms
Every major cultural award and recognition system also shifted wildly. The MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship awarded seven white male Gen Xers in 2013 alone—more than all white male millennials combined in the following decade. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, exactly zero of 45 millennial artists were white American men. The National Book Awards nominated only three white male millennials out of 70 millennial nominees in the decade after 2014. These changes represented a complete restructuring of cultural gatekeeping to exclude white males.
8. The Absence of Alternative Pathways
Contrary to assumptions that excluded white men simply moved to other high-status fields, declines were universal. White men dropped from 31.2% of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7% in 2024, and from 31% of medical students in 2014 to 20.5% in 2025. At Google, white men fell from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024. The only refuges found—crypto, podcasting, Substack—were chosen precisely because they lacked institutional gatekeepers.
9. The Silence and Self-Censorship
Nearly all interview subjects demanded anonymity, with “frenzied pre-publication negotiations” over identifying details. Even successful white male millennials expressed “gratitude and relief” rather than entitlement, understanding their success as fragile and contingent. The fear of being labeled “that guy” created a culture of self-censorship. Academia is described as “so small” that “there’s a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” reflecting how even talking about these experiences became professionally radioactive.
10. The Ideological Transformation of Institutions
The demographic shift wasn’t just numerical - it was also ideological. Journalists described newsrooms going “from center-left places in 2005” to “incredibly left places,” with white staffers adopting “protective coloration, allyship mindset, to get through the door.” In academia, fields of study themselves were reoriented—military history became unmarketable while black sexualities studies opened pathways. The author notes this represented not just who told stories, but “which stories got told,” fundamentally altering the cultural and intellectual output of these institutions while simultaneously driving their declining public trust and institutional strength.
Savage has two young sons. He concludes with two questions:
What do I say when my boys ask about my old hopes and dreams? What do I tell them when they ask about theirs?
The answer is simple. DEI must be excised from America like the cancer it is.
Based upon “The Lost Generation” by Jacob Savage
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