Brett Cooper — DEI Didn’t Just Fail — It Created a Generation of Radicalized Men | Episode 111

What happened to the men? How did they get so radical? Why are all of the men so right-wing? Well, DEI happened and Jacob Savage is here to prove it. So, earlier this week on December 15th, Compact Magazine and Jacob Savage had the balls to go where very few other publications have gone and they released a scathing expose on the realities of DEI and more specifically the impact that they had on white men. The article is titled The Lost Generation and again it's written by an author named Jacob Savage and his post on X sharing this article now has over 9 million impressions.

People are now calling this article one of the most important pieces of political journalism ever. And it brings to light one of the most talked about issues in modern culture and modern politics. What happened to the men? Now, before we dive into this and talk about the article, make sure that you like this video and subscribe to the channel if you have not already. And of course, ring that notification bell to make sure that you never miss one of our uploads.

All right, so this is not Jacob's first time writing on this topic, talking about white men and DEI. Over the summer, he actually had another article go viral. It was titled The Vanishing White Male Writer. And this topic is very personal to Jacob Savage because he was once an aspiring screenwriter who was forced out of his dreams due to the implications from DEI, specifically because his white skin tone. In this article, he wrote, "The doors seem to close everywhere and all at once.

In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower level TV writers. By 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%. The Atlantic's editorial staff went from 53% male and 89% white in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white in 2024. White men fell from 39% of tenure track positions in the humanities department at Harvard to 18% in 2023. In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year that DEI became institutionalized across American life.

Industry after industry, gatekeepers were promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn't a white man. And then they provided just that. And thinking about Hollywood and his dreams of being a screenwriter, he was not wrong because even back in 2014, like Hollywood was the belly of the beast. And I don't think I really noticed this or it impacted me until, you know, Trump's first term. I would say like around 2016.

But it became routine. And you guys know I was a child actor. That's what I did when I was younger. But it was routine that every single breakdown I would get for an audition, no matter what the project was, it would have some line saying, you know, we're seeking an ethnically ambiguous actor. and they would list off the ideal races for the certain role and then at the end they would kind of be like oh and yeah if you're white I guess you can audition but like don't get your hopes up was basically the sentiment that was given to us like it even became a running joke a non-political joke with even my left-wing high school friends that we would go out for roles we would get call backs we would go to director sessions we'd even get pinned and then oh somebody diverse got the role like it was just so expected and 10 years later it's only gotten more blatant for example comedian Tyler Fischer went public with the story of how an agent decided that they could not rep him because he was a straight white male.

Listen to this. >> This has been happening for about 10 years. Every once in a while, a casting director would say, "Hey, you know, I want to submit you for this job, but we're not really doing the white guy thing right now." And I'm, "Okay, that's interesting." And it it happened more and more frequently. And then this agent um that I am suing or manager rather, reached out and said, "We love you. we want to get you auditions for Curb Your Enthusiasm, all this stuff.

And um said, "Great." Few months later, they reach out said, "We want to call, we want to get you on the phone." So I'm sitting there like, "All right, here we go. Finally, it's all it's all happening." >> And he goes, "Ah, we we we hit a snag. We really love you. We think you're a star, but we're not taking white guys." And I was just like, "What the f, you know, been at this for 15 years. Not that I deserve anything.

You know, if I went my whole career without getting booked on something, but I at least had the opportunity to audition, I'd feel okay about that. >> And that's the key point. You at least want the opportunity to get your foot in the door, to at least feel like maybe you're being considered based on merit, even if you don't get the job. If it's in Hollywood, if it's in any other industry, people are just asking for the opportunity to be considered equally.

I thought we cared about equality, but of course, it's more about equity these days. And you know Tyler's story, it's not just hearsay. He actually has the recording of that conversation. Listen to this. >> Is it a policy like explicit that they're not taking on any like white men or is it like case by case? >> On camera talent stand up probably not. >> Okay. So no so no white men are allowed for on camera stuff. >> I guess it's right now where it stands, but like yeah depending on if cast of directors.

That's not the feedback anymore. Fortnite cast of directors, you know, studios, whatever it may be, where it's like, this is what we're looking for. >> So, yeah, Tyler, why don't you just sit on your hands and hope that the world is going to change in a year? And obviously, that did not happen. Tyler recorded that audio multiple years ago, and the situation is still the same. So, the point being, it's not just Jacob who experienced this in Hollywood.

It certainly wasn't just Tyler, which is why millions upon millions of men across social media feel so seen and vindicated by this article. But the thing is, it wasn't all men. It was specifically young men. And as a woman who has kind of been outside of the situation looking in, the most interesting part of the article to me was the positioning that it was older white men who made these pledges at their companies within their industries and helped usher in DEI for everyone under them.

But they, those men in executive positions, the older men, they did not suffer. They continued to hold their positions of power while younger white men were being erased from entry- level positions and skipped over for promotions. It was millennials who suffered the most. It was the older genzers. It's it's men still coming into industries right now. And people look around at the situation. They go, I can't why are men so radicalized?

Why are they so rightwing? I mean, hello. The answer is right in front of our faces. Savage wrote, "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 is a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed and who mostly stayed quiet.

The same identity a decade apart, met entirely different professional fates. If you were 40 in 2014, born in 1974, beginning your career in the late '9s, you were already established. If you were 30 in 2014, you hit the wall because the mandates to diversify didn't fall on older white men who in many cases still wield enormous power. They landed on us. And I think this, you know, distinguishing by cohort is so important because even as I was researching this article, I was on TikTok trying to find some clips to insert into the story.

And I saw so many of these videos from, you know, 2020 and 2021 where all these people are screaming about the power of white men in the world and why we need DEI and why we need to diversify. And they're like, "All of these men hold all of the wealth. These white men hold the executive positions." Okay. Yeah. A lot of them still do, but what about the normal average white man who is just trying to get by, who is just trying to start his career, who's just trying to get his foot in the door to even be one of those executive men.

We are talking about two completely different groups. Now, from here, as he establishes this premise, Savage goes on to tell the stories of three different men across three different industries who all suffered the same fate. Now, the first one that he brings up is Andrew, a journalist who was pushed out of the editorial world by executives with DEI agendas. He wrote, "Suddenly in Andrew's newsroom, everything was driven by identity.

There were endless diversity trainings, a racial climate assessment, and at one point, reporters were told that they had to catalog in minute detail the identity characteristics of all of 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. And this line about emergency hires makes me laugh because obviously I have a different experience. But I remember sitting in my office in 2020 when I was an intern at a production company, which is, you know, a serious Oscar-winning production company. This was like a real company. And I've said it before in different interviews and videos, but my job went from, you know, as an intern, read these scripts and pass along the ones with the best characters, the best stories to a literal racial fire drill.

I mean, they were losing their minds. They were like, WE WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH BLACK STORIES. YOU NEED TO FIND us an indigenous movie with a strong female lead. I was like, okay, well, does it matter if the script's good? No, we just need to have these characters. Like, it happened overnight. And it was so disgusting and so disheartening to me because it was so blatantly an attempt to appease a political mob versus trying to make good art versus trying to tell stories that impact people and make them better.

It was simply just trying to check a box to make people happy. and in recounting the stories and hearing, you know, from Jacob and Tyler and all these things, like I just like, thank God that I am out of that world, that I'm independent. I'm at my farm using a Malow beef tallow on my face, which all of you need to be doing with my friends over at Amalo. And I know that this sounds unusual, but the results speak for themselves.

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That is helixleep.com/bread for 27% off any purchase. Make sure that you enter our show name into the post-purchase survey so that they know we sent you. Anyway, so back to the article. The second man that Savage highlighted was a PhD student looking for a career in academia. And he writes, quote, "I'm 35 years old. I'm four plus years postphd. And quite frankly, I'm also a white dude. Combine those factors together and I'm for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th century American historian."

The pylon was swift and vicious. "You're all just laughable," wrote the New York Times Nicole Hannah Jones. "Have you seen the data on professorships? White males are 30% of the US population, but nearly 40% of faculty, tweeted a tenure professor at GWU. Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination. And then Jacob goes on and he says it didn't matter that as far back as 2012, women were more likely to be tenure track across the humanities than men.

Or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women. or even that an association of academic DEI professionals found that assistant professors of color, 35% and female assistant professors, 52%, are over represented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients, 32% and 44% respectively. And I know that we're in the weeds here with data and statistics, but we should also say that at Harvard, white men went from 49% in 2014 to 27% in 2024.

At Berkeley, in their physical sciences department, white men were 48% of applicants, but only 26% of hires. At Yale since 2018, only 14.6% of tenure track assistant professors hired were white American men. Or we could say simply across the board, we could argue that fewer and fewer men are being hired. Maybe the Gen Xers are still in those positions. Maybe that is what the New York Times writers are referencing. But what about the young men coming out of those universities looking for work?

What about the fact that in the years following BLM at S&P companies, 94% of new hires were people of color? And from that remaining 6% of hires, how many do you think were women over men? So, I hope you're starting to see why men might be so discouraged and just a little bit angry. Now, back to Jacob's article. He goes back to Hollywood and he interviews another writer, and that's the last man that he included in the piece, writing, "A whistleblower sent me a document from early 2017, an internal needs sheet, need sheet compiled by a major talent agency that shows just how steep the headwinds were across the grid, which tracks staffing needs for TV writers rooms.

The same shorthand appears dozens of times. Diverse female women and diverse only. These mandates came from some of the most powerful names in television. Noah Holly prioritizing women. Dean Delvin prioritizing women. Ideally higher ethnic African-American. Ryan Murphy from Glee and Scream Queens. Want female and diverse emphasis on Africanamean. This was systemic discrimination. He writes documented in writing implemented without consequence.

It is striking how casual it all was. Chicago fire. The upper level can be anyone, but we need diverse staff writers. As in other industries, upper level positions, writers with experience and credits, could still be filled by white men. But the entry- level jobs, the staff writer, and the co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, they were reserved for others to literally just get your foot in the door to start your career.

Now, Douglas Mackey, who I actually talked about in I think yesterday's episode, maybe he quote tweeted the article and he said, "Want to know why movies suddenly sucked? Why TV suddenly sucked? Why SNL sucks?" Quote, "In 2011, white men were 48% of lower level TV writers. By 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%." Jack Dailyaly responded with, "Perhaps that's the one reason why the writing in Taylor Sheridan shows, Yellowstone, Lanman, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingston, Lioness, is so different from nearly everything else."

And it's not that these writers and production teams are white and therefore just inherently better and more talented. It's just that Hollywood for over a decade became so focused on hiring minorities and then having those minorities tell their stories, speaking their truth, and then even putting parameters around what intersectionality boxes need to be checked in order for every production to be green lit for those productions to qualify for Emmys, Oscars, Golden Globes.

It consumed the entire industry from PAs to producers to staff writers to actors to costume designers. It impacted everything. So when you see an Americana style TV show about a white family in middle America doing western things and riding horses, it is shocking and it's also refreshing to the majority of us. Someone else said, "Are you saying that maybe, just maybe, the upcoming Netflix film, Queen of Coal about a trans coal miner in a downtrodden, hard, scrabble town who comes to rescue the bigoted white men who rejected her might be a product of DEI hiring and not meritocracy.

Crazy, right? Just simply insane. And again, people look around. They have been looking around for years wondering you why why are these young men so fed up like we have this man problem? What what's the issue? Why do they think that the odds are stacked against them? Why aren't they driven to marry and start families? I'M SORRY, BUT WHY would they why would they be driven to do that when they worry that they might not be able to get jobs to buy a home to provide for said family?

Now, the most devastating part of this entire article was when Jacob Savage wrote about his own sons. And he said, "Eventually, the time machine conundrum was unresolved and we said our goodbyes." He's talking about a job that he had. There would be other screenplays, other projects, visits to studio lots, and major pitches, but that was the last time that either of us saw the inside of a writer's room. That was the moment we came closest to a career.

Had the political environment been different, one job might have led to another. And today, I might have colleagues and work friends and a whole range of professional personal experiences. an entirely different life. At the time, I blamed those women. Of course, I did. They have since ascended the TV ladder and work as co-executive producers on major shows. On some level, even today, I can't help but think that could have been me.

That should have been me. There's a wounded pride here. How could there not be? I have two sons. I used to imagine long before Oh my god, it's going to make me tear up. I used to imagine long before they were born that I would take them to film sets, that I'd bring them along to exotic locations. Instead, their father spends most of his working day in his bedroom scrolling through spreadsheets and ticket listings. What do I say when my boys ask me about my old hopes and dreams?

What do I tell them when they ask about theirs? It's devastating. And he's not alone. Almost every industry spent over a decade overlooking these men. Hollywood mocked them relentlessly. Journalists spat in their faces. And now, come 2025, everyone's looking around going, "HEY, WHAT? WHY? WHY are you so upset? Pull yourself up by YOUR BOOTSTRAPS. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM, MAN? This is the problem. And it has been brewing for over a decade.

In a recent episode, Tucker Carlson touched on this. Listen to what he said. >> They've grown up in over the last 10 years a hates them. And not in a subtle way, openly with a whoou like directness and ferocity. They've grown up in a country that has systematically in law excluded them from the workplace, from education, from federal grants. and has told them again and again and again, "No, we're not discriminating against you and yes, you deserve it."

Imagine growing up like that. And again, this isn't behind the scenes. This is way out in the open. And not only has it done exactly that to young white men, of course, white men being the one group are officially excluded under DEI. There's only one. It's white men, white straight men. That's not whining. And by the way, this happens to be the one group in America who by and large have been taught for cultural reasons, don't whine, don't talk about yourself so much.

No one wants to hear your story. And whatever you do, don't be the victim. All of that's good advice, by the way. But this group has not only been excluded with the force of law by the justice department in every state and at every college and university with maybe three exceptions. They've been mocked and attacked and lectured and heranged and screamed at. >> So there you have it. And obviously not every man has experienced something, you know, as severe and blatant as say what Jacob experienced or what Tyler Fischer experienced.

You know, many men still found success in their industries. They made it work. But I mean, ask any young man from both of these generations who worked through this era. And they would say that at some point in the last decade, something shifted. They felt it. Even if they still worked in their industries, even if they still got a good job, started a family, they knew, they do know that they have been discriminated against.

But I will say, not to use a cliche, but I do think that this pressure has created some diamonds. Like the good thing is I do think that something remarkable has come of this and that is our evolving independent media landscape. Like listen to this comment. This guy said it is no coincidence that alt media, YouTube, podcasting and Substack all took off right at the peak of DEI. Nor is it a coincidence that these fields are heavily dominated by white men.

They were essentially banished from academia media and corporate America as a matter of explicit policy. So they had to create new outlets from scratch. And they did it well. And in large part, I think that men like that drove us towards a focus on authentic media and away from these legacy media outlets who are also discriminating against them. They did that even as they were overlooked, pushed aside, canceled and fired.

They did that and many went on to be successful. Many continued to start families. They did that and they also started flocking back to church causing a resurgence in American Christianity. Against all odds, I would say they still did what men do best. they built and I hope that they continue to do so. And while we can obviously argue that it would have been better for society, it would have been easier for these men if this DEI had never taken hold, I do think that it created a generation of young men who are a force to be reckoned with.

And all I can say is hopefully the old guards are ready. What's up, guys? I'm Kyle and I would never lie to you. No reason to question that, right? I was lying to you. This was a disguise that I was wearing. Now, take a second to recover from that shock and revelation so I can help you save Christmas with Good Ranchers. Because here's the thing, a lot of meat at the grocery store is wearing a disguise just like this.

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