Discrimination against white men has destroyed an entire generation, according to a viral article by Jacob Savage in Compact. Most of us have probably heard stories of white men being rejected for jobs purely because of their sex and skin color. This article adds a mountain of statistics to these anecdotes. Here’s just a sample:

• In 2011, 48 percent of lower-level tv writers were white men. Last year it was 12 percent.
• In 2014, 39 percent of tenure-track positions at Harvard were filled by white men. Now it’s 18 percent.
• In 2021, 66 percent of ProPublica’s new hires were women, and 58 percent were nonwhite.
• Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of the Los Angeles Times interns have been white men.
• Of the 70 millennial writers nominated for the National Book Awards in the decade since 2014, only three were white men.

Some push back on these statistics by arguing that many of these industries still have large numbers of white men. Savage shows that it was white men trying to advance their careers after 2014 who were wiped out by diversity, equity and inclusion (dei). “In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year dei became institutionalized across American life,” he wrote. The result:

“If you were 40 in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were 30 in 2014, you hit the wall.”

White men may still be common in top positions, but the intake of new white men has completely dried up. “The femaleness is striking,” Savage quotes an anonymous “well-known Gen-X reporter with impeccable liberal bona fides: ‘It’s like, wow, where have the guys gone?’” The Gen-X reporter continued:

“Newsrooms were center-left places in 2005. 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.”

“I always thought I was an effeminate nerd growing up … but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the most masculine end of men in media.”

It’s not just newsrooms. White men are still in the majority in Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty, but that’s because of people who received tenure before dei. If you look at those who are not yet tenured professors but are on track to be, the proportion of white men collapsed from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent last year. The only new hires unaffected are white Europeans, presumably because foreign nationals are not counted as white in government education statistics.

It’s similar in the tech industry. “For a lot of guys in their mid-30s, around 2017–2018, it was a quite dramatic shift,” Savage quotes a journalist in a related industry saying. “They’re all like, whoa, suddenly every door is closed, and I am just not going to move ahead at this company at all. Because it’s been lightly and sometimes not-so-lightly communicated to me that there’s just no way the job I want is going to be given to a white guy.”

Savage shows the human cost of all this wasted potential. Young men give up on their dream careers or struggle to establish themselves and move forward with marriage and family. It’s also come at a great cost to society. As Savage asks:

“Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline?”

The Bible reveals that this attack on men is a curse. Isaiah 3:12 states: “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.” We’ve inflicted this curse on ourselves by violating clear, logical, biblical principles. In Exodus 23, God tells judges not to “pervert the justice due to your poor in his suit”—“nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his suit” (verses 6, 3; Revised Standard Version). Discrimination against a marginalized group is wrong. But so is so-called positive discrimination, bending justice in their favor. Modern society has hurt millions by breaking what should be an obvious, commonsense law.