Gen Z men have been sacrificed on the altar of diversity — and it’s sending them into the arms of reactionary influencers like Nick Fuentes, who prey on their grievances.
A recent article in Compact magazine about the plight of young white men in hiring and admissions revealed how, over the last decade, they’ve been forced by the DEI regime to pay for the advantages conferred upon their fathers and grandfathers.
The way they were passed up by colleges and workplaces was completely unfair. Gen Z white men grew up knowing that the system was stacked against them. No wonder they’re bitter, if not reactionary.
We should roll back the DEI bureaucracy for the sake of meritocracy. But if you need yet another reason, how about stopping white teen boys from falling down a rabbit hole of grievance politics.
Writer Jacob Savage hit a nerve with his Compact article, “The Lost Generation,” which rattles through startling statistics showing just how large a hit white Millennial men took in professional representation.
White men in tenure-track humanities positions at Harvard fell from 39% in 2014 to 18% in 2023. White men working as entry-level TV writers in Hollywood dropped from 48% in 2011 to 12% in 2024.
At Yale’s history department, Savage reports, there are 10 white males over the age of 70, but, of sixteen tenure-track millennials, just one white man.
As a reminder, the results of the 2020 US census showed 61% of the US population is white, making 30% of the population white males.
As Savage points out, older white men who were around when racial discrimination was more palpable were already established when DEI came down the pipeline in the mid-2010s and did not take a professional hit — their sons and grandsons did.
“If you were forty in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s — you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit a wall,” he argued.
Until the Trump administration began to take aim at DEI initiatives with a slew of executive orders in his second term, the machine cranked along, disadvantaging white men in the name of “justice.”
As a member of Gen Z myself, I noticed the leg up that certain groups seemed to have in college admissions, and again in hiring. If you weren’t a legacy or an extremely well connected nepo-baby, being a white boy seemed to be the least advantageous demo when application season came along.
It’s undeniable that the United States is guilty of systemic oppression — and in the not-so-distant past. The problem is that today’s boys don’t remember those times.
Millennial and especially Gen Z young men only recall the system being stacked against them. Their fathers — and their white male managers — are already well-established, and yet they are being asked to pay for the advantages their predecessors are currently enjoying.
Imposing new systems of discrimination in order to atone for the past is a flawed approach. And it’s causing an explosion of resentment that’s tainting the future.
There’s much ado about the ascent of Nick Fuentes, who spews slurs right and left and offends every cultural sensibility for sport. Fuentes, who has called out the “older generations” for “completely [betraying] and [selling] out the youth,” has seen his following quintuple over a year.
His predominantly young male fans have been seduced by the politics of grievance. They’ve been trained to walk around like perpetual victims, and there is a tiny kernel of truth in their sense that the world is stacked against them.
They grew up looking over their shoulder, wondering whether they would be at a better college or have a different job if not for their immutable characteristics — whether they are being held back by the glass ceiling of DEI.
America has never had a perfect meritocracy. But we moved further away from one when we infused DEI into the process.
Nobody is better off for it. Those who benefitted from the system wonder whether they are where they are because of advantages conferred upon them, and those who are handicapped by it walk around with a chip on their shoulder.
It’s time to reorient ourselves back in the direction of merit, if not for the pride of young Americans, then to stem the concerning rise of reactionary grievance politics.
