Conservatives figured out that being a marginalised group actually sucks a lot but the left forgot that white people are the majority of the country and racial identity politics works even better if you are in the majority. Conservatives should apply the lesson of marginalised groups, and the left should understand that the stigmatisation of racial identity politics is actually good for racial minorities.
Your astonishing unwillingness to engage with actually existing pipelines is kind of hilarious. “Savage at one point complains about the Los Angeles Times; but in Los Angeles, only 29% of the population is white, etc.”
This is next level LOL — what are the demographics of the Southland’s population who read the LA Times? What are the demographics of those who are college-educated and want to be journalists?
The demographics of college-educated millennials who want to be journalists are about 2/3 women, as I substantiated with a hyperlink and a footnote. I cited LA's white population not to say we should expect only 29% of LA Times journalists to be white, but to show that there should probably be some downward adjustment to national rates in one of the least white areas of the country.
Again, I think you wrote a reasonable article in good faith, which is more than can be said of the people I'm addressing in this post. But you don't get to presuppose that the "existing pipelines" circa 2013 reflected a level playing field. That begs the entire question that DEI debates have always been about.
One thing I think some of these reactions are missing, though, that point out that this was largely effecting the elite 1% or whatever of people is that norms and trends that start out in elite environments often trickle their way down into "normie" society if and when they become vogue enough. DEI was certainly heading that way, as retail corporations and other large employers started getting on the PR train after 2020. Initially it seemed like a good thing (to me), but it was pretty clear soon after that these were largely ham-fisted PR schemes that were then handed down from on-high to HR. They were not employee-led, and that meant that as soon as the political winds shifted all of that momentum evaporated. Many of them also allowed zero critical inspection (again, because they came via HR) and as such it was never a discussion or a dialogue, which also meant it eventually metastasized into another way for people to jockey for merit and signal their promotability.
There is a version of DEI out there somewhere that could do something very powerful and good. I don't know what that looks like (in my head I imagine that "agreement" handshake meme from Predator), but it wasn't what we got. I don't blame some people for looking at what was going on in "elite" spaces and saying, "I'm not interested in that making it's way to me". 2020's DEI seemed like it really really wanted everyone to be suspicious of each other, walk on eggshells, and interpret everything in the worst, most malicious possible way, because management was terrified of anyone making an HR complaint or blowing up the company Twitter account. In the end that just made things worse.
Imagine being the HR person trying that 2020s intersectional-feminist DEI schtick on a blue-collar jobsite.
"Sorry Ted, you can't say you're bringing a 'brown bag lunch' to work, because some Spike Lee movie had a scene about a now-defunct Black in-group colorist practice in elite universities that mostly took place in the South."
"...But I literally bring my lunch in a brown paper bag..."
The thing that really got me about that comparison of DEI to the Rwandan Genocide in particular is that he is talking about the need for an equivalent truth and reconciliation process as if what has happened there is a model to aspire to. If he knew a single thing about what's happened in the region since then he'd know that the ongoing Kivu conflict in the Congo, in which millions of people have died amid countless acts of sexual violence and forced displacement, is essentially a direct continuation of Hutu-Tutsi ethnic tensions. There was no true reconciliation, and in his ignorance he's advocating for a campaign of ongoing retaliation from all sides.
I agree with your point, but I think you're missing another elephant in the room.
At about the same time as DEI peaked, the botton dropped out of the journalism and academic job markets. I know more about the academic side but I think on the journalism side, it's the flow and direction of advertising dollars at the root of the problem. In academia, universities in especially the US and UK have been moving towards becoming businesses with management and administration running the show; aspiring academics are more likely to end up on a sequence of fixed-term low-paid adjunct contracts.
So you're a white male trying to get from a postdoc into an academic career path and your chances have dropped to one tenth of what they used to be ... because there are only one tenth as many jobs in total, at least compared to the number of postgraduate students in the same situation. The effects of DEI are probably a rounding error compared to the general academic job market situation.
As an aside and a specific example, Hamline University argued they never "fired" the lecturer in the history of art Mohammed painting crisis. That is technically true - she was an adjunct, so they could just choose not to continue her contract next semester.
DEI is one of many tools that management has (had) to keep the adjuncts in line - speaking from a UK point of view, when you make it known that not everyone in the department will have their contract renewed next year, you can get away with a lot and run circles round the law where you have to give a notice period and something like a reason when you terminate the contract for an employee on a regular contract. DEI is not the cause of any of this, but you will see it every time in the media when it could possibly be related to a case.
"Number of people employed" is a lot lower than "number of people who think they're affected", though. How many applicants are there per position? Los Angeles is kind of famous for being (having been?) full of would-be actors and actresses just waiting tables in the meantime.
It gets muddier once you divide back out by the number of jobs each person applies to, granted.
I've said this was wrong in three separate posts now, including this one. And I sincerely yearn for the return of a politics where that were the most important thing to say on the subject. In 2008, I wrote that article for my high school newspaper without even needing to decry ascendant authoritarianism as I did it.
But in the political moment we have, the far greater threat to Democrats' ability to win elections again comes not from DEI's actual excesses, but from the fantastical lies about what it threatened, and what that justifies Trump in doing now.
I guess I think the way forward is not in minimally admitting to certain slightly sub-optimal policies but in saying, full-throatedly, this was bad, and we aren’t going to do it anymore. I maintain that if at the convention Kamala had said something — Nixon-going-to-China style — something along the lines of, “I know it’s a little rich coming from me but under my Admin DEI will be over,” she would have won. But that was beyond the scope of possibility for her. And what you accomplish with this sort of post (which insists on a super narrow admission of what I documented, though it’s fairly obvious it happened across many elite industries), in many ways a deflection towards “greater concerns,” helps guarantee that this specific poisonous form of politics continues.
Part of the issue is that DEI is a big term that means different things to different people, and included some good alongside the bad. That includes some of the DEI that happened in some elite industries from 2014-2024. To be full-throated, we have to first specify which part of it we're talking about, to distinguish ourselves from those criticizing any effort to make anything more equitable or inclusive along any axis.
I don't think Kamala saying that would have won her the election. I think it would have barely moved the needle, because this is a much bigger issue to online elites than it is to swing voters, who barely watch the convention anyway. But even if I'm wrong about that, the opposition party's next campaign speech is beyond my power to affect.
I'm an exasperated libertarian, standing between our two tribes and trying to referee discourse and prioritize problems. When I see DEI on my timeline today, it is almost never from left-wing people demanding more aggressive affirmative action to end the legacy of white supremacy or the domination of black bodies, etc., like it was in 2018. It is almost always from conservatives of the sort I linked in this piece, who either present DEI as proof of a sinister Great Replacement plot to destroy Western civilization, or demand that the left engage with your article at a time when the news is full of crises.
I took them up on it in a way that felt proportionate to the scale of these problems, and that provides the honest answer for why other liberals are not giving yours their headspace.
> I maintain that if at the convention Kamala had said something — Nixon-going-to-China style — something along the lines of, “I know it’s a little rich coming from me but under my Admin DEI will be over,” she would have won.
Wait, do you really think so? I feel like this would have the same effect as Gavin Newsom hosting Charlie Kirk on his podcast; their core bases would feel (rightfully) betrayed by their representative who has abandoned their beliefs for the crowd, and the other side would feel (rightfully) scornful about the side who is now promising a watered-down version of what Trump wants. They'd have to make HUGE gains with moderates in order to make up for losses in the core, and even then, the reputation of "slippery unprincipled politician" that they'd gain seems unfavorable at best. I genuinely can't imagine how Harris saying that would've led her to win.
Your prediction may turn out to be correct, but we would never say “only 1.7% of [insert minority group] was discriminated against, so it was no big deal.” Or call this discrimination a “fad.”
Wouldn't we? If an economic study corrected the left's narrative that women are paid 79 cents on the dollar to what men are paid, and found that actually, once you correct for all the variables that the left usually omits, they're paid 98 cents to the dollar, wouldn't conservatives claim victory? Or would they concede that wow, discrimination against women must still be a big deal? (I realize pay disparities are not quite the same as employment, but the analogy works to compare the scale of the problem.)
Google tells me a fad is "an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities." I think that's a good (and unflattering) description of what DEI was at elite institutions, whether or not it involved discrimination.
The 1.7% is extreme bad faith, and assuming that this occurred EXCLUSIVELY in the industries I wrote about. This also occurred in advertising, in publishing, in tech, in the Secret Service (in 2021 a majority of trainees were female!). And then to turn around and say that actually this is the same as the active discrimination every millennial trans person faces — where, exactly, outside the military is this occurring? Just bad faith all around.
There existed DEI outside those three industries, yes. But its intensity varied greatly, and you described the peak intensity of the most progressive industries. Some amount of DEI in some industries may have been entirely appropriate, for all the reasons my post explains. Appropriate or not, it was not intense enough across the economy writ large to produce any noticeable downturn in white millennial men's employment or economic fortunes. It is no more bad faith to point out that you're describing an outlier than it is to stretch that outlier across the entire economy, when the macroeconomic evidence just isn't there to support it.
I'll post his link here and let readers judge for themselves. If you have data you consider less cherry-picked, I'd be genuinely interested to see that too.
We have stopped it from happening! It is literally illegal now. And where in the country are Democrats still running on this? Maybe Google will turn up 1-2 outliers, but surely even you'd admit it is nowhere near as central to mainstram Democrats' messaging as it was in 2020-21. The lesson is officially learned.
It would be more in touch with current events to say: "if you don't want liberals to talk about how DEI is exaggerated to substantiate racist conspiracy theories, stop that exaggeration from happening."
Minor example — i’ve gotten sent a lot — but does this sound like academia is no longer doing DEI?
The Department of English at Mount Holyoke College invites applications for a one-year, full-time Visiting Assistant Professor, who is a scholar and creative writer beginning July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027 with a 3/2 teaching load. The candidate will have experience teaching undergraduate students who are broadly diverse with regard to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, and religion. Courses will include introduction to creative writing as well as literature courses in an area of research expertise. The candidate should have a strong record of publication in creative nonfiction or fiction, alongside a demonstrable research agenda in literary criticism in areas such as Latinx studies; African American studies; performance studies; material culture and the creative arts; disability studies; and gender and sexuality studies. PhD or ABD in Literature or Creative Writing required.
There's no such thing as bad publicity, so thanks for the link and mention, but had you bothered reading my work you'd find I'm not remotely the caricature you've conjured up from a single provocative note out of many thousands I've posted. I grew up on the left, I was a progressive journalist for many years, and see my project partially as trying to revive the liberalism I grew up with that actually gave a damn about the working class. Your characterization of my oeuvre is lazy enough to call into question the rest of your essay. Why would I bother reading further?
I mocked your note because it was representative of the rhetoric conservatives on my timeline have been using to describe DEI in particular, and Democrats more broadly—not because I have a firm view of where you personally fall on the spectrum of conservative reasonableness. If you’re not usually as radical as the people I describe in the last section of this post, I’m glad to hear it! And I hope you’ll join me in condemning those people, like Elon and Stephen Miller, who are spreading such irresponsible propaganda.
Regardless of your oeuvre, that particular Rwanda comparison of yours was absurd. You may not be among the white nationalists I’m describing, but neither are you naïve to their existence, and your note (perhaps unintentionally) played to that audience’s tune.
There is a narrative on the right that white America is under attack, by a vague but sinister “other” – a “they” comprising elites, globalists, Islamists, communists, foreigners and their sympathizers. Sometimes white America is swapped out for “heritage” Americans, or the homeland, or Western civilization, etc. Regardless, this is a central narrative of the Trump presidency, openly embraced by its top officials.
A big part of where one lies on the conservative spectrum comes down to how menacing you portray that attack to be, and what you say it justifies Trump in doing now. A big part of that comes down to one’s ability to maintain a grounded mental picture of the world that keeps problems, injustices, and suffering in approximate perspective.
There is a version of this narrative that I can respect, that is relatively connected to reality, that says the anti-white vibes on Twitter got really annoying and anti-intellectual for a few years, and that progressive institutions briefly discriminated against white men because they had a well-meaning but misguided desire to ensure everyone had equal opportunity.
And there is another version that is completely lost in a made-up universe where this incoherent band of “others” is all in cahoots and planning to replace you, because they despise you and want to kill you. Or worse, that they are low-IQ beasts who cannot accept that their rightful place is beneath us, and the future of civilization itself depends on our ability to beat them back.
You call that second group a “caricature,” but it is actually the narrative being trumpeted by an enormous chunk of the current administration. I don’t care where you fall on the spectrum so long as you don’t lend rhetorical support to those nutters.
I refrained from using the term "bad faith" in my previous comment, but you're making it difficult to avoid that conclusion. You are minimizing the significance of the crusade of racial vitriol over the past decade plus as just a minor little short-term boo-boo that cropped up in a few places from good people with the best of intentions who just might have taken it a smidgen too far, with those who disagree with your sunny framing papering it over dismissed as "nutters."
I was a reporter at Columbia University for eleven years, and scapegoating of white people and especially white men as the source of every inequity and social problem was ubiquitous on a daily basis. Not only was a particular demographic category systematically cut off from career and academic opportunities (along with people of East Asian and South Asian heritage) but they were constantly and reflexively demeaned and vilified. Was a lot of that unprincipled people simply leaning into the zeitgeist to advance their careers? Sure, but there was an unmistakable streak of genuine animus and malevolence every single day.
Bottom feeders like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are morally indistinguishable from Nick Fuentes and his ilk, but they were wholeheartedly embraced by virtually every prestigious institution in the United States. Thousands of highly credentialed people in positions of influence and power deliberately fomented racial hatred to advance their personal interests and political project, and they intended that to be the new permanent status quo. No, that's not the same as what happened in Rwanda, but it's along the same continuum. And that's why we need a truth and reconciliation commission, to have a credible and exhaustive record of what actually took place. I agree that there are "nutters" exaggerating what happened to reach extreme conclusions, but attempts to dismiss the gravity and severity of what woke wrought are equally nutty.
I could as credibly accuse you of bad faith for conflating hostile rhetoric with material oppression and violence.
The intensity of persecution necessary for a truth and reconciliation commission has historically involved mass killings. Either a literal genocide, or decades of brutal dictatorship with tens of thousands of political disappearances. Commissions become necessary when a community has endured such crippling trauma that it becomes emotionally paralyzed, unable to pick up the pieces without some semblance of closure.
Reasonable people can disagree about how bad wokeness was...within a certain range. I described endpoints on a spectrum, and not everyone to the right of my portrayal is a nutter. But those who've convinced themselves that what happened to white men in 2020 was "along the same continuum" as what happened to Tutsis in 1994 are fucking nutters.
I was at Yale and Johns Hopkins for half of the decade in question. Yes, there was a fair bit of "racial vitriol" in political discussions. There was scapegoating of white men--especially "rich, old white men," as an abstract archetype--for implausibly many problems (as well as for real racial inequities).
Somehow, I endured. At no point did I feel unsafe. I never even felt unwelcome, outside of a few niche Facebook pages where I picked a fight for fun. I was approximately as "persecuted" for being libertarian as I was for being a white guy - which is to say, only by the soft judgment of dopey people.
I'll even grant that there was "an unmistakable streak of genuine animus and malevolence"...in the most vocal 10-20% of politically active students. And even this was a learned, performative imitation of animus more likely to be typed than spoken, and more likely to be spoken than socially acted on. Voiced by white male speakers as often as anyone else, it was the same anger that prior generations of radical young college students tried on as fashion statements for a dozen causes: against the Vietnam war, against capitalism, or against global warming. They had in their heads a simplified story of who was to blame for a great injustice, and confused rage at the boogeyman with moral virtue.
Fair-minded, level-headed people never bought into the excesses - but they also saw important distinctions between Ibram Kendi and Nick Fuentes. Ibram Kendi does not believe in black supremacy. He does not oppose democracy, deny the Holocaust, or regularly praise Hitler. He does not say things like "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, [Whites] need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise." Kendi had as his endpoint an egalitarian society, and so did the great majority of his followers. The New Right cannot say the same.
I invite you to consider that, as one of the few white men who did manage to get a foot in the door of "name" institutions during this latest woke era, you enjoyed a form of privilege you might not be fully cognizant of. I too am among the artificially truncated cohort of white men who lucked into some fancy places even as anti-white male prejudice reached its apogee for the time being. Did I ever feel "unsafe" in the sense that my life was in danger? No, but I was painfully aware that a single awkward moment or misplaced phrase could bring my career crashing down, and that I was presumptively first on the chopping block. I covered dozens of events where people of my approximate demographic description were demonized in the most lurid of terms. One topic I covered extensively at Columbia Engineering was social engineers' efforts to embed fashionable "intersectionality" into algorithms and AI to automatically and systematically discriminate against disfavored groups 24/7 without even the need for a flesh and blood bigot to actively kick someone in the teeth. Do you remember during Covid when vaccines were divvied up via a racial spoils system instead of triage prioritizing the most vulnerable patients? How was that anything but dystopian madness?
Ibram X. Kendi is a glib, genial idiot that I don't respect enough to actively dislike. He is a complete non-entity. But Kendi-ism is a toxic scourge that has absolutely nothing to do with achieving an egalitarian society, but rather subjecting different demographic groups to dramatically different standards in order to institute rigid quotas. It is racism, plain and simple, and as such utterly indefensible.
The magnitude of institutional discrimination against white men (and also white women, and people of East Asian and South Asian heritage) over the past 15-20 years is too vast to be swept under the rug, and indeed attempts like yours to minimize the scale of the injustices only exacerbate the situation. You are blessed that your stain of being an undesirable white man didn't ruin your career ambitions, and you might try cultivating some compassion for those who didn't have your good fortune.
Look man, you can write all the incisive copes you want, but at the end of the day, DEI policies were arbitrary punishments of millennial white men for inequities they didn’t create. Inequities that they actually most strongly opposed of any white male generation to that point in time. They didn’t address root causes. And there was a very vocal, sadistically gleeful contingent on social media happily cheering on the “replacement,” and a disproportionately large percentage of the people who spoke out against it were white nationalists. It really does not matter, at all, what the actual scope of that impact was; it matters that the system mistreated those guys while extreme leftists cheered, mainstream moderate voices said nothing, and a lot of the people who said “this is wrong” happened to hold a lot of horrible positions, but were right about this one.
I voted for Harris, and Trump II has been so horrific that I doubt I could ever vote Republican in the foreseeable future. But it took me a while to get there, longer than it should have, because it’s really hard to see past being mistreated solely for who you are. Leftists seem to understand this for every other demographic on Earth but inexplicably fail to apply the lesson to white men.
Whatever the scope, DEI was horrible, and the efforts to rehabilitate or minimize it are horrible, and they directly empower horrible people on the right. Just stop it man.
I’m liberal, non-white, and similarly interested in avoiding escalation of culture war topics but it does feel to me that there needs to be a forceful condemnation of the sort of anti-white rhetoric I see all the time. It’s not just about hiring, it’s not uncommon for me to meet other young people who will say really racist stuff against white people as if its just a reasonable inoffensive thing to say and I see a lot of white people just go along with it and it all feels so crass and demeaning. I don’t ever confront these people but I just sort of nip the conversation in the bud and try to move on. Whatever social environment this is, I really think the only hope to stop it is strong political outrage because otherwise day to day culture in less white coastal liberal circles that I tend to be a part of, just entrench themselves in this way of talking and social validation makes it hard for anyone to really chastise others about it even if it makes them uncomfortable, especially white liberals.
“For the past month, moderate conservatives have exaggerated this article’s findings for the psychic comfort of pretending that the out-of-touch radicals running our country are still on the left.”
No, you’re just an out-of-touch elitist snob who wants to maintain DEI policies despite them having disastrous results. The right didn’t exagerate anything about it Savage’s article. It is you and your ilk, in fact, that are exaggerating the right’s reasonable concerns because you refuse to acknowledge that your ideology is increasingly unpopular, and rather than self-reflect you just continue to advocate for terrible ideologies. And, you know, proving Savage’s point precisely by pushing anti-white anti-male rhetoric in your article. Please stop demonising perceived enemies and start to actually improve the situation. This article does the complete opposite of that.
I received an e-mail with the original reply: “nuh uh”. So nice of you to try and cover up your immature response with an equally immature one. Totally convinced me.
Great piece but I don't like "conserbole" as terminology because it cedes to Republicans the inaccurate and overly flattering idea that they remain "conservative."
“To show a decline towards more proportional representation fits exactly with the conception of justice trumpeted by DEI advocates, which was that playing field was formerly tilted towards white men, and we needed DEI to level it.”
Historically speaking, DEI was mainly focused on blacks. To achieve proportionality is far-fetched if the 15-point IQ gap between whites and blacks is real. To have actually achieved it would have required significant discrimination against whites and the promotion of incompetents (I experienced some of this incompetence at various universities). Therefore, proportionality between whites and minorities can really only be achieved with higher-IQ Asians, Indians, etc.—those who need/ed little help anyway. There is likely a small gap between men and women but it’s much smaller, so near proportionality is more realistic in non-STEM areas like journalism. But this says nothing about freedom of association, which was traded away for racial reconciliation decades ago. Are we reconciled?
Fellow exasperated libertarian here. Although I had already read the Bruenig piece you referenced, your article drove home more forcefully than his (I don’t know why) that I had succumbed to too much online right-wing discourse about DEI. However, on the topic of white replacement, it’s clear that for those whites who do want to retain a homeland, that that option is simply being taken away.
I'm really glad you found it useful, and were not too put off by the forceful tone. I've probably gotten too sucked into that discourse myself.
Can you clarify what you mean by "retain a homeland" ? I'm a white, native-born American, and I think my homeland is quite secure. Libertarians, especially, should think that immigrants pose no threat to it at all.
Conservatives figured out that being a marginalised group actually sucks a lot but the left forgot that white people are the majority of the country and racial identity politics works even better if you are in the majority. Conservatives should apply the lesson of marginalised groups, and the left should understand that the stigmatisation of racial identity politics is actually good for racial minorities.
Your astonishing unwillingness to engage with actually existing pipelines is kind of hilarious. “Savage at one point complains about the Los Angeles Times; but in Los Angeles, only 29% of the population is white, etc.”
This is next level LOL — what are the demographics of the Southland’s population who read the LA Times? What are the demographics of those who are college-educated and want to be journalists?
The demographics of college-educated millennials who want to be journalists are about 2/3 women, as I substantiated with a hyperlink and a footnote. I cited LA's white population not to say we should expect only 29% of LA Times journalists to be white, but to show that there should probably be some downward adjustment to national rates in one of the least white areas of the country.
Again, I think you wrote a reasonable article in good faith, which is more than can be said of the people I'm addressing in this post. But you don't get to presuppose that the "existing pipelines" circa 2013 reflected a level playing field. That begs the entire question that DEI debates have always been about.
No, he does get to propose that. You, instead, just want to maintain DEI policies despite being increasingly unpopular. Please self-reflect.
I found some good counter-perspective from this post regarding the economic/class context of Savage's piece:
https://remybarnes.substack.com/p/wont-somebody-please-think-of-da
One thing I think some of these reactions are missing, though, that point out that this was largely effecting the elite 1% or whatever of people is that norms and trends that start out in elite environments often trickle their way down into "normie" society if and when they become vogue enough. DEI was certainly heading that way, as retail corporations and other large employers started getting on the PR train after 2020. Initially it seemed like a good thing (to me), but it was pretty clear soon after that these were largely ham-fisted PR schemes that were then handed down from on-high to HR. They were not employee-led, and that meant that as soon as the political winds shifted all of that momentum evaporated. Many of them also allowed zero critical inspection (again, because they came via HR) and as such it was never a discussion or a dialogue, which also meant it eventually metastasized into another way for people to jockey for merit and signal their promotability.
There is a version of DEI out there somewhere that could do something very powerful and good. I don't know what that looks like (in my head I imagine that "agreement" handshake meme from Predator), but it wasn't what we got. I don't blame some people for looking at what was going on in "elite" spaces and saying, "I'm not interested in that making it's way to me". 2020's DEI seemed like it really really wanted everyone to be suspicious of each other, walk on eggshells, and interpret everything in the worst, most malicious possible way, because management was terrified of anyone making an HR complaint or blowing up the company Twitter account. In the end that just made things worse.
Imagine being the HR person trying that 2020s intersectional-feminist DEI schtick on a blue-collar jobsite.
"Sorry Ted, you can't say you're bringing a 'brown bag lunch' to work, because some Spike Lee movie had a scene about a now-defunct Black in-group colorist practice in elite universities that mostly took place in the South."
"...But I literally bring my lunch in a brown paper bag..."
An absolute non-starter.
The thing that really got me about that comparison of DEI to the Rwandan Genocide in particular is that he is talking about the need for an equivalent truth and reconciliation process as if what has happened there is a model to aspire to. If he knew a single thing about what's happened in the region since then he'd know that the ongoing Kivu conflict in the Congo, in which millions of people have died amid countless acts of sexual violence and forced displacement, is essentially a direct continuation of Hutu-Tutsi ethnic tensions. There was no true reconciliation, and in his ignorance he's advocating for a campaign of ongoing retaliation from all sides.
I agree with your point, but I think you're missing another elephant in the room.
At about the same time as DEI peaked, the botton dropped out of the journalism and academic job markets. I know more about the academic side but I think on the journalism side, it's the flow and direction of advertising dollars at the root of the problem. In academia, universities in especially the US and UK have been moving towards becoming businesses with management and administration running the show; aspiring academics are more likely to end up on a sequence of fixed-term low-paid adjunct contracts.
So you're a white male trying to get from a postdoc into an academic career path and your chances have dropped to one tenth of what they used to be ... because there are only one tenth as many jobs in total, at least compared to the number of postgraduate students in the same situation. The effects of DEI are probably a rounding error compared to the general academic job market situation.
As an aside and a specific example, Hamline University argued they never "fired" the lecturer in the history of art Mohammed painting crisis. That is technically true - she was an adjunct, so they could just choose not to continue her contract next semester.
DEI is one of many tools that management has (had) to keep the adjuncts in line - speaking from a UK point of view, when you make it known that not everyone in the department will have their contract renewed next year, you can get away with a lot and run circles round the law where you have to give a notice period and something like a reason when you terminate the contract for an employee on a regular contract. DEI is not the cause of any of this, but you will see it every time in the media when it could possibly be related to a case.
This is a great post, but I truly have no idea who any of these linked people are. I'm reminded of https://xkcd.com/2071/
"Number of people employed" is a lot lower than "number of people who think they're affected", though. How many applicants are there per position? Los Angeles is kind of famous for being (having been?) full of would-be actors and actresses just waiting tables in the meantime.
It gets muddier once you divide back out by the number of jobs each person applies to, granted.
A lot of words to avoid saying, “this was wrong, if I want my side to win elections again maybe they should not do this.”
I've said this was wrong in three separate posts now, including this one. And I sincerely yearn for the return of a politics where that were the most important thing to say on the subject. In 2008, I wrote that article for my high school newspaper without even needing to decry ascendant authoritarianism as I did it.
But in the political moment we have, the far greater threat to Democrats' ability to win elections again comes not from DEI's actual excesses, but from the fantastical lies about what it threatened, and what that justifies Trump in doing now.
I guess I think the way forward is not in minimally admitting to certain slightly sub-optimal policies but in saying, full-throatedly, this was bad, and we aren’t going to do it anymore. I maintain that if at the convention Kamala had said something — Nixon-going-to-China style — something along the lines of, “I know it’s a little rich coming from me but under my Admin DEI will be over,” she would have won. But that was beyond the scope of possibility for her. And what you accomplish with this sort of post (which insists on a super narrow admission of what I documented, though it’s fairly obvious it happened across many elite industries), in many ways a deflection towards “greater concerns,” helps guarantee that this specific poisonous form of politics continues.
Part of the issue is that DEI is a big term that means different things to different people, and included some good alongside the bad. That includes some of the DEI that happened in some elite industries from 2014-2024. To be full-throated, we have to first specify which part of it we're talking about, to distinguish ourselves from those criticizing any effort to make anything more equitable or inclusive along any axis.
I don't think Kamala saying that would have won her the election. I think it would have barely moved the needle, because this is a much bigger issue to online elites than it is to swing voters, who barely watch the convention anyway. But even if I'm wrong about that, the opposition party's next campaign speech is beyond my power to affect.
I'm an exasperated libertarian, standing between our two tribes and trying to referee discourse and prioritize problems. When I see DEI on my timeline today, it is almost never from left-wing people demanding more aggressive affirmative action to end the legacy of white supremacy or the domination of black bodies, etc., like it was in 2018. It is almost always from conservatives of the sort I linked in this piece, who either present DEI as proof of a sinister Great Replacement plot to destroy Western civilization, or demand that the left engage with your article at a time when the news is full of crises.
I took them up on it in a way that felt proportionate to the scale of these problems, and that provides the honest answer for why other liberals are not giving yours their headspace.
> I maintain that if at the convention Kamala had said something — Nixon-going-to-China style — something along the lines of, “I know it’s a little rich coming from me but under my Admin DEI will be over,” she would have won.
Wait, do you really think so? I feel like this would have the same effect as Gavin Newsom hosting Charlie Kirk on his podcast; their core bases would feel (rightfully) betrayed by their representative who has abandoned their beliefs for the crowd, and the other side would feel (rightfully) scornful about the side who is now promising a watered-down version of what Trump wants. They'd have to make HUGE gains with moderates in order to make up for losses in the core, and even then, the reputation of "slippery unprincipled politician" that they'd gain seems unfavorable at best. I genuinely can't imagine how Harris saying that would've led her to win.
Your prediction may turn out to be correct, but we would never say “only 1.7% of [insert minority group] was discriminated against, so it was no big deal.” Or call this discrimination a “fad.”
Wouldn't we? If an economic study corrected the left's narrative that women are paid 79 cents on the dollar to what men are paid, and found that actually, once you correct for all the variables that the left usually omits, they're paid 98 cents to the dollar, wouldn't conservatives claim victory? Or would they concede that wow, discrimination against women must still be a big deal? (I realize pay disparities are not quite the same as employment, but the analogy works to compare the scale of the problem.)
Google tells me a fad is "an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities." I think that's a good (and unflattering) description of what DEI was at elite institutions, whether or not it involved discrimination.
You make a fair point, .98 cents on the dollar isn’t equal, and we should care about pay gaps-big and small.
By that logic, we should also care about discrimination big and small.
“It’s really hard to give a shit about” this white guy, is the type of phrase that drove moderates (white and otherwise) away from dems.
Even if white creatives are a minority category, they matter.
The 1.7% is extreme bad faith, and assuming that this occurred EXCLUSIVELY in the industries I wrote about. This also occurred in advertising, in publishing, in tech, in the Secret Service (in 2021 a majority of trainees were female!). And then to turn around and say that actually this is the same as the active discrimination every millennial trans person faces — where, exactly, outside the military is this occurring? Just bad faith all around.
There existed DEI outside those three industries, yes. But its intensity varied greatly, and you described the peak intensity of the most progressive industries. Some amount of DEI in some industries may have been entirely appropriate, for all the reasons my post explains. Appropriate or not, it was not intense enough across the economy writ large to produce any noticeable downturn in white millennial men's employment or economic fortunes. It is no more bad faith to point out that you're describing an outlier than it is to stretch that outlier across the entire economy, when the macroeconomic evidence just isn't there to support it.
even Bruenig’s cherry picked data shows a noticeable effect
I'll post his link here and let readers judge for themselves. If you have data you consider less cherry-picked, I'd be genuinely interested to see that too.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/what-does-the-census-data-say-about-the-lost-generation/
what’s crazy to me is — hear me out — if you don’t want the Republicans to use this as a wedge issue stop it from happening.
We have stopped it from happening! It is literally illegal now. And where in the country are Democrats still running on this? Maybe Google will turn up 1-2 outliers, but surely even you'd admit it is nowhere near as central to mainstram Democrats' messaging as it was in 2020-21. The lesson is officially learned.
It would be more in touch with current events to say: "if you don't want liberals to talk about how DEI is exaggerated to substantiate racist conspiracy theories, stop that exaggeration from happening."
I’m also skeptical the lesson has been learned. Take a look at the nyt’s comment section.
Minor example — i’ve gotten sent a lot — but does this sound like academia is no longer doing DEI?
The Department of English at Mount Holyoke College invites applications for a one-year, full-time Visiting Assistant Professor, who is a scholar and creative writer beginning July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027 with a 3/2 teaching load. The candidate will have experience teaching undergraduate students who are broadly diverse with regard to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, and religion. Courses will include introduction to creative writing as well as literature courses in an area of research expertise. The candidate should have a strong record of publication in creative nonfiction or fiction, alongside a demonstrable research agenda in literary criticism in areas such as Latinx studies; African American studies; performance studies; material culture and the creative arts; disability studies; and gender and sexuality studies. PhD or ABD in Literature or Creative Writing required.
There's no such thing as bad publicity, so thanks for the link and mention, but had you bothered reading my work you'd find I'm not remotely the caricature you've conjured up from a single provocative note out of many thousands I've posted. I grew up on the left, I was a progressive journalist for many years, and see my project partially as trying to revive the liberalism I grew up with that actually gave a damn about the working class. Your characterization of my oeuvre is lazy enough to call into question the rest of your essay. Why would I bother reading further?
I mocked your note because it was representative of the rhetoric conservatives on my timeline have been using to describe DEI in particular, and Democrats more broadly—not because I have a firm view of where you personally fall on the spectrum of conservative reasonableness. If you’re not usually as radical as the people I describe in the last section of this post, I’m glad to hear it! And I hope you’ll join me in condemning those people, like Elon and Stephen Miller, who are spreading such irresponsible propaganda.
Regardless of your oeuvre, that particular Rwanda comparison of yours was absurd. You may not be among the white nationalists I’m describing, but neither are you naïve to their existence, and your note (perhaps unintentionally) played to that audience’s tune.
There is a narrative on the right that white America is under attack, by a vague but sinister “other” – a “they” comprising elites, globalists, Islamists, communists, foreigners and their sympathizers. Sometimes white America is swapped out for “heritage” Americans, or the homeland, or Western civilization, etc. Regardless, this is a central narrative of the Trump presidency, openly embraced by its top officials.
A big part of where one lies on the conservative spectrum comes down to how menacing you portray that attack to be, and what you say it justifies Trump in doing now. A big part of that comes down to one’s ability to maintain a grounded mental picture of the world that keeps problems, injustices, and suffering in approximate perspective.
There is a version of this narrative that I can respect, that is relatively connected to reality, that says the anti-white vibes on Twitter got really annoying and anti-intellectual for a few years, and that progressive institutions briefly discriminated against white men because they had a well-meaning but misguided desire to ensure everyone had equal opportunity.
And there is another version that is completely lost in a made-up universe where this incoherent band of “others” is all in cahoots and planning to replace you, because they despise you and want to kill you. Or worse, that they are low-IQ beasts who cannot accept that their rightful place is beneath us, and the future of civilization itself depends on our ability to beat them back.
You call that second group a “caricature,” but it is actually the narrative being trumpeted by an enormous chunk of the current administration. I don’t care where you fall on the spectrum so long as you don’t lend rhetorical support to those nutters.
I refrained from using the term "bad faith" in my previous comment, but you're making it difficult to avoid that conclusion. You are minimizing the significance of the crusade of racial vitriol over the past decade plus as just a minor little short-term boo-boo that cropped up in a few places from good people with the best of intentions who just might have taken it a smidgen too far, with those who disagree with your sunny framing papering it over dismissed as "nutters."
I was a reporter at Columbia University for eleven years, and scapegoating of white people and especially white men as the source of every inequity and social problem was ubiquitous on a daily basis. Not only was a particular demographic category systematically cut off from career and academic opportunities (along with people of East Asian and South Asian heritage) but they were constantly and reflexively demeaned and vilified. Was a lot of that unprincipled people simply leaning into the zeitgeist to advance their careers? Sure, but there was an unmistakable streak of genuine animus and malevolence every single day.
Bottom feeders like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are morally indistinguishable from Nick Fuentes and his ilk, but they were wholeheartedly embraced by virtually every prestigious institution in the United States. Thousands of highly credentialed people in positions of influence and power deliberately fomented racial hatred to advance their personal interests and political project, and they intended that to be the new permanent status quo. No, that's not the same as what happened in Rwanda, but it's along the same continuum. And that's why we need a truth and reconciliation commission, to have a credible and exhaustive record of what actually took place. I agree that there are "nutters" exaggerating what happened to reach extreme conclusions, but attempts to dismiss the gravity and severity of what woke wrought are equally nutty.
I could as credibly accuse you of bad faith for conflating hostile rhetoric with material oppression and violence.
The intensity of persecution necessary for a truth and reconciliation commission has historically involved mass killings. Either a literal genocide, or decades of brutal dictatorship with tens of thousands of political disappearances. Commissions become necessary when a community has endured such crippling trauma that it becomes emotionally paralyzed, unable to pick up the pieces without some semblance of closure.
Reasonable people can disagree about how bad wokeness was...within a certain range. I described endpoints on a spectrum, and not everyone to the right of my portrayal is a nutter. But those who've convinced themselves that what happened to white men in 2020 was "along the same continuum" as what happened to Tutsis in 1994 are fucking nutters.
I was at Yale and Johns Hopkins for half of the decade in question. Yes, there was a fair bit of "racial vitriol" in political discussions. There was scapegoating of white men--especially "rich, old white men," as an abstract archetype--for implausibly many problems (as well as for real racial inequities).
Somehow, I endured. At no point did I feel unsafe. I never even felt unwelcome, outside of a few niche Facebook pages where I picked a fight for fun. I was approximately as "persecuted" for being libertarian as I was for being a white guy - which is to say, only by the soft judgment of dopey people.
I'll even grant that there was "an unmistakable streak of genuine animus and malevolence"...in the most vocal 10-20% of politically active students. And even this was a learned, performative imitation of animus more likely to be typed than spoken, and more likely to be spoken than socially acted on. Voiced by white male speakers as often as anyone else, it was the same anger that prior generations of radical young college students tried on as fashion statements for a dozen causes: against the Vietnam war, against capitalism, or against global warming. They had in their heads a simplified story of who was to blame for a great injustice, and confused rage at the boogeyman with moral virtue.
Fair-minded, level-headed people never bought into the excesses - but they also saw important distinctions between Ibram Kendi and Nick Fuentes. Ibram Kendi does not believe in black supremacy. He does not oppose democracy, deny the Holocaust, or regularly praise Hitler. He does not say things like "Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, [Whites] need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise." Kendi had as his endpoint an egalitarian society, and so did the great majority of his followers. The New Right cannot say the same.
This was eloquent, I appreciate that.
I invite you to consider that, as one of the few white men who did manage to get a foot in the door of "name" institutions during this latest woke era, you enjoyed a form of privilege you might not be fully cognizant of. I too am among the artificially truncated cohort of white men who lucked into some fancy places even as anti-white male prejudice reached its apogee for the time being. Did I ever feel "unsafe" in the sense that my life was in danger? No, but I was painfully aware that a single awkward moment or misplaced phrase could bring my career crashing down, and that I was presumptively first on the chopping block. I covered dozens of events where people of my approximate demographic description were demonized in the most lurid of terms. One topic I covered extensively at Columbia Engineering was social engineers' efforts to embed fashionable "intersectionality" into algorithms and AI to automatically and systematically discriminate against disfavored groups 24/7 without even the need for a flesh and blood bigot to actively kick someone in the teeth. Do you remember during Covid when vaccines were divvied up via a racial spoils system instead of triage prioritizing the most vulnerable patients? How was that anything but dystopian madness?
Ibram X. Kendi is a glib, genial idiot that I don't respect enough to actively dislike. He is a complete non-entity. But Kendi-ism is a toxic scourge that has absolutely nothing to do with achieving an egalitarian society, but rather subjecting different demographic groups to dramatically different standards in order to institute rigid quotas. It is racism, plain and simple, and as such utterly indefensible.
The magnitude of institutional discrimination against white men (and also white women, and people of East Asian and South Asian heritage) over the past 15-20 years is too vast to be swept under the rug, and indeed attempts like yours to minimize the scale of the injustices only exacerbate the situation. You are blessed that your stain of being an undesirable white man didn't ruin your career ambitions, and you might try cultivating some compassion for those who didn't have your good fortune.
The various collectives of autonomous intelligence squabble!
“I don't respect enough to dislike.” I just snorted a Pepsi Zero all over my monitor.
It didn’t really happen, it’s also fine, the people noticing are the real bad guys, and it’s not happening (reprise). Great work
This is an excellent summary of the conservative response to Trump attempting a coup and regularly ignoring the Bill of Rights.
I suppose. Good thing the Dems are so righteous and would never ignore the law or the constitution.
Look man, you can write all the incisive copes you want, but at the end of the day, DEI policies were arbitrary punishments of millennial white men for inequities they didn’t create. Inequities that they actually most strongly opposed of any white male generation to that point in time. They didn’t address root causes. And there was a very vocal, sadistically gleeful contingent on social media happily cheering on the “replacement,” and a disproportionately large percentage of the people who spoke out against it were white nationalists. It really does not matter, at all, what the actual scope of that impact was; it matters that the system mistreated those guys while extreme leftists cheered, mainstream moderate voices said nothing, and a lot of the people who said “this is wrong” happened to hold a lot of horrible positions, but were right about this one.
I voted for Harris, and Trump II has been so horrific that I doubt I could ever vote Republican in the foreseeable future. But it took me a while to get there, longer than it should have, because it’s really hard to see past being mistreated solely for who you are. Leftists seem to understand this for every other demographic on Earth but inexplicably fail to apply the lesson to white men.
Whatever the scope, DEI was horrible, and the efforts to rehabilitate or minimize it are horrible, and they directly empower horrible people on the right. Just stop it man.
I’m liberal, non-white, and similarly interested in avoiding escalation of culture war topics but it does feel to me that there needs to be a forceful condemnation of the sort of anti-white rhetoric I see all the time. It’s not just about hiring, it’s not uncommon for me to meet other young people who will say really racist stuff against white people as if its just a reasonable inoffensive thing to say and I see a lot of white people just go along with it and it all feels so crass and demeaning. I don’t ever confront these people but I just sort of nip the conversation in the bud and try to move on. Whatever social environment this is, I really think the only hope to stop it is strong political outrage because otherwise day to day culture in less white coastal liberal circles that I tend to be a part of, just entrench themselves in this way of talking and social validation makes it hard for anyone to really chastise others about it even if it makes them uncomfortable, especially white liberals.
“For the past month, moderate conservatives have exaggerated this article’s findings for the psychic comfort of pretending that the out-of-touch radicals running our country are still on the left.”
No, you’re just an out-of-touch elitist snob who wants to maintain DEI policies despite them having disastrous results. The right didn’t exagerate anything about it Savage’s article. It is you and your ilk, in fact, that are exaggerating the right’s reasonable concerns because you refuse to acknowledge that your ideology is increasingly unpopular, and rather than self-reflect you just continue to advocate for terrible ideologies. And, you know, proving Savage’s point precisely by pushing anti-white anti-male rhetoric in your article. Please stop demonising perceived enemies and start to actually improve the situation. This article does the complete opposite of that.
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I received an e-mail with the original reply: “nuh uh”. So nice of you to try and cover up your immature response with an equally immature one. Totally convinced me.
nuh uh
Very intelligent response. Totally convinced me.
Great piece but I don't like "conserbole" as terminology because it cedes to Republicans the inaccurate and overly flattering idea that they remain "conservative."
“To show a decline towards more proportional representation fits exactly with the conception of justice trumpeted by DEI advocates, which was that playing field was formerly tilted towards white men, and we needed DEI to level it.”
Historically speaking, DEI was mainly focused on blacks. To achieve proportionality is far-fetched if the 15-point IQ gap between whites and blacks is real. To have actually achieved it would have required significant discrimination against whites and the promotion of incompetents (I experienced some of this incompetence at various universities). Therefore, proportionality between whites and minorities can really only be achieved with higher-IQ Asians, Indians, etc.—those who need/ed little help anyway. There is likely a small gap between men and women but it’s much smaller, so near proportionality is more realistic in non-STEM areas like journalism. But this says nothing about freedom of association, which was traded away for racial reconciliation decades ago. Are we reconciled?
Fellow exasperated libertarian here. Although I had already read the Bruenig piece you referenced, your article drove home more forcefully than his (I don’t know why) that I had succumbed to too much online right-wing discourse about DEI. However, on the topic of white replacement, it’s clear that for those whites who do want to retain a homeland, that that option is simply being taken away.
I'm really glad you found it useful, and were not too put off by the forceful tone. I've probably gotten too sucked into that discourse myself.
Can you clarify what you mean by "retain a homeland" ? I'm a white, native-born American, and I think my homeland is quite secure. Libertarians, especially, should think that immigrants pose no threat to it at all.
My apologies in advance for just dropping an (short) article in response but this sums up my views. This is not a defense of a white homeland per se, but it would allow more liberty for those concerned to retain more homogeneity in various areas. https://open.substack.com/pub/jclester/p/open-borders-today-stupid-or-sinister?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay