Compact's "Lost Generation" essay blows up (12-17-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendarshow dot com, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. So it is rare that a long form essay published on I believe a British owned company's website gets the kind of attention and views that this piece that I have now in front of me got over the last forty eight hours. It's called The Lost Generation and was published at Compactmagazine compactmag dot com. And it was written by Jacob Savage, a white male heterosexual. And that's important. I'm telling you that for a reason, white male heterosexual gen Z creative type okay. And he talks about how back in January of twenty sixteen, he was thirty one, he had been living in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. I take it back. He may be a millennial, he may be gen z I don't know, but he's one of those, and that's what the focus of this piece is on. So he's thirty one, living in LA for five years and he's just been writing scripts. He wants to be a TV show writer, and he's trying to get work. And the way I guess you do that is you do all of these menial jobs, you know, wait tables and all that, while you're doing all of this writing and trying to hone your craft and get ideas pitched in front of people, and you know, somebody picks it up. And he had been writing with his best friend, so there was like a duo and they were just writing straight constantly five years. They wrote a pilot script and a veteran show runner said yeah, let let's talk, and so they were like excited at first. The project though, fizzled, but then they were surprised when out of the blue, an executive emailed them and wanted to meet with them. The show runner said that he had submitted the two writers, Jacob and his friend for an upcoming writer's room that he was going to run, and that this executive really liked that pilot script that the two had written and heed to hire the duo, so they thought, this is our break, right, So their project was dead. But they met with the executive anyway, who is described here as a gen X white guy, who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writer's room was small, and the higher level writers, the veteran writers in the room, the ones with the most seniority, well they were all white guys too, and they couldn't have an all white male room. But you know, maybe if we get another season, we may be able to bring you on. And then they never did, he says. The door seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In twenty eleven, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were forty eight percent of lower level TV writers. So the thing to keep in mind and all of this is this is about the talent pipeline. Okay, forty eight percent of the lower level TV writers white men in twenty eleven. By twenty twenty four, so thirteen years later, it went from forty eight percent white dudes to twelve percent white dudes. The Atlantic's editorial staff the newspaper, it went from fifty three percent mail and eighty nine percent white down to thirty six percent male and sixty six percent white. White men fell from thirty nine percent of tenure track positions in the humanities at Harvard went from thirty nine percent down to eighteen percent over the course of a decade. He says in retrospec twenty fourteen was the hinge, the year DEI became institutional on across American life in industry, after industry gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn't a white guy and then provided just that quote with every announcement of promotions. There was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender or race. That's according to a former management consultant who went on to say, quote, and when you don't fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage, and on the other hand, you look and say, wow, the world is not rooting for you. In fact, it's deliberately rooting against you, he says. As the Trump administration takes a chainsaw to the DEI apparatus, there's a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well meaning but ineffectual HR modules. And then he has a quote from Kianga Yamata Taylor in The New Yorker. Now, if you do a Google search of this woman, you find out like she's in African American studies, professor I think at Yale and big in the DEI activism. Okay, and she says, undoubtedly there has been ham fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating, but for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone. Except it hasn't been. So here's the problem. It hasn't been. He goes on to say, this may be how boomers and Gen X white guys experienced DEI, but for white male millenniums, 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, in other words, by the by the generational cohort, the millennials, the Gen zs, the Gen wise, the Gen a's. I'm not calling them Alpha's jen a is what I call them. For now. We'll see if they can pick up another title at some point. But he's exactly right, because I've I've read a lot of stuff. I've covered the DEI stuff for years now. And I am a white dude, gen xer myself, so I you know, I was already in you know, into well into my career when all of this stuff started happening. And because of my age, I am already in sort of the you know, the upper levels, if you will, of a seniority kind of a place. Much like he goes on to explain, in newsrooms, in media companies, in television and movie production, in academia, and what keeps coming through and this is a piece. It's like it took an hour to read this thing. It's a massive essay. And what he keeps coming back to is that for gen xers and boomers, white men, they're the ones that are still in place because they've got the seniority and the tenure. And so what happens when you try to rebalance for DEI purposes, Well, if you have people already on the job, you're not firing all of those people because they're white guys that would probably get you sued, right, But what happens is everybody that comes along after then has to be an offset to your existing your existing employee demographic. And what does that mean for young white guys. Means there's there's no path for them because there's gen X and boomer white guys already on the payroll. This, this, and this, what he's describing here, It proves the warning that I was making about DEI and people like me were saying, this is not good. You do not want to have everybody viewing everything through these prisms of race and gender and sexual orientation. That cannot be the way that you view people, right, particularly in hiring decisions. But also this helps explain what is being used as sort of the jet fuel for you know, these more radical influencer types that have emerged over the last couple of years. I'm talking about guys like Nick Fouentes and the Manna Sphere and all of these like misogynist norm breakers and all of that, like they like, they are the ones that have come up in this environment. And lo and behold, look when when you tell everybody to view each other through racialized prisms, that also is going to lead the white guys to start looking at themselves like that too, And that's what they're doing. That's what's happening. Now here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. 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Call or text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabinsofashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. So Compact Magazine's piece by Jacob Savage, This thing has gotten a lot of discussion in various places over the last forty eight hours, so I bring it to you. I'm going over this with you so you know what this is about. And also I think it offers a different perspective on the blast zone of the DEI policies that you know, people like me and many in the audience were arguing against because we saw the corrosive effects on the society. But this is like, this is beyond what even I thought would occur, he says. Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would be no backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or a person of color, the expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of color. The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate. A senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me. This is in the section he's talking about media. He says, if there was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone. But if she was good, you knew that she would get accelerated to the New York Times or the Washington Post in pretty short order. The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By twenty nineteen, the newsrooms of Pro Publica, the Washington Post, and the New York Times were majority female, as were new media upstarts like Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post. And then twenty twenty happened and the wheels came off. He says, that was the summer of fiery but mostly peaceful riots, And when I was reading this, I had completely forgotten. But I did have a pretty close experience to this myself after I left WBT the first time, when I was on my timeout, as John Hancock called his timeout, that's what he called it. So I was also on a similar timeout. And so when I was looking for a job and I got one, but I was told by a manager that they really had to go to bat for me. They really had to like twist some arms in their corporate HR because I was replacing a black female employee. And they just said it like that, like wait, so my race and my sex would would prohibit me from getting this job somehow like like that that was a factor that was discussed. I think that's illegal. But I got the job. But I think it was also because I had a lot of experience in the in the field. But I don't know. I mean, this was before a lot of the DEI stuff really ramped up. It's about five years prior. And then he says, of course, twenty twenty happened, and the wheels came off. In the aftermath of George Floyd's death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a quote unquote reckoning. And then he goes on to quote all of the statements that came out promising, you know, more diverse hires at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Bon Appetite, NPR, Conde Nast, La Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Pro Publica as I mentioned, and The Atlantic. They were all out there saying, you know, this is what we're going to do, and then they did it. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. 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And these are all cultural institutions, right, These are the things that drive narratives, that impact the culture, right, that tell stories to help people make sense of what's going on. And so this hiring editor says, for a typical job, we would get a couple hundred applications, probably at least eighty from white guys. It was a given that we weren't gonna hire the best person. It was jarring how we would talk about excluding the white guys. The pipeline hadn't changed much. White men were still about half of the applicants, but they were now filling closer to only ten percent of the open positions. And he has various quotes from various white, straight guys telling their stories in all of these different industries. He doesn't give their full names, and he talks at a later point in the piece about how he's never had so many of his sources callback and change their anonymous name, make it something else, so it's not anything. Take out that detail because that could be identifiable. Like nobody wanted to be seen as that guy complaining that they didn't get the job, saying, oh, it's because of you know, discrimination, when it is and they're telling you, like these hiring people, they they're telling these young white guys, sorry, you know you're you're a white, straight guy, you're not getting the job. Like that's that's what they're they're talking about. So one of these people that he talked to, his name is Andrew, worked in a newsroom. He says everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, there was a racial climate assessment. At one point, reporters were told that they had to catalog in detail the identity characteristics of all of their sources. Why would you need to do that. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and he objected when negotia shifted from severance pay and parental leave, which I think are things that unions typically tried to implement, you know, but they were trying to shift the negotiations away from that and onto racial quotas. They wanted to do emergency hires of black people, emergency hires quick. Everybody, we're racist, we're systematically institutionally racists. We need to hire some more black people, like this is what they were saying in a newsroom. When he questioned these new priorities. The response was swift. He says, on a zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying, and then other women would snap their fingers in the chat window. It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale. He goes on to say later in the piece, the irony was where older white men remained in charge. Actually, where they remained in charge, there was almost no room to move up. They were already filling the white guy quota. All the upper management types that were implementing these policies that are stiff arming younger white males. And this plays out in example after example after example. Other pipelines dried up as well, the alt weeklies. I don't believe we have a dead tree copy of such magazine here in Charlotte. Anymore. It used to be called creative loafing way back in the day. But then they went belly up and think some of their writers went over and started was a Queen city nerve, I think is what it is. But I think it's only online. The old weeklies that gave misfit young men their start have now shed them entirely. There are no white men on the editorial staff of the Seattle Stranger, or on staff of Indie week which publishes in North Carolina. As late as twenty seventeen, there were six white men atop the masthead for the Portland Mercury twenty seventeen. Seven years later there was one. And that's the white eye Boomer. Not our traffic eye boomer, but a baby Boomer generation. And he's the editor in chief, so the boss. By the early twenty twenties, many journalists I spoke to noticed something else. The young white men who once flooded internship and fellowship pools had simply stopped applying. Gen Z men had absorbed the message the journalism was not for them. I have noticed this as well. You know who else noticed this? Like I don't know twenty years ago, Rush Limbaugh, do you remember what he called it, the chickification. He called it the chickification of news. A well known gen X reporter with impeccable liberal bona Fides confided quote, the femaleness is striking. It's like, Wow, where have the guys gone? In less than a decade, the entire face of the industry changed. And he then goes over all the data. I mean, the piece is packed with data. I'm just I'm trying to limit the percentages and the years and stuff because numbers are difficult to convey on radio. They're easier to understand and digest when you are looking at them. So I'm not going over But he's got New York Times and the male to female ratio changing, and it's all going in one direction. It's all the same, no matter which media operation he's looking at. The demographic shift reshaped, not only who told the stories. But here's the key, what do I always say, right, The greatest media bias is in the stories that don't get covered, Right, He says, the demographics shift from male to female reshaped, not only who told the stories, but which stories got told. Andrew at a colleague at this news department, We'll call him Lucas, and he was assigned to go write a piece after George Floyd's death about why you should never call the cops. He says, I remember having to interview one of these abolitionists, the prison abolitionists, for a story about how if somebody breaks into your car or your house, that it's white supremacy to call the cops, even if you need the police report for an insurance report. He says, that always made me feel gross. I think back on that with a lot of regret. Newsrooms were center left places in two thousand and five, the prominent gen X reporter said, now they're incredibly lefty 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, just to get in the door. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias. Which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the vantage play to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Kevin says, well, Pete, I've really enjoyed your show. Hopefully you'll find employment soon after you're firing. That's well, I mean it's going to happen at some point. Chris says. When it comes to DEI I look at it as the chickens have come back home to roost or karma if you will the same way black people were treated based on the color of their skin. Now white people find themselves in the same predicament. I'm black, and I'm not saying what's happening is right, I smell a butt. I don't really agree with DEI I believe in content of character, quality of work, and being qualified. Transgressions of the past will eventually come back to bite you in the butt, though, Right, So this is Kendyism. What Chris is articulating, I think here is that's Ibra Mex Kendy, who in his you Know, Anti Racism book that he was invited to share with all of the educators in the Charlotte Mecklenberg school system, for example, among many other places that brought in Kendy to to sell this slop, he says that the remedy for past discrimination is current discrimination. See this is why, like this is an unethical view, okay, because if that's the case, then you never end up without discrimination. And again, if you want to live in a racialized society where rights and jobs and opportunities and all this other stuff is dependent on on whatever racial demographic has power, like that is a completely unethical system to advocate. And you darn sure, I better not be talking about equality under the law for everybody either. See. I am of the opinion that you should not discriminate based on any of these characteristics. Like we need to be as Chris says in his message that a meritocracy, if somebody is producing the work and they are good at what they do, then that's the person you would want, right obviously, because then what ends up happening is now you will have the cycle just continuing. Let me see here, this is from seven oh four number. My aunt was a teacher years ago. She was turned down for a position because they said that they had to hire a minority, even though they said she was far more qualified for the job. This from Ken five years ago. It was called affirmative action. I mean up until a couple of years ago it still is. I mean yeah, I mean this was the outcome of affirmative action, which again you may agree with the reasoning behind it, which was to you know, correct the past transgressions. But that's still discrimination. That's what that is in practice, as was laid bare in the Supreme Court arguments. Ken says, I applied to a company that my father and uncle worked for. I did not get hired. My uncle was friends with the hiring manager, and he asked him why this is what He stated that even though I had one of the highest test scores, he could not hire me because I was white. Walter wants to know, as a middle aged white guy, where do I apply for my reparation. I don't think I don't think that's gonna I don't think that's how that works. Walter. So in this in this piece called the Lost Generation, it's at Compactmagazine compactmag dot com by Jacob Savage. I mentioned he talks about and I just kind of went over the media and the news organizations. He then pivots over to academia the Ivory Tower. He calls this section and he says, there are a lot of stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everybody that I spoke to seem to agree on it's best not to talk about it, at least not in public. And that's why I'm talking about it in public right now. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecallanarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.