Discrimination is just discrimination... no matter who is doing it (12-17-2025--Hour2)

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 vpetelenarshow 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, what happens when you set up a project to improve or increase diversity and you do it across all sorts of industries and cultural institutions. What happens when you try to implement racial and gender quotas in your hiring, Well, we now know, we can see this is what's been occurring for about the last day decade, really ramping up in twenty twenty, and across the industries of media, academia, and Hollywood. You can see that gen X and boomer white guys in upper management roles, they hang on to their jobs and then all of the talent pipeline gets jammed up because they can't hire and they won't hire any young white men, and so they are shut out of these jobs, and they're told this, by the way, they're literally told this that sorry, we're looking for a diversity higher. It's what they call it. We need a diversity higher. And so you're not getting the job because of something you have no control over. We had a Texter Chris in the last hour who said, you know, this is sort of chickens coming home to roost because this is what black people went through. And that's true. There were, you know, discrimination laws against hiring black people. You know, only whites need apply and all of that stuff, and all of that was wrong. But here's the thing, chickens coming home to roost or karma as he called it. Also, the gen z and millennial white guys, they had nothing to do with that. And so you're you're meeting out some sort of collective punishment against people that did nothing wrong to you. So you're robbing them of opportunities and a life, right Like, they have these ideas of what they want to do with their life and they're working hard to achieve it, and you're saying, no, you'll never achieve it. And that's because one hundred years ago, somebody that looked like you racially did something bad to somebody who looks like me racially. That that is an that is an indefensible and unethical position to take. I'm not saying you can't take it. I'm just making judgments. If one does, you know, let me get John on. Hello John, thanks for hanging on, John, sir. Fun to say. I actually caused my HR to no longer want to talk to me. Wait, wait, wait, hang on a second. Tell me how you did that. I'm taking notes. Well. I asked them if we wanted diversity or excellence, and they said we want both. I said, you can't have both unless you look for excellence first. And they said to me, how do you how do you get that? I said, well, let's take a let's do a hypothetical situation. You're looking for the best manager, and your best manager happens to be a white woman, but you already have or white women in management, and you're now looking for a Asian guy Asian guys and ninth that person. You're not getting excellence if you are if your first criteria is diversity. And they looked at me and they started fitting and sputtering, hemming and hanging, and I was like, my logic cannot be defeated on this one. You look for the best, You're going to get the best because you may have, like I said, white woman or a black guy or right. Well, this is this also goes to the It goes to that what was his name, James de Morey or something, the guy that worked I think at Google and in the internal email messaging system or whatever. He published something among employees that looked at, you know, why there are so few women in the coding industry, and he said, basically, men and women are different, and guys are generally more interested in things, women more interested in people, you know. And he made these he made this assertion, and he got fired for it because people were you know, offended, and he's committing violence against us right by by offering up an explanation that, hey, you know what, there may be some other reason. It's not like misogyny. It's not institutional or systemic in Google. It's a byproduct of men and women being interested in different things, and that's why guys tend to be interested in, you know, in learning to code. That might be an explanation. In fixing the problem. Yeah, yeah, all right, I appreciate the call. John you're kind of breaking up there. Your cell phone connection is kind of breaking up. So but it's a fair point, and the logic that John just laid out is undefeated. It's that is true. It'd be nice if you can do both. Sure, but one has to like, you can't have multiple top priorities, right, There's only one top priority. So if you want to make diversity hiring your top priority, then you have to understand that excellence is going to be a lower priority than that. That's how priorities work, right, It is only one at the top. Next up is academia. When over the news media, this is academia. There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia, but the one, the one thing that everybody I spoke to seem to agree on is that it's best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. One millennial professor nervously explained, quote, the humanities are so small. There's a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it. So it came as a bit of a shock when a guy named David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoctorate and left wing Twitter personality decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet. He posted on x formerly known as Twitter. I'm thirty five years old, I'm four plus years post PhD, and quite frankly, I'm also a white dude. Combine those factors together and I'm all for sorry. Combine those factors together, and i am, for all intents and purposes, unemployable as a twentieth century American historian. So that's his field of study, twentieth century American history. And he's saying I can't get a job as a PhD after four years. And of course, when he posted that the pylon was swift and vicious, thereby basically confirming his very point. A big part of why it's hard to diversify is the turnover is really slow in the universities. This is according to a tenured millennial professor. And that's become worse now because baby boomers live a long time. Many elite universities once had mandatory retirement at age seventy, but back in nineteen ninety four, Congress sun seted the academic exemption for age discrimination. So Congress did away with that universities used to force you out at seventy and then and that I was allowed. It wasn't considered age discrimination, even though it obviously is, but they said, can't do that anymore. What happened is then it locked in the demographics of a largely white male PROFESSORIAT for another generation. And while the pipeline and the demographic cohorts haven't changed much. In other words, the talent that's coming up through the universities to take these jobs that hasn't changed demographically, still get a lot of white guys that are applying for these jobs. That hasn't changed. But what has changed is who actually gets hired because of all of the old white guys that are still in the upper levels, so they don't hire any new white guys. You know, Stories are powerful. 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They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. Let me get to some more messages on the text line here, driven by liberty Buick, GNC Stanley says, out of all this DEI stuff, there's still one thing about it all. I don't get. If the original discrimination was primarily perpetuated by old white people with money, how's the Democrat Party primarily up of old white people with money considered the great savior of the minorities in downtrodden. Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing, Like they were the ones that gave us all of the discrimination laws. But they changed everybody flipped in nineteen sixty five, don't you remember the great the Big lie. Although you're free to think, it's problematic to say out loud. Fortunately for us, our founder's new freedom of conscience was worthless without freedom of speech, he says. Scott says, Pete, I know you are all about solutions, So how about this. Just put on your applications that you identify as black or Asian or whatever, female, gender fluid, whatever and bingo you are in. I'm just spitball over you. That's that might be a good work around. Steve says, I feel the past ten years have had a similar effect on those white males who lost their seniority as well. It has been very difficult to find equivalent paying positions since my position was eliminated in twenty twenty one. Then this is from an eight to eight number. You stated this DEI stuff is a twenty twenty story. I did not state that a two eight number. You have anything for twenty twenty five to discuss, like how we are on the brink of a world war with the US parked outside of Venezuela because China is about to move on Taiwan. Yeah. No, this is a story that was published less than forty eight hours ago, and it's about now. It's about the people who have been raised in this system that was that infected all levels of our domestic institutions. So that's why, that's why I'm going over it, because the politics is that is downstream of the culture. I don't know what's happening off the coast of Venezuela. I know these blowing up drug boats, and I know they're talking about a blockade and these racts of war, and that's not cool without a without a declaration of war from Congress. That's what I said in every one of our foreign interventions that didn't have declarations of war. So I hope that helps, all right, as long as we're off topic, Alex, Welcome to the show. Hello Alex, Hey Pete, how are you doing? I am all right? What's up? Yeah? I just want to say this has gone on long before ten years ago. When I started to work at the US postal source back in the eighties, this was going on. And I remember one morning I was a distribution clerk and my friend was a carrier. In one morning we're out on break just the two of us were both white guys, and he asked me, he said, do you think I'll ever be able to become a supervisor? I said, NA, you're too male and you're too pale. And we both laughed cynically at the reality of my joke, but we knew the score. I wanted to mention, was. That something that was ever like explicitly articulated to you by. They had as well known that they had an up permative action policy with the Postal Services, as with all federal agencies, and everything is no secret. I also want to mention that when I took the Civil Service test back in the eighties, they knew your race and your gender as soon as you picked up the pencil to take the Civil Service test, they asked. And I later found out that the Civil Service tests were there was a policy called race norming, whereby the numbers were juggled so as to benefit minorities. And just look at the demographics of the Postal Service, especially upper management, and there's no question. So I'm retired now. I'm just I was glad to get out while the getting was good. Yeah, it's been nice talking with you, all right, Alex. I appreciate the call. Yeah, I mean this is I mean, this is why the Supreme Court ruled as it did. I mean that was about college admissions, where they admitted that their admissions weighted by race, you know, and that's why the predominant racial category that was being discriminated against wasn't white people, it was Asians. They were getting rejected even though they had you know, superior grades, you know, extracurricular activities and stuff, and awards and all of this. They were well qualified to be enrolled in the schools, but they were being rejected because the schools didn't want quote unquote too many. Yet they deny their quotas. It's like, okay, well, what is too many? I'll know it when I see it. Is that it back to the academia portion of this piece. The white men who do get hired are often older and more established, or get this, they're foreign. Several people I spoke with notice that European white men don't seem to face the same barriers. The reason, according to one professor, is that they exist slightly outside the American culture wars. Another is an administrative sleight of hand. Federal education statistics classify foreign nationals outside of racial categories. In other words, a white European on a work visa doesn't register as white in the diversity metrics. Among new PhDs with definite academic employment plans, white temporary visa holders are nearly twice as likely as white US citizens or permanent residents to secure the tenure track positions twice as likely. 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 cabins Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime seven oh four five, seven oh one oh seven nine. It's also the WBT text line where Chris has written in again and he says, you seem to want to align me and my earlier text with this ibram x Kendy clown as if I believe in his messaging, and I don't. I don't know what you're alignment. I'm sorry if it came across like that. I'm just saying that what you articulated about chickens coming home to roost and karma like that's that smacks of candyism because that's what he was saying, and maybe it didn't mean to sound like that, but that is what that was. He said. The solution or the remedy to pass discrimination is current discrimination. That's what he advocated for. He says, I clearly, I clearly said I do not agree with DEI, and I believe in quality of work and being qualified to do the work. It is absolutely unfair to what's happening with white people now. I'm not one of those people who believe that just because black people were treated a certain way years ago as an excuse to treat white people a certain way down well, and that's no, that's good. That's the ethical position to take. You know, nobody alive today is guilty of anything that occurred two hundred years ago. And that's what makes this the DEI stuff so insidious, is that it forces people now to engage in some sort of collective shaming or or assumption of guilt for things that you didn't do, and being told that you're somehow a bad person because of some characteristic that you were born with that you had nothing to do with. Let me get Chris on. Hello, Chris, welcome to the show. Good to talk to you. Pete. Let me get right to it, having a little control hearing you. But in relation to to wokism they acquired, that group has kind of acquired, you know, transgenderism. My understanding recently is a transgenderism that is starting to lose that's flavor. If I understanding that correctly. There, Yeah, there's theories are happening. Yeah. Well, I mean I've seen some of the the data suggests that people who identify younger, people who identify as trans, that that number is declining. Okay, so that there's a little hope on that. I kind of see the the when logic is starting to take hold of it, that men can't be women, women can't be men kind of thing. I can see that, So kind of kind of going back into the DEI someone Now, of course they're still gonna accept transgenderism, but I think the argument appears like it might be winning from that perspective. Maybe so, yeah, maybe so. In relation to the DEI, though, I see a bigger hurdle for us to jump over because there was history and things that happened and injustices, and it just seems that much more difficult to get to that point of if if like transgenderism is it's kind of self evident when people will really start thinking about it. But this lends itself to kind of injustices that did happen, and we're not saying it didn't, but it's very I don't know, it needs to be a little bit more nuanced in our. In our No, we don't, sorry, Chris, this is America. We don't do nuance, So no, there's a problem with you. No, we do it for latus when we walked here. Right, that's right, Chris. I appreciate the call, sir, all right, thank you. I appreciate the call. Let me go over here and talk with Brian. Hello, Brian, how are you hey? What's going on? How you doing? Man? I'm doing fine, I think how are you doing? Yeah? Okay, I know. Did I hear you say something about about white people not being guilty for what other white people did two hundred years ago? I said, nobody is guilty of Nobody is guilty of anything that people did two hundred years ago, black people or white people or any other people. What was what was then that? So I just turned on the radio. I got that point. But I'm thinking that just because you was missing a DEI I'm thinking that, Okay, well, thee I shouldn't be inactive because of what happened years and years ago. Is that what you're saying. So I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and put you back on hold, Brian, and I will advise you to go back and listen to the first hour of the podcast. You can get it at the peatpod dot com, because I'm not going to rehash an hour and a half worth of content for you. So if you would like to learn what I said, it is readily available on the podcast, and then you can, you know, send me a message or something if you've got any questions. I've been covering this piece by Jacob Savage at the Lost Generation or called the Lost Generation. It's a compactmag dot com. Compact magazine, and he we already covered the newsroom portions. Now he's into academia. He talks about Berkeley commissioning regrets analysis to identify which quasi legal strategies would produce the fewest number of white male job offers. This was all out in the open. In his first year on the academic job market, a man identified only as Ethan applied to nearly fifty jobs. It was a slog. He was thrilled when he was a finalist for a tenure track position at Brown University. At every stage of the process, the number of male applicants was whittled down. Ethan made it to the final interview round at Brown after a long back and forth with the search committee, a sign that he believes was of internal dissension, but he lost out quote. They wanted everything through the prism of race. Unless you place race squarely at the center of your research, you're vulnerable, especially if your identity doesn't fit the desired profile. Of the men who managed to pass through Brown's gender gauntlet white. Since twenty twenty two, Brown has hired forty five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Forty five of the forty five three were white American men, that is just under seven percent. Over the next three years, Ethan applied to dozens more positions, including UC Berkeley, U C Irvine, and as elsewhere. The UC schools required DEI statements, in which prospective faculty were asked to detail future plans to advance DEI. Ethan had to write dozens of these statements in the course of his job search, but the UCS took it a step further. Universities of California, under an eight and a half million dollar state program called Advancing Faculty Diversity. Uc administrators used DEI statements as a first cut to winnow down the applicant pools before the faculty were even allowed to consider the candidates. 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 plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News, as they may the media landscape more transparent. I want to finish up. I'm going to skip over the Hollywood portion of this piece by Jacob Savage, The Lost Generation. This final chapter is called everywhere Else. For a decade, he says, it kept going faster and faster with any actual without any actual quotas to achieve, only the constant exhortation to do better. The diversity complex became self radicalizing, a strange confluence of top down and bottom up pressure. No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had. The boundaries shifted depending on the industry and the moment. A white woman might be favored in some contexts disfavored in others. An Asian American man might face extra obstacles in tech or medicine, but if he wanted to be a screenwriter or an English professor, then the system worked in his favor, but for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve, and solve it they did. Over the course of the twenty tens, Nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines. Seven white male gen xers won the MacArthur Genius Fellowship in twenty thirteen alone, the same number as the total number of white male millennials who have won it since. In twenty fourteen, two white male millennials were National Book Award finalists, including one winner that's ten years ago. That year, nine white male American artists under forty appeared at the Whitney Biennial, but of the seventy millennial writers nominated for the National Book Awards in the decade that followed, three were white men. The Big Four Galleries represent forty seven millennial artists. Three of the forty seven or white dudes at the twenty twenty four Whitney Biennial, which featured forty five millennial artists, none were white guys. The white men shut out of the culture industries didn't surge into high status fields. Other fields, They didn't suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. Tech not much of a refuge either, talks about the white male populations dropping at Google at Amazon. He says, the refugees, sorry, the refuges. That young white men did find crypto podcasting substack because there were no barriers to entry. A friend who's now an executive at a major crypto company scraped by as a freelance film editor for years. He applied to Netflix five times, and eventually he was told explicitly that they did not need more white guys. He did not go into crypto because it was high status. He went into it because Hollywood wouldn't have him. The DEI departments have mostly shut down or quietly rebranded themselves. The mountains of reports and glossy PDFs have been quietly scrubbed, as if to hide the evidence. What was the justification for gutting the American meritocracy. Nobody seems to know. It's tempting to wave it all away as secular decline. White men abandoning fields that were losing status or economic value. But the time, the timeline, the timing of it doesn't line up. The sharpest declines and opportunity for younger white men did not happen during the rolling crises of the past few years. They were baked in during the mid twenty tens, when new media was expanding, coverage, universities were growing, Hollywood was at peak TV. And this raises some uncomfortable questions. Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and TV now? Is academia more respected now? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort, or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline? The fact that other groups in other areas, in other eras, I should say, in other times in our history, have faced worse discrimination, that is not in itself an argument that, in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement of white male millennials, oh, it's relatively mild when you look at the past discrimination. That's not an argument, especially when the entire liberal establishment insists that nothing actually happened, that the mild correction was in fact no correction at all, and that any white man harmed in the process must have just been a mediocre guy, because what they're really saying is that we were not supposed to notice. And here's the kicker on this. Most of the men that he interviewed were liberals. Some still are, he says, but to feel the weight of society's disfavor can be disorienting. We millennials were true believers in race and gender blind meritocracy, which, for all its faults, was far superior to what replaced it, and to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism towards the entire liberal project that won't soon disappear. As I said in the first hour, this is the stuff like jet fuel for the Nick Fuentes crowd. 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 the Pete Callner Show. Again. Thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone. M.