I read the Savage article and found it a bit boring, simply because it stated the extreme obvious for 5000 words, and then delivered mega retarded conclusions simply to avoid stating the even more extreme obvious
John Carter wrote a very long essay which cut to the bone more directly. All I can say is the ship has sailed and the damage is long done. And all that is left is for the whole rotten edifice to come crashing down.
Agreed that Savage didn't go far enough. His personal experience with Hollywood screenwriting was limited. But he seems to have opened the floodgates, hence eugyppius' (and others) widening the breach by exposing the complete lunacy of the DEI movement with more amusing stories written in colorful, humorous prose.
The brownies standing on boxes to watch the game over the fence instead of paying for a seat gets me every time. Metaphorical in so many ways, and for so many things.
My first thought when I saw that image was that "equity" would be more accurately portrayed by removing the first two guys' crates and sinking the tall guy into the ground. After all, the "stuff" we're giving to some must first necessarily be taken from others.
Of course. But the illustration is about the concept of "equity" in general, not about the specific situation shown. Instead of a baseball game viewed over the outfield fence, it could be a foot race where one runner has long sleek legs, the second runner has short fat legs, and the third runner has just one leg, then chaining the first and second runners to weights of different kinds to make the footrace a "fair" one. "Equity" is all really about equality of results.
I’m not disagreeing with you at all btw. I just find it to be extra vulgar that they’re stealing whilst being equitable about it. Is that called, “honor amongst thieves?”
I also was immediately struck(upon first seeing that image years ago) by how it cavalierly normalized petty larceny as not just an everyday pastime, but an admirable goal to be aided by social policy.
The two best graphic responses I encountered to refute it were this snarky one:
Theres a reason why humans evolved successfully though survival of the fittest. Not every sperm is meant to survive but of the ones which do the species, in theory, becomes stronger.
I wrote a much more concise article laying out in much better detail what this Lost Generation article was trying to say.
Unfortunately, titling an article "n*****rs, f****ts, c**ts, and k**es" ...is a literal crime in Canada, so I deleted it. So I wouldn't get a visit from the police.
Those are the four groups of people who have ruined America, and I mean something very precise by this, and it is not simply bigoted ranting.
Blacks: By causing a fundamental contradiction in US law that requires the assumption that everyone is equal when they are clearly not, And all the destruction that comes from a legal system desperately trying to pretend that's true.
Gays: By making it impossible for men to form platonic friendships, by infecting mass culture with anti-family social norms, And by generally queering the default scripts that people use for prosperous lives.
Women: The feminization of critical industries and infrastructure in order to fuel a bullshit girl power narrative is going to cause catastrophic collapse in the near future.
And I'm not writing the fourth one on a German blog.
If you haven't already, you should read 'The Age of Entitlement' by Christopher Caldwell. It explains how 1960s and '70s US civil-rights legislation and enforcement created a mechanism to, in essence, bypass the US constitution., and indeed to create a sort of alternative constitution.
I should add, I probably would take issue with you arguing that 'k**kes' destroyed American meritocracy. From what I've seen, they tend to wind up alongside Asians on top of meritocratic organizations. That's entirely separate, mind you, from my dismay at their widespread ancestral Russophobia that almost got us into WW3 very recently. And don't even get me started on Gaza.
If you read The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes, you can see that the slide into authoritarian government began with at least Herbert Hoover finding ways around separation of powers and federalism but accelerated with the Democratic Party's program in the 1930's. However, the transition began in the 1920's, beyond the scope of The Forgotten Man, with a SCOTUS ruling that weakened the Constitution, which is not workable as it was originally written.
Sadly I know several super talented or otherwise top in their field who cannot find employment over this rotten, gangrenous infestation. One who is about to lose his home.
The self-employed route is not always possible, but offers an escape hatch.
Same for the "consultant" route, especially since the diversity of "consultant" headcount usually doesn't show up on HR's DEI reports. And institutions who follow DEI precepts always need somebody who can remediate the screwups of all that "overlooked American talent" they have hired. Do not skimp on your rates.
"The unspeakable truth is that disadvantaged minorities are precisely and basically by definition those whom any kind of meritoracy, however conceived, would tend to exclude." As I found out way back in 1977 when serving on the Admissions Committee for the Department of Anthropology for Stanford University. After admitting six Ph.D. candidates entirely on merit but with no scholarships, the Dept Chair suddenly announced that the Dean had made two scholarships available, but these would be restricted to one Hispanic and one Black, respectively. We had to go through the applications again, diffing out such applicants from the bottom of the discarded pile. Our final choice were barely qualified to teach high school, but they got a free ride at one of America's most prestigious universities solely on the basis of their race. I do not believe that either actually obtained a degree, but that didn't matter. But the Dean and the other libtards who set them up for failure could pat themselves on the back for "equity."
Let's not forget that DEI gave us Katanji Jackson Brown on the US Supreme Court. An individual so unqualified and ignorant that , despite being a woman herself, claims she cannot identify what a woman is, as she is not "a scientist". Yet, she was voted in anyway. The good news is that her continuously ridiculous rulings offer new evidence every case for the insanity and real world consequences of DEI. For that, I guess we should be grateful...
The reason this was able to take off so catastrophically in 2015 or so is because all the seeds were planted in the '60s and '70s in all the elementary schools upwards.
In the early '70s I was a secretary in a Manhattan private elementary school, part of a two-campus (Manhattan and Bronx) educational institution that went through HS. The parent body was ultra-liberal. At one point the board brought in Beryl Banfield (look her up) to lecture us on our white sins and she was very very upset that we weren't sufficiently remorseful.
When the elderly maiden lady principal retired, the board decided to show its own remorsefulness at least and brought in a very elegant black lady to be the new principal. That was when I first developed stress-related asthma. The new principal hired an idiot white girl to be her own private secretary (I was the school office secretary) and the elegant black lady would come into my office and scream at me regularly for having to correct the illiteracy etc. of her girl.
This was a long time ago, of course, so I don't remember all the details and wasn't privy to board discussions and concerns, of which there were apparently plenty, and on the morning I went into work fully expecting to be fired, I saw the elegant black lady principal leaving the building on the arms of her much older rich black husband because she had been fired instead. They brought in a Jewish guy to succeed her and I think he didn't last long either because they finally gave the job to the vice principal (funny thing, her parents were immigrants from Germany) and she was in charge as long as I was still there (I left in 1976 on my international adventuring).
But that was the era when black community groups (look up Beryl Banfield!) began taking over NYC school districts and relentlessly forcing out white administrators and teachers (a significant percentage of whom were Jews) and replacing them with barely literate "advocates." Public schools in NY haven't been so great ever since I was a wee girl but the acceleration in the destruction of basic education was rot on meth after the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike in 1968 and the related riots in 1971.
So here we are. Conservatives Inc. spent those decades creating or expanding think tanks and publishing books and getting (or staying) rich and putting their own kids in private primary schools from where they'd get into the relentlessly-being-corrupted Ivies and they did nothing meaningful to stop it. Someone tell me how a monster like Chomsky could get tenure and be allowed to destroy the minds of several generations of young people whose diplomas gained them entree into every crucial level of society. That idiot Buckley published "God and Man at Yale" in 1951. Did that light a bonfire under anyone? No. But it paid good royalties I'm sure. Every conservative going back 74 years now can quote from it I'm sure.
A microcosm of what you describe has occurred at my University alma mater. And I, futilely, asked a similar question for many years: why are so many ostensibly conservative alums still supporting a school (with big dollar endowments no less) that has destroyed itself from within? The answer is that they are lazy and just can't bear to look at it. The fact that there's a "History of Drag" class in the college of Arts & Letters, and that this doesn't bother them enough to stop writing checks simply indicates that they are taking the approach of thinking: "If I do nothing, it will hopefully go away."
I have discovered that we few who actually care a lot about this, are very, very few indeed. We opt for supporting some very few small colleges that have not sold out. I won't bother to name them because I'll get a firestorm of ad hominem attacks for my trouble.
The answer I think is that they thought their social class was impervious to the predations of shrieking incompetent black people. They thought their own children had enough patronage networks to ensure they'd always be employed in all the right places.
They can't even see real danger to their own children when it's manifest everywhere. In the olden days of real taxi service, a taxi driver was a well-vetted person. Grocery stores and restaurants employed their own delivery people.
Do you really truly absolutely want your lovely young single daughter to get into Ubers driven by anyone or to have Uber Eats or DoorDash casing the security in her apartment building?
This is basic common sense. You want a sort of chain of custody for any service that interacts with your precious ones.
In every possible way that you can destroy a well-functioning society, the smart people went ahead and did it.
Mostly what I found is that in 1966 Beryl Banfield said “I object to being chosen on the basis of color, not competence,” as she turned down an appointment to replace a popular white (Jewish?) principal.
I guess it was after that that she turned to social justice activism?
As to why they let it all happen, one could guess that no one was prescient enough to see what the future would bring—or more likely what you suggest, they just focused on the present.
Yes, six or seven years later she was far more aggrieved.
I swear the guy doesn't pay me a kickback but Darryl Cooper's series "Blacks and Jews" describes some of the environment my FFFFG and her sister directly saw and experienced as teachers in the NYC public school system in the '70s. It was a blatant and ruthless destruction of any educational standards that would impede the most rabid activists from tearing down the basics of how you successfully teach children to read and write and how you begin installing the regime inescapable anywhere now.
Banfield wasn't vicious like many of them but I remember even now her frustration that we weren't reduced to penitential tears for all the stuff we hadn't actually done to anyone.
The sad part is that the "lost generation" of young white men may indeed be lost; bright young men who would have been scientists instead put their brain power into speedrunning video games and shitposting on Twitter under anonymous anime profile pictures. The raw genetic talent might still be there, but talent must be cultivated with care and discipline or else it is wasted. I fear that e-right Twitter's claim that a host of John Nashes would immediately appear if only white men were allowed back in the institutions is just not true and that we have permanently handicapped our otherwise best and brightest.
Another very sad outcome that is not being much discussed is that most of the institutions practicing these tactics are now trash - in just a few years. Why do Hollywood movies suck? Why don't kids want to go to college? How did the best selling beer in the world lose 50% of it's market share overnight? And, on and on.
I am a victim of this lost generation and I can't help but notice that there's an article telling me that I've been victimized but there's no article telling me how the people who victimized me are going to make me whole again.
Until I see a paycheck, it's just words, words, words.
> Everyone had long since realised that insisting on meritocratic standards was a great way to fill your schools not with the modern-day descendants of slaves, but rather with a lot of white and Asian people.
When I lived in the Bay Area and people would scream about tech being full of white men, I was very confused because when I looked around at every team I worked on, I, a white man, was a minority. Every single team I worked on was majority Asian, usually but not always Chinese.
I literally marked it on my calendar the day I saw the headlines. January 2017 is when employment in the Silicon Valley tech sector tipped over 50% Asian, making white men a literal minority. Still waiting to hear about the DEI initiatives to hire more guys like me.
You should all understand, too, that this is everywhere in the wonderful world of work, and an awful lot of us may now be described as having become extremely postjudiced when it comes to dealing with them famously marginalized people, angry black women destroying customer service everywhere.
At least 25 years ago we had a problem with our Verizon landline. We'd made an overseas call that refused to disconnect. We used a cellphone to call customer service, and the Helpful Black Lady asked in her surliest tones if we wanted a tech to come out and she warned us what the minimum charge would be.
We hung up and tried calling again, and this time we got one of them Infamous White Women who said that if we unplugged the transformer it would reset the circuit and that would solve the problem, so we did and it did. Simple as that.
I been just as multicultural as you can get and not lose your own sense of self, all these many many decades, and when you lose me, you've had to work real real hard at it. I went to a black gynecologist over fifty years ago and had a black internist 25 years ago and these days I wouldn't use a black healthcare professional unless he could prove he was a reanimated zombie who'd gotten his degree in the 1950s. (To be fair that goes for white docs too though.)
Oh well. We've much to feel cheery about anyway, this holiday season. Kamala ain't President.
Even though I'm technically Gen X, I finished my PhD in 2012 and got an NSF grant for a postdoc, which I finished in 2015 with the leading European AI researcher. That put me on the academic job market in 2014, when I applied to 80 universities for a tenure-track position in with a record of 12 publications, including 3 journal articles and a book deal with Springer-Verlag for a monograph of my PhD thesis -- a better record than Claudine Gay's entire career, and she got to be president of Harvard. Granted, I didn't have that many citations, but that's not enough to explain why I got precisely 2 phone interviews from 3rd-tier schools and made it onto zero shortlists.
I've had a decently successful career in industry since, although I avoided California like the plague. But I would much rather have spent that decade doing research.
And yet I have relatives that don't understand why DEI actually makes me angry. They still think it's just about "fairness" and "righting historical wrongs".
Thanks for describing your experience during this craziness. I find it helpful to hear about the experiences of people I trust, so I can calibrate my understanding of a situation.
I always tried to hire a diverse group of people, but I literally mean, diverse in thought, because in my experience diversity of thought matters a lot. When DEI became a thing, I was no longer allowed to hire for diversity of thought, but simply for diversity of skin or sex or lack of sex.
Until these articles I hadn't thought about the irony(?) of senior white guys excluding excluding any white guys more junior than themselves.
I was once a candidate in a bizarre „group interview“ for the position of chair with our dean. The other three candidates waxed on abut the value of and their commitment to „diversity“. I came up last and said that I wanted to address the lack of intellectual diversity that existed in our college. I knew that I was kicking over a hornet nest but it was both fun and liberating.
> are pretending that Savage’s article is the first they’ve heard about how brutally bad and exclusionary the DEI mavens made everything:
This reminds me of the take I came up with 10 years ago. It feels a little dated now, but I'll share it because it's relevant here, I think.
In the mid 2010s, I noticed a particular template of Op-Ed that ran all the time. In it, a white (or occassionaly Jewish) woman (It was always a white woman) Would write an article about some human behavior that was antisocial or otherwise bad. The tone would be super neurotic and hand-wringing, as if the author knew that she was guilty of the very thing she's saying people should stop doing.
The surface level reading was a plea to society to stop doing the antisocial behavior. But there was a weird sort of subtext to it, turning the entire article into a kind of lampshade in the TV tropes sense of the term.
While the surface reading of the article would make it clear that we are opposed to whatever behavior, the subtext of the article would say something like "Yeah, I know it's bad, but we all do it, so don't beat yourself up too much about it."
The net result was this weird and insidious pattern where somebody would publish an op-ed that seems to be against something, But the subtext would not necessarily support it, but normalize it. And it would do this while having the plausible deniability of, "what are you talking about? I wrote an article against that."
"Girls, stop hooking up with fuckbois from Tinder." If I tell you that's the hypothetical headline, you could probably perfectly imagine the exact article I'm talking about. Even just the phrasing of the hypothetical headline does it. "Girls, stop" presumes that girls are doing it, which tells everyone that it can't be *that* bad, if its so normal
Based on the coverage I've seen of this article, this article follows that pattern.
"By then, these minoritoids were about 20 years into their careers and making their way into the upper rungs of the faculty and administration."
Here the old adage "those who can't research, teach; those who can't teach, administrate" comes into play. The less competent disproportionately self-select, and are selected, into administrative positions. Opportunity cost is a major driver--they literally have nothing else to do with their time. The less competent also tend to be more ideologically motivated. They survive in academia by waging political battles that those with something worthwhile to do avoid like the plague.
This has been greatly exacerbated by the cancerous growth of administrative/staff positions generally. I conjecture that one driver behind this has been the pressure to provide sinecures to the under-performers in a sort of perverse version of Say's Law where supply creates its own demand.
You also identify the other blade of the scissors: legacy live white male administrators and faculty throwing their Millennial successors to the wolves in order to avoid being consumed themselves.
I say this as someone who has witnessed the entire trajectory of academia from 1990 onwards, earlier actually if you consider my doctoral years. Were I 20 years younger I would never have had a prayer in hell in academia.
"The less competent also tend to be more ideologically motivated. They survive in academia by waging political battles that those with something worthwhile to do avoid like the plague."
I think this is why the current situation can be perpetuated for a lot longer than people seem to think, no matter how "unsustainable" it may appear to be from the perspectives of any third parties that are horrified by it.
I agree. They are embedded in the system and to them fighting to maintain their power is existential. Hence the ongoing guerrilla warfare observed in numerous DEI administrators against Trump administration efforts to banish DEI. Such warfare can go on a long, long time.
The money paragraph, for me at least, from the Lost Generation piece:
""The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced worse discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not itself 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 was in fact “mediocre.”
Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t supposed to notice."
And then, his rhetorical questions hit the nail precisely on the head:
"Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline?"
From you Eugy, I particularly enjoyed this brutally frank bit:
"I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to recentre my professional life around the tiresome intellectual pretensions and imaginary racial grievances of undertalented, overpromoted angry black women."
Eugyppius, you are correct about post-2010 DEI standing on the shoulders of earlier anti-meritocratic hiring practices. In 1985 or '86, my alma mater, the University of Arizona, hired a woman for a newly created (endowed?) deanship. I have forgotten her stodgy formal title, but she was known as 'the dean of black students' (or sometimes, tongue in cheek, 'the black dean of students') because that's what her formal title meant. I was 25, back in grad school after a stint in the Marines, and had occasion to interview her over some controversy because I was an editor on the campus newspaper.
I have forgotten the details, but the controversy arose, as always, over black students supposedly being treated unfairly. I just let her run her mouth and took notes as fast as I could. She spun a bizarre fictive legendarium regarding historical discrimination that, by the 2010s, we learned to call 'critical race theory.' It had haunted academe for awhile, I guess - a byproduct, as I understand it, of Foucalt's and Marcuse's postmodern 'deconstructionist' ideas. It just took a couple more decades to go mainstream and hit corporate boardrooms.
I read the Savage article and found it a bit boring, simply because it stated the extreme obvious for 5000 words, and then delivered mega retarded conclusions simply to avoid stating the even more extreme obvious
John Carter wrote a very long essay which cut to the bone more directly. All I can say is the ship has sailed and the damage is long done. And all that is left is for the whole rotten edifice to come crashing down.
Agreed that Savage didn't go far enough. His personal experience with Hollywood screenwriting was limited. But he seems to have opened the floodgates, hence eugyppius' (and others) widening the breach by exposing the complete lunacy of the DEI movement with more amusing stories written in colorful, humorous prose.
The brownies standing on boxes to watch the game over the fence instead of paying for a seat gets me every time. Metaphorical in so many ways, and for so many things.
My first thought when I saw that image was that "equity" would be more accurately portrayed by removing the first two guys' crates and sinking the tall guy into the ground. After all, the "stuff" we're giving to some must first necessarily be taken from others.
What about equity for the people who paid to put on the game and the half time show?
Of course. But the illustration is about the concept of "equity" in general, not about the specific situation shown. Instead of a baseball game viewed over the outfield fence, it could be a foot race where one runner has long sleek legs, the second runner has short fat legs, and the third runner has just one leg, then chaining the first and second runners to weights of different kinds to make the footrace a "fair" one. "Equity" is all really about equality of results.
I’m not disagreeing with you at all btw. I just find it to be extra vulgar that they’re stealing whilst being equitable about it. Is that called, “honor amongst thieves?”
Vonnegut slid the skewer into that over 60 years ago, but some social engineers still haven't heard the message.
https://interestingliterature.com/2022/10/kurt-vonnegut-harrison-bergeron-summary-analysis/
See Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron". 1961.
I also was immediately struck(upon first seeing that image years ago) by how it cavalierly normalized petty larceny as not just an everyday pastime, but an admirable goal to be aided by social policy.
The two best graphic responses I encountered to refute it were this snarky one:
https://1drv.ms/i/c/b333d642626add3d/IQAyudkYV4U9TY4BRMBVY5-TAbH8GYfXPlT8zDZl4cWGks0?e=mWjtWR
...and this more cerebral one, which I believe is from a Prager U. video:
https://1drv.ms/i/c/b333d642626add3d/IQB_QScWdG9wRIPqG66DxV3wATtD3xkxdIAI9tzY627-jDM?e=6JLPZJ
Decide, in hindsight, which of these three images carries the ring of truth.
Thanks. Those are great and both are accurate.
Theres a reason why humans evolved successfully though survival of the fittest. Not every sperm is meant to survive but of the ones which do the species, in theory, becomes stronger.
Or, as I sometimes coldly put it, "There is no Disney version of Origin of Species, in which everybody lives happily ever after."
All of the above.
I wrote a much more concise article laying out in much better detail what this Lost Generation article was trying to say.
Unfortunately, titling an article "n*****rs, f****ts, c**ts, and k**es" ...is a literal crime in Canada, so I deleted it. So I wouldn't get a visit from the police.
Those are the four groups of people who have ruined America, and I mean something very precise by this, and it is not simply bigoted ranting.
Blacks: By causing a fundamental contradiction in US law that requires the assumption that everyone is equal when they are clearly not, And all the destruction that comes from a legal system desperately trying to pretend that's true.
Gays: By making it impossible for men to form platonic friendships, by infecting mass culture with anti-family social norms, And by generally queering the default scripts that people use for prosperous lives.
Women: The feminization of critical industries and infrastructure in order to fuel a bullshit girl power narrative is going to cause catastrophic collapse in the near future.
And I'm not writing the fourth one on a German blog.
If you haven't already, you should read 'The Age of Entitlement' by Christopher Caldwell. It explains how 1960s and '70s US civil-rights legislation and enforcement created a mechanism to, in essence, bypass the US constitution., and indeed to create a sort of alternative constitution.
I should add, I probably would take issue with you arguing that 'k**kes' destroyed American meritocracy. From what I've seen, they tend to wind up alongside Asians on top of meritocratic organizations. That's entirely separate, mind you, from my dismay at their widespread ancestral Russophobia that almost got us into WW3 very recently. And don't even get me started on Gaza.
If you read The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes, you can see that the slide into authoritarian government began with at least Herbert Hoover finding ways around separation of powers and federalism but accelerated with the Democratic Party's program in the 1930's. However, the transition began in the 1920's, beyond the scope of The Forgotten Man, with a SCOTUS ruling that weakened the Constitution, which is not workable as it was originally written.
Sadly I know several super talented or otherwise top in their field who cannot find employment over this rotten, gangrenous infestation. One who is about to lose his home.
The self-employed route is not always possible, but offers an escape hatch.
Same for the "consultant" route, especially since the diversity of "consultant" headcount usually doesn't show up on HR's DEI reports. And institutions who follow DEI precepts always need somebody who can remediate the screwups of all that "overlooked American talent" they have hired. Do not skimp on your rates.
"Minoritoids" -- eugyppius, you certainly have a way with words. 😄
But the best is "Enshittifying". I will recommend this Substack to anyone that can read.
I like it, especially since it's so easy to imagine a... soothing Preparation... that eases the friction of having to deal with them.
"The unspeakable truth is that disadvantaged minorities are precisely and basically by definition those whom any kind of meritoracy, however conceived, would tend to exclude." As I found out way back in 1977 when serving on the Admissions Committee for the Department of Anthropology for Stanford University. After admitting six Ph.D. candidates entirely on merit but with no scholarships, the Dept Chair suddenly announced that the Dean had made two scholarships available, but these would be restricted to one Hispanic and one Black, respectively. We had to go through the applications again, diffing out such applicants from the bottom of the discarded pile. Our final choice were barely qualified to teach high school, but they got a free ride at one of America's most prestigious universities solely on the basis of their race. I do not believe that either actually obtained a degree, but that didn't matter. But the Dean and the other libtards who set them up for failure could pat themselves on the back for "equity."
And hallelujah, those days are finally over.
Run that same scam today and you will get more than a strongly-worded letter from these folks:
https://equalprotect.org
On just the home page, check out how many such schemes they have stomped out so far.
Just this one case should bring smiles to the faces of many here:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/09/doj-sues-providence-schools-over-anti-white-teacher-program-challenged-by-equal-protection-project/
Let's not forget that DEI gave us Katanji Jackson Brown on the US Supreme Court. An individual so unqualified and ignorant that , despite being a woman herself, claims she cannot identify what a woman is, as she is not "a scientist". Yet, she was voted in anyway. The good news is that her continuously ridiculous rulings offer new evidence every case for the insanity and real world consequences of DEI. For that, I guess we should be grateful...
The reason this was able to take off so catastrophically in 2015 or so is because all the seeds were planted in the '60s and '70s in all the elementary schools upwards.
In the early '70s I was a secretary in a Manhattan private elementary school, part of a two-campus (Manhattan and Bronx) educational institution that went through HS. The parent body was ultra-liberal. At one point the board brought in Beryl Banfield (look her up) to lecture us on our white sins and she was very very upset that we weren't sufficiently remorseful.
When the elderly maiden lady principal retired, the board decided to show its own remorsefulness at least and brought in a very elegant black lady to be the new principal. That was when I first developed stress-related asthma. The new principal hired an idiot white girl to be her own private secretary (I was the school office secretary) and the elegant black lady would come into my office and scream at me regularly for having to correct the illiteracy etc. of her girl.
This was a long time ago, of course, so I don't remember all the details and wasn't privy to board discussions and concerns, of which there were apparently plenty, and on the morning I went into work fully expecting to be fired, I saw the elegant black lady principal leaving the building on the arms of her much older rich black husband because she had been fired instead. They brought in a Jewish guy to succeed her and I think he didn't last long either because they finally gave the job to the vice principal (funny thing, her parents were immigrants from Germany) and she was in charge as long as I was still there (I left in 1976 on my international adventuring).
But that was the era when black community groups (look up Beryl Banfield!) began taking over NYC school districts and relentlessly forcing out white administrators and teachers (a significant percentage of whom were Jews) and replacing them with barely literate "advocates." Public schools in NY haven't been so great ever since I was a wee girl but the acceleration in the destruction of basic education was rot on meth after the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike in 1968 and the related riots in 1971.
So here we are. Conservatives Inc. spent those decades creating or expanding think tanks and publishing books and getting (or staying) rich and putting their own kids in private primary schools from where they'd get into the relentlessly-being-corrupted Ivies and they did nothing meaningful to stop it. Someone tell me how a monster like Chomsky could get tenure and be allowed to destroy the minds of several generations of young people whose diplomas gained them entree into every crucial level of society. That idiot Buckley published "God and Man at Yale" in 1951. Did that light a bonfire under anyone? No. But it paid good royalties I'm sure. Every conservative going back 74 years now can quote from it I'm sure.
Just someone tell me why they let it all happen.
That's totally fair.
I think the answer is very basic: sloth.
A microcosm of what you describe has occurred at my University alma mater. And I, futilely, asked a similar question for many years: why are so many ostensibly conservative alums still supporting a school (with big dollar endowments no less) that has destroyed itself from within? The answer is that they are lazy and just can't bear to look at it. The fact that there's a "History of Drag" class in the college of Arts & Letters, and that this doesn't bother them enough to stop writing checks simply indicates that they are taking the approach of thinking: "If I do nothing, it will hopefully go away."
I have discovered that we few who actually care a lot about this, are very, very few indeed. We opt for supporting some very few small colleges that have not sold out. I won't bother to name them because I'll get a firestorm of ad hominem attacks for my trouble.
The answer I think is that they thought their social class was impervious to the predations of shrieking incompetent black people. They thought their own children had enough patronage networks to ensure they'd always be employed in all the right places.
They can't even see real danger to their own children when it's manifest everywhere. In the olden days of real taxi service, a taxi driver was a well-vetted person. Grocery stores and restaurants employed their own delivery people.
Do you really truly absolutely want your lovely young single daughter to get into Ubers driven by anyone or to have Uber Eats or DoorDash casing the security in her apartment building?
This is basic common sense. You want a sort of chain of custody for any service that interacts with your precious ones.
In every possible way that you can destroy a well-functioning society, the smart people went ahead and did it.
Mostly what I found is that in 1966 Beryl Banfield said “I object to being chosen on the basis of color, not competence,” as she turned down an appointment to replace a popular white (Jewish?) principal.
I guess it was after that that she turned to social justice activism?
As to why they let it all happen, one could guess that no one was prescient enough to see what the future would bring—or more likely what you suggest, they just focused on the present.
Yes, six or seven years later she was far more aggrieved.
I swear the guy doesn't pay me a kickback but Darryl Cooper's series "Blacks and Jews" describes some of the environment my FFFFG and her sister directly saw and experienced as teachers in the NYC public school system in the '70s. It was a blatant and ruthless destruction of any educational standards that would impede the most rabid activists from tearing down the basics of how you successfully teach children to read and write and how you begin installing the regime inescapable anywhere now.
Banfield wasn't vicious like many of them but I remember even now her frustration that we weren't reduced to penitential tears for all the stuff we hadn't actually done to anyone.
The sad part is that the "lost generation" of young white men may indeed be lost; bright young men who would have been scientists instead put their brain power into speedrunning video games and shitposting on Twitter under anonymous anime profile pictures. The raw genetic talent might still be there, but talent must be cultivated with care and discipline or else it is wasted. I fear that e-right Twitter's claim that a host of John Nashes would immediately appear if only white men were allowed back in the institutions is just not true and that we have permanently handicapped our otherwise best and brightest.
Another very sad outcome that is not being much discussed is that most of the institutions practicing these tactics are now trash - in just a few years. Why do Hollywood movies suck? Why don't kids want to go to college? How did the best selling beer in the world lose 50% of it's market share overnight? And, on and on.
I am a victim of this lost generation and I can't help but notice that there's an article telling me that I've been victimized but there's no article telling me how the people who victimized me are going to make me whole again.
Until I see a paycheck, it's just words, words, words.
> Everyone had long since realised that insisting on meritocratic standards was a great way to fill your schools not with the modern-day descendants of slaves, but rather with a lot of white and Asian people.
When I lived in the Bay Area and people would scream about tech being full of white men, I was very confused because when I looked around at every team I worked on, I, a white man, was a minority. Every single team I worked on was majority Asian, usually but not always Chinese.
I literally marked it on my calendar the day I saw the headlines. January 2017 is when employment in the Silicon Valley tech sector tipped over 50% Asian, making white men a literal minority. Still waiting to hear about the DEI initiatives to hire more guys like me.
You should all understand, too, that this is everywhere in the wonderful world of work, and an awful lot of us may now be described as having become extremely postjudiced when it comes to dealing with them famously marginalized people, angry black women destroying customer service everywhere.
At least 25 years ago we had a problem with our Verizon landline. We'd made an overseas call that refused to disconnect. We used a cellphone to call customer service, and the Helpful Black Lady asked in her surliest tones if we wanted a tech to come out and she warned us what the minimum charge would be.
We hung up and tried calling again, and this time we got one of them Infamous White Women who said that if we unplugged the transformer it would reset the circuit and that would solve the problem, so we did and it did. Simple as that.
I been just as multicultural as you can get and not lose your own sense of self, all these many many decades, and when you lose me, you've had to work real real hard at it. I went to a black gynecologist over fifty years ago and had a black internist 25 years ago and these days I wouldn't use a black healthcare professional unless he could prove he was a reanimated zombie who'd gotten his degree in the 1950s. (To be fair that goes for white docs too though.)
Oh well. We've much to feel cheery about anyway, this holiday season. Kamala ain't President.
Merry Christmas to all!
"Kamala ain't President." 🎆🎇🎆
Every time I'm tempted to get discouraged, I console myself with that thought.
And perhaps even more importantly that Walz ain't VP. Now I understand the stench that seeped through the screens every time that guy was on.
It's xawaash.
You’re an excellent writer and this take is spot on.
Even though I'm technically Gen X, I finished my PhD in 2012 and got an NSF grant for a postdoc, which I finished in 2015 with the leading European AI researcher. That put me on the academic job market in 2014, when I applied to 80 universities for a tenure-track position in with a record of 12 publications, including 3 journal articles and a book deal with Springer-Verlag for a monograph of my PhD thesis -- a better record than Claudine Gay's entire career, and she got to be president of Harvard. Granted, I didn't have that many citations, but that's not enough to explain why I got precisely 2 phone interviews from 3rd-tier schools and made it onto zero shortlists.
I've had a decently successful career in industry since, although I avoided California like the plague. But I would much rather have spent that decade doing research.
And yet I have relatives that don't understand why DEI actually makes me angry. They still think it's just about "fairness" and "righting historical wrongs".
"Tiresome intellectual pretensions and imaginary racial grievances of undertalented, overpromoted angry black women. "
Great line!
Thanks for describing your experience during this craziness. I find it helpful to hear about the experiences of people I trust, so I can calibrate my understanding of a situation.
I always tried to hire a diverse group of people, but I literally mean, diverse in thought, because in my experience diversity of thought matters a lot. When DEI became a thing, I was no longer allowed to hire for diversity of thought, but simply for diversity of skin or sex or lack of sex.
Until these articles I hadn't thought about the irony(?) of senior white guys excluding excluding any white guys more junior than themselves.
What a disaster.
I was once a candidate in a bizarre „group interview“ for the position of chair with our dean. The other three candidates waxed on abut the value of and their commitment to „diversity“. I came up last and said that I wanted to address the lack of intellectual diversity that existed in our college. I knew that I was kicking over a hornet nest but it was both fun and liberating.
> are pretending that Savage’s article is the first they’ve heard about how brutally bad and exclusionary the DEI mavens made everything:
This reminds me of the take I came up with 10 years ago. It feels a little dated now, but I'll share it because it's relevant here, I think.
In the mid 2010s, I noticed a particular template of Op-Ed that ran all the time. In it, a white (or occassionaly Jewish) woman (It was always a white woman) Would write an article about some human behavior that was antisocial or otherwise bad. The tone would be super neurotic and hand-wringing, as if the author knew that she was guilty of the very thing she's saying people should stop doing.
The surface level reading was a plea to society to stop doing the antisocial behavior. But there was a weird sort of subtext to it, turning the entire article into a kind of lampshade in the TV tropes sense of the term.
While the surface reading of the article would make it clear that we are opposed to whatever behavior, the subtext of the article would say something like "Yeah, I know it's bad, but we all do it, so don't beat yourself up too much about it."
The net result was this weird and insidious pattern where somebody would publish an op-ed that seems to be against something, But the subtext would not necessarily support it, but normalize it. And it would do this while having the plausible deniability of, "what are you talking about? I wrote an article against that."
"Girls, stop hooking up with fuckbois from Tinder." If I tell you that's the hypothetical headline, you could probably perfectly imagine the exact article I'm talking about. Even just the phrasing of the hypothetical headline does it. "Girls, stop" presumes that girls are doing it, which tells everyone that it can't be *that* bad, if its so normal
Based on the coverage I've seen of this article, this article follows that pattern.
"By then, these minoritoids were about 20 years into their careers and making their way into the upper rungs of the faculty and administration."
Here the old adage "those who can't research, teach; those who can't teach, administrate" comes into play. The less competent disproportionately self-select, and are selected, into administrative positions. Opportunity cost is a major driver--they literally have nothing else to do with their time. The less competent also tend to be more ideologically motivated. They survive in academia by waging political battles that those with something worthwhile to do avoid like the plague.
This has been greatly exacerbated by the cancerous growth of administrative/staff positions generally. I conjecture that one driver behind this has been the pressure to provide sinecures to the under-performers in a sort of perverse version of Say's Law where supply creates its own demand.
You also identify the other blade of the scissors: legacy live white male administrators and faculty throwing their Millennial successors to the wolves in order to avoid being consumed themselves.
I say this as someone who has witnessed the entire trajectory of academia from 1990 onwards, earlier actually if you consider my doctoral years. Were I 20 years younger I would never have had a prayer in hell in academia.
"The less competent also tend to be more ideologically motivated. They survive in academia by waging political battles that those with something worthwhile to do avoid like the plague."
I think this is why the current situation can be perpetuated for a lot longer than people seem to think, no matter how "unsustainable" it may appear to be from the perspectives of any third parties that are horrified by it.
I agree. They are embedded in the system and to them fighting to maintain their power is existential. Hence the ongoing guerrilla warfare observed in numerous DEI administrators against Trump administration efforts to banish DEI. Such warfare can go on a long, long time.
The money paragraph, for me at least, from the Lost Generation piece:
""The fact that other groups, in other eras, have faced worse discrimination—that in the grand scheme of things, the disenfranchisement of white male millennials was relatively mild—is not itself 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 was in fact “mediocre.”
Because what they’re really saying is: We weren’t supposed to notice."
And then, his rhetorical questions hit the nail precisely on the head:
"Is the media more trusted now than a decade ago? Is Hollywood making better films and television? Is academia more respected? Have these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort—or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline?"
From you Eugy, I particularly enjoyed this brutally frank bit:
"I wasn’t getting paid nearly enough to recentre my professional life around the tiresome intellectual pretensions and imaginary racial grievances of undertalented, overpromoted angry black women."
Eugyppius, you are correct about post-2010 DEI standing on the shoulders of earlier anti-meritocratic hiring practices. In 1985 or '86, my alma mater, the University of Arizona, hired a woman for a newly created (endowed?) deanship. I have forgotten her stodgy formal title, but she was known as 'the dean of black students' (or sometimes, tongue in cheek, 'the black dean of students') because that's what her formal title meant. I was 25, back in grad school after a stint in the Marines, and had occasion to interview her over some controversy because I was an editor on the campus newspaper.
I have forgotten the details, but the controversy arose, as always, over black students supposedly being treated unfairly. I just let her run her mouth and took notes as fast as I could. She spun a bizarre fictive legendarium regarding historical discrimination that, by the 2010s, we learned to call 'critical race theory.' It had haunted academe for awhile, I guess - a byproduct, as I understand it, of Foucalt's and Marcuse's postmodern 'deconstructionist' ideas. It just took a couple more decades to go mainstream and hit corporate boardrooms.