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One of the weirdest aspects of the orgy of racist antiwhite hate during the Great Awokening was how the mainstream establishment went out of their way to clearly document just how viciously they wished to discriminate against white men.

A fine new article in Compact, “The Lost Generation,” by Jacob Savage, who may be even more obsessed with counting than I am, quantifies just how much young white men have been squeezed out of entry-level jobs in entertainment writing, news media, and academia.

You might think that if your ideology asserted that young white men are dangerously racist, then you might try to cover up from these volatile menaces the fact that you are cheating them out of their careers for racist reasons, just to be, you know, prudent. Still, Savage makes clear how many young white men were told over the past dozen years that they weren’t going to be hired because they were young white men.

For example, at the peak of the streaming TV boom, suddenly nobody was hiring young white male screenwriters:

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent….

After all, how many young white men have ever written a funny TV script? I mean, besides Rob Reiner writing the pilot for Happy Days? And besides his dad, Carl Reiner, naming Rob Petrie, the character played by Dick Van Dyke, who just turned 100, after his son?

A whistleblower sent me a document from early 2017, an internal “needs sheet” compiled by a major talent agency, that shows just how steep the headwinds were. Across the grid, which tracks staffing needs for TV writers’ rooms, the same shorthand appears dozens of times: “diverse,” “female,” “women and diverse only.” These mandates came from some of the most powerful names in television: Noah Hawley (“prioritizing women”), Dean Devlin (“prioritizing women…ideally hire ethnic/African American”), Ryan Murphy (“want female and diverse, emphasis on African American”).

This was systematic discrimination, documented in writing, implemented without consequence. It’s striking how casual it all was. “‘Chicago Fire’—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs [staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others.

In early 2023, I had called attention to Savage’s essay “The Vanishing” about how DEI was ruining the career prospects of young Jews—because, to the surprise of many Jews, they are counted as white by HR departments—in my post “Whiteness Ends: Jews Hardest Hit.”

Back before October 7, 2023, not many Jews were yet willing to admit that diversity wasn’t good for the Jews. After the subsequent upsurge of approval for Hamas’ raid on Israel by the Diverse, however, Savage’s critique of DEI is catching on more broadly.

One of the most childish contortions of the Great Awokening was the mass media proudly announcing during the George Floyd “racial reckoning” that it was going to capitalize certain superior races’ names (e.g., “Blacks”), but not capitalize those of certain inferior races (“whites”).

The most notorious example has, of course, been the shift in June 2020 by the Associated Press and The New York Times from writing “whites and blacks” to writing “whites and Blacks.” Huge numbers of people have messaged me about how shocked they were by the overt racist hatred implicit in these neologisms.

You might think that if you are worried about whites becoming angrier over American racial policy, a cost-free symbolic concession would be to go back to treating America’s two most famous races equally in the AP Stylebook: Use either “whites and blacks” or “Whites and Blacks.” It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, just so long as you don’t go out of your way, as the prestige press has been doing since 2020, to continue to express flagrant racist animus against whites.

But I’ve never heard anybody even discuss this simple reform to rebuild trust in the news media.

Why did the press decide to capitalize the names of certain politically privileged minorities? For example, on April 1, 2022, the AP announced it was capitalizing “the Deaf” (but not “Beethoven went deaf”).

The blind remain out of luck, however.

The reasons offered by major institutions in the 2020s for justifying capitalizing some words but not others are blatantly insincere. For example, the Associated Press prevaricated:

Most notably, people who are Black have strong historical and cultural commonalities, even if they are from different parts of the world and even if they now live in different parts of the world. That includes the shared experience of discrimination due solely to the color of one’s skin.

There is, at this time, less support for capitalizing white. White people generally do not share the same history and culture, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color.

Nah, the AP is capitalizing blacks to honor blacks and lowercasing whites to insult whites.

Of course, it’s not proper English usage to capitalize a noun because you believe it is a good thing and not capitalize it because you think it’s a bad thing. Until George Floyd, proper nouns were capitalized to show that they are unique names for singular things, not to show that proper nouns are morally better than common nouns.

This 2020s trend is reminiscent of the 19th-century progression in Bible translations toward “reverential capitalization” of pronouns referring to God, such as He, Him, His. A rare example of reverential capitalization in English before Victorian times was the great composer Handel’s handwritten manuscript of The Messiah.

One of the stranger examples of recent reverential capitalization was that the common noun “the indigenous” that was used to refer to a variety of disparate peoples was converted into the novel proper noun “the Indigenous.” Usually, though, announcement of this shift got buried in the much more celebrated “black” to “Black” sacralization of June 2020. For example, the Associated Press announced on June 19, 2020:

AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity, and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person. We also now capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place.

But the people native (or Native) to Tahiti, Tierra del Fuego, and the Kalahari Desert seldom believe that they are one singular, unique group that constitutes a capitalized proper noun.

The New York Times uses “Indigenous” to refer to Canadian Amerindians, because Canada is filling up with Asian Indians, while calling Canadian citizens American Indians seems weird (as does the Canadian wokeism “First Nation”).

But the Times also capitalizes “Indigenous” to refer to Laplanders (but not to Norwegians, God forbid!), Mexican Indians, Australian Aborigines, American Indians, a nomadic Fulani tribe in Chad, the Ainu of Japan, and South American Indians.

Yet, we don’t write sentences like, “Hadza, Australian Aborigines, Huns, and Neanderthals are examples of Nomads.”

We don’t expostulate: “Ancient Sumer, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River were among the first Farmer civilizations.”

Similarly, we don’t say: “Belgium and South Korea are Industrial countries.”

Talking to various AI brands, I find that they keep insisting that indigenous is now capitalized to show respect for certain marginalized peoples (but not for other marginalized peoples).

I spent a long time talking to ChatGPT to try to figure out who is “Indigenous” with-a-capital-I. It was insistent that there are several bodies within the United Nations that talk about “Indigenous” issues. But they don’t keep a list of who is Indigenous and who isn’t. There aren’t any precise criteria for who makes the nonexistent list, either.

Me: Are the Swiss Indigenous to Switzerland?

Google Gemini: In a general sense, you can say the Swiss are indigenous (lowercase “I”) to the Alps.

…Under international standards used by the United Nations and other global bodies in 2025, the Swiss are not classified as an “Indigenous People.”

Political Status: The term “Indigenous” is specifically reserved for groups that form non-dominant sectors of society and have experienced colonization or displacement by a later settler population.

Me: Were the Helvetians not colonized by Rome?

More recently, Poland was wholly colonized by Germany, Austria, and Russia from 1795 to 1945. Does that make Poles Indigenous to Poland?

Switching to ChatGPT:

Me: “So, Papuans stopped being Indigenous fifty years ago when Papua New Guinea became independent?

AI: “No, they are still Indigenous.”

Basically, it sounds like Indigenous with a capital I is a euphemism for 19th-century terms like “backward” or 20th-century terms like “premodern.”

The various AIs get irate at that suggestion but don’t have any more plausible explanation.

Overall, it appears that America’s dominant cultural institutions now have the maturity level of 8-year-olds who think that capitalization is an honorific for the Good Guys as opposed to the Bad Guys.

Thus, in the future, I expect to see the spelling “hunter-Gatherer” to denote that female Gatherers are Good, while male hunters are bad.