How DEI Is Destroying the American Family

Discriminatory “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) policies have been enshrined in virtually every major American institution for more than a decade now. While conservatives have made some laudatory progress in turning the cultural tide against DEI, the fallout on the American economy and, even more devastatingly, the American family, is only just beginning.

This week, Compact Magazine published what may be the most important long-form essay of the year. “The Lost Generation,” authored by aspiring screenwriter and odd-jobs aficionado Jacob Savage, describes in specific, heartbreaking detail the economic carnage that DEI has wrought on young men, and young white men in particular.

Savage provides staggering statistics on the race and gender-based overhaul of hiring practices in journalism and academia to highlight how DEI has fundamentally transformed the American workplace:

• In 2011, 48 percent of lower-level TV writers in Los Angeles were white men; by 2024, that dropped to 11.9 percent.
• In 2021, new hires at media giant Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white.
• That same year, at NPR – funded by taxpayer dollars – 78 percent of new hires were non-white.
• Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men.
• In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women, and 69 percent had been people of color.
• In 2013, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white; today it is 37 percent male and 59 percent white.
• White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
• In the Yale humanities department, just six out of 76 (7.9 percent) of tenure-track professors hired since 2018 have been white men.
• UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors since 2020 – just three (4.7 percent) are white men.
• Since 2022, Brown University has hired 45 tenure-track professors in the humanities and social sciences; just three (6.7 percent) have been white, American men.
• In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students; by 2025, that had dropped to 20.5 percent.

As one hiring editor at a major newspaper told Savage, “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” As an Ivy League professor put it in describing how a hiring committee viewed one white male applicant, “On paper, he was so clearly the strongest candidate. It really kind of did feel like, well, we can’t not interview this guy. But we’re still not gonna hire him.”

But, critically, it isn’t all white men who have fallen into the crosshairs of the left’s DEI crusade. As Savage explains, “This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America… If you were forty in 2014 – born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s – you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.”

It’s not that zero older men fell victim to the DEI purge. But many older, more established white men were grandfathered into institutional power structures. To make up for that, Hollywood, newsrooms, universities, and corporations had to be all the more aggressive in discriminating against white and male applicants for jobs. As Savage writes regarding discrimination against white men in Hollywood, “Every fellowship, grant, and hiring incentive was suddenly oriented toward changing who got in the door.”

The result is a “lost generation” who did everything they were told to do – stay out of trouble, go to college, earn a degree, work hard – only to be told effectively, “white men need not apply.” This paragraph from Savage is as haunting as it is accurate:

For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. 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 economic fallout from the left’s DEI rampage is easy to see. The establishment media is more aggressively left-wing than ever, a record low number of Americans trust the legacy press, and cable news ratings are through the floor. (Meanwhile, mediums like podcasts and Substack, which don’t have identity-based barriers to entry, are more popular than ever). Disney and Hollywood giants continue to take huge losses on projects because they care more about the identity of actors, writers, directors, and producers than telling compelling stories. Major brands like Target and Bud Light have faced consumer backlash, costing them billions of dollars.

And then there’s the personal economic fallout. Men like Savage have had their career progress blocked because of their race and gender. In his case, he was told by a veteran showrunner that the studio couldn’t hire him because he was white. As Savage writes, “I could see what was happening – I was being told point-blank what was happening – and still I thought I’d be the exception, that if I wrote one more script, took one more meeting, I’d slip through. But very few people get to be the exception.”

But as this gut-wrenching reflection also reveals, DEI has destroyed so much more than just economic opportunity, because economic opportunity is the foundation for personal growth and, ultimately, marriage and family life. Countless young men were systematically excluded from career success during their 20s and 30s – peak years to become established and settle down. When virtually every major institution has actively tried to block the financial advancement of entire generations of men, is it any surprise that marriage and fertility rates are collapsing?

Meanwhile, as one perceptive X user put it in response to Savage’s essay, “The women who ‘won’ the DEI lottery got careers instead of families, delayed fertility until it was too late. DEI attacked family formation from both sides, excluded men from provider roles, AND diverted women from their fertility window. Everyone lost.”

This breakdown of the family is a feature, not a bug, of the DEI complex, which is nothing more than a toxic blend of Marxist totalitarianism and modern race- and gender-based identity politics.

A core tenet of Marxism is that the family is the primary obstacle to state power. It is far more difficult to manipulate a person anchored in family, and a population capable of forming healthy marriages, raising children, and trusting one another cannot be reshaped by emotional blackmail. DEI serves the same function in modern America. It breaks down the economic foundations of family life for young men, tells women that a single-minded focus on career is their only path to fulfillment, collapses marriage and birth rates, fuels depression and isolation, and destroys trust in every institution it touches.

Ultimately, DEI was never just about punishing white men. Making white men the scapegoat for all of society’s problems was merely the opening move in a broader project aimed at controlling everyone – white and black, men and women alike. Once you convince a society that one group is inherently guilty and another is inherently fragile, you can replace merit with ideological obedience and turn every individual into a political subject whose value depends on their identity, not their character or achievement.

In the process, women and minorities are reduced to caricatures of their race and gender, told that their success is impossible without discriminatory engineering and that their real worth lies not in their talent or drive but in their demographic category.

This is why DEI is not just discrimination against white men, though it plainly is that. It is a wholesale attack on the very idea of the individual – and therefore on the family, which depends on individuals building stable, meaningful lives together. A society that trades merit for identity will always end up fragmented, distrustful, and dependent. And that is the point.

When strong families fall, the state and institutional centers of power are all that remain – and that is exactly the world the architects of DEI have been working toward from the beginning.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.