I can remember when I first realized that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to “make it” – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing.

By that I don’t mean the normal vicissitudes of a volatile creative industry. I don’t mean actors “resting” or scripts getting stuck in “development hell.” I mean that all jobs, and job opportunities, were abruptly vanishing. Applications went nowhere, résumés were binned, hopeful meetings were suddenly canceled. And white men in Hollywood in their twenties or thirties, who had assumed they were on the upwards curve of a career, discovered that the optimistic curve had ended. It was more like a ski jump. They were plunging into the drifts of debt, failure and bankruptcy.

Since then I’ve often wondered where many of those guys went. And now I have more than an answer, thanks to a simmering, eloquent essay in Compact magazine which has gone extremely viral, with Vice President J.D. Vance wading in alongside many other powerful voices. The essay is entitled “The lost generation,” it begins in Hollywood but ranges way beyond, and it is by a youngish white “writer” called Jacob Savage.

I put the word writer in inverted commas not to impugn Mr. Savage – on the basis of this essay he is highly talented – but because he is, by his own admission, a failed writer. He is one of the writerly men who floated around Hollywood in the 2010s, only to find themselves rebuffed on all fronts, their scripts unread, their skills unwanted.

Why did Jacob Savage and his cohort lose out so badly that he ended up scalping tickets for a living? Because they were the wrong color, and the wrong gender, at the wrongest, maddest of times. Hollywood was in the first frenzy of #OscarsSoWhite (closely followed by #MeToo), and it was openly determined to atone for the pale male past: by hiring lots and lots of women, Asians, black people, Latinx, lesbians, lesbian Arabs – basically anything apart from younger white men.

Nor was this policy some hidden directive. It was overtly acknowledged, indeed celebrated. The powers that be actively wanted to be seen excluding white men, as proof of their woke, feminist, anti-racist credentials. As Savage notes, one of the great ironies is that much of this purging was driven by the old white men at the top of the movie biz – the boomers. To save themselves, they sacrificed their sons.

If this were merely a tale of Hollywood, we might dismiss it as lunacy in La-La Land. But of course it was not, and is not. As “The lost generation” articulates, Hollywood’s anti-white-male pathology briskly infested multiple areas of American life: journalism, academe, publishing. It then crossed borders and oceans, infecting the UK, Canada, Australia and beyond.

Here are a few snippets which give a flavor of Savage’s mind-boggling data: “In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 per cent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024 they accounted for just 11.9 percent… Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent).”

Even as he adduces these numbers, Savage includes some startling testimony. This is from the world of senior New York journalism: “‘For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,’ a hiring editor recalled. ‘[but] it was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.’”

 Since the early 2010s, being a white man in many of the best, most fulfilling professions across the Anglosphere has meant being automatically pushed to the back of the queue

There is more – much more. Savage notes how the payroll at one department at a Californian university fell to just 3 percent white males (not a typo). But you get the flavor, and the anger. And that anger is surely justified. Since the early 2010s, being a white man in many of the best, most fulfilling professions across the Anglosphere has meant being automatically pushed to the back of the queue. In some cases, there is no hope at all, even if you are plainly the most talented. You are the victim of profound and immoral discrimination which you did literally nothing to deserve.

As America, so Britain. I could cite multiple UK examples, from the Royal Air Force’s notorious exclusive recruitment of non-whites – eventually ruled illegal – to the ludicrous continuation of a literary prize for “women in fiction,” which, given the overwhelming domination of fiction by women, is rather like having a prize for getting black men into TV sofa adverts.

But perhaps an anecdote is more powerful. A businessman friend of mine once endured a board meeting at which company diversity was discussed. The head of diversity was asked: “How are we doing with gender equity at managerial level?” She replied: “Pretty well – we’re up to 70 percent women.” No irony was detected.

The case is made. But does it matter? Aren’t we simply righting major historical wrongs, even if some people are hurt along the way? I believe it matters a great deal, and has been seriously pernicious, even if the intentions were noble. Consider just three consequences.

The internet is full of women lamenting that they cannot meet successful, interesting men. Birth rates suggest they may have a point; polls show women have never been so uninterested in marriage. But one reason for all this may be that white men have been bullied and impoverished for 15 years or more – and so they now present, through no fault of their own, as meek, embittered or broke.

Meanwhile, governments are pushing the anti-male agenda, as in Britain where schools are instructed to “root out misogyny and sexism,” to counter the so-called Andrew Tate effect. Well, one way to reduce resentment among boys and young men might be to cease the blatant, systematic bias in favor of women.

Finally, there is the ultimate male role: soldiering. As Vladimir Putin menaces Europe, the airwaves are full of generals, politicians and female heads of intelligence agencies telling us we must be more warlike, boost defense spending and so on. In other words, the armed services are about to embark on a recruitment drive. Necessarily, that recruitment will be of young white men.

It will be interesting to see how this is pitched. Perhaps along the lines of: “Yes, we think you are intrinsically toxic, because of your gender. Also, your whiteness makes you morally suspect. In addition, your ambitions to be a lawyer, journalist or doctor are laughably misguided, because women and ethnic minorities must always come first. But, by the way, would you mind dying for the state that treats you like this?”

To use a Hollywood term: I don’t think that will make bank at the box office.