Transcript

White Men Have Been Shunned. Our Lives Are Worse Because Of It.

From Matt Walsh · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 21 min · 3,662 words · 30 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "White Men Have Been Shunned. Our Lives Are Worse Because Of It.", an episode of Matt Walsh published December 18, 2025 (21 min, about 3,662 words). It mentions 24 people, works and ideas, including Compact Magazine, Permission piece, Jacob Savage, Disney Writing Program, SAT.

What this episode is about

The article discusses the growing perception that discrimination against white men in institutions like media and Hollywood has contributed to societal decline. It highlights a well-received essay by Jacob Savage in Compact Magazine, which provides research and statistics showing a significant decrease in the representation of white men in writing roles, attributing this shift to a decline in the quality of entertainment produced.

Key takeaways

  • Old white male privilege is now a 'lost generation' story; progress or paradox?
  • Long-form journalism lives: Savage's article stretches attention spans despite a sound-byte culture.
  • From 48% to 11.9%: White men in TV writing hit the plot twist they didn't expect.
  • Emmy nominations under 40: Lack of white male directors feels like the diversity irony it critiques.
  • Disney fellows: No white males, proving skill can't escape ethnicity's Hollywood spotlight.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Disney Writing Program, Chicago Fire, Compact Magazine, Jacob Savage
  2. – 10:00: Compact Magazine, Permission piece, Jacob Savage
  3. – 15:00: Philadelphia Plan
  4. – 20:00: ExpressVPN, BuzzFeed, The Verge, Wesley Yang
  5. – 21:26: Limited hangout, Permission piece

Notable quotes from "White Men Have Been Shunned. Our Lives Are Worse Because Of It."

  • Publication to break containment. But that's exactly what happened with a new article in something called Compact Magazine titled The Lost Generation.
    about Compact Magazine · at
  • Savage also points to the Disney writing program, which is basically a boot camp that leads in most cases directly to full-time staff writing jobs on major shows. Over the past decade, Savage.
    about Disney Writing Program · at
  • Commentators like Oruron McIntyre who have called Jacob Savage's article a permission piece. It's a way to finally admit something that the left had previously described as a…
    about Permission piece · at
  • They were doing it. And long before that, in the 1960s, there was the Philadelphia plan where federal contractors were required to start hiring so-called minority workers in…
    about Philadelphia Plan · at
  • Cases can be some of the most vindictive people in the country. Back in 2015, as the author Wesley Yang pointed out, BuzzFeed published one of their insufferable listicles that…
    about Wesley Yang · at
  • That's why I started using ExpressVPN.
    about ExpressVPN · at
  • Call the article whatever you want, a permission piece, a limited hangout whatever but it's not going to be the way to course correct the self-inflicted collapse of our country. The way to fix.
    about Limited hangout · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Jacob Savage — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    Now, it was written by Jacob Savage. is a white man who aspired to be a big player in the entertainment industry before he had to settle for a much less glamorous career scalping tickets from.
  • Wesley Yang — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Dan Erickson — Person · 1 mention
  • Oren McIntyre — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

Products & tech

  • SAT — Product · 2 mentions
  • Severance — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Also notes that Dan Ericson, the white guy who created the Apple TV show Severance, which is the best show on TV today, I think by a mile and one of the best of this century…
  • Chicago Fire — Product · 1 mention · first at
    And in some cases, that discrimination was put in writing. One higher up at a talent agency wrote quote Chicago Fire, the UL upper level can be anyone, but we need diverse SWS staff writers.

Concepts & topics

Sponsors

Full transcript with timestamps

But the truth, which everybody intuitively knows, is that things were a lot better back when white men were not being discriminated against by every institution in the country, but instead were running most of them. We don't usually come across long- form articles that resonate with millions of people these days, mainly because nobody knows how to read anymore. Uh, for as long as everyone's owned a cell phone, pretty much every form of media has been locked in an arms race to make content shorter, more attentiongrabbing, more conspiratorial. So, it takes a lot for a 10,000word essay in a tiny little known publication to break containment. But that's exactly what happened with a new article in something called Compact Magazine titled The Lost Generation.

Now, it was written by Jacob Savage. is a white man who aspired to be a big player in the entertainment industry before he had to settle for a much less glamorous career scalping tickets from his bedroom. Now, it's not hard to see why Savage's article has been so wellreceived. It's a wellressearched, well-written explanation of how major institutions in this country, particularly the media and Hollywood, have systematically discriminated against white men over the past decade. Now, it's definitely not a perfect article for reasons that we'll get into.

and it reaches a conclusion that is obviously wrong and frankly kind of embarrassing. But at the same time, if you've been looking for reasons why every aspect of society seems to be falling apart, and we've been uh, you know, talking about that on the show for the past few weeks, this piece in Copak magazine is a very good jumping off point. Now, in particular, the article includes the following statistics on writing jobs in the entertainment industry, which help explain why every streaming show and movie, virtually without exception, is now terrible.

Quote, "In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48% of lower level TV writers. By 2024, they accounted for just 11.9%. Women of color made up uh 34.6%. White men directed 69% of TV episodes in 2014 and just 34% by 2021. But that remaining third went overwhelmingly to established names, leaving little space for younger white men. Since 2021, 11 directors under 40 have been nominated for Emmes Emmys. None of them have been white men. Now, the article goes on to describe a white man who wrote a screenplay that made it on Hollywood's blacklist, which is a prestigious list of unproduced screenplays as determined by Hollywood executives. But despite that achievement, he couldn't land a full-time staff job from any showrunner.

At one point, he was told to his face by a showrunner, a Gen X white guy. We're told that they already had too many white people on staff. And the author also notes that Dan Ericson, the white guy who created the Apple TV show Severance, which is the best show on TV today, I think by a mile and one of the best of this century, wasn't able to land a job in a TV writer room until his own show began production. And in some cases, that discrimination was put in writing. One higher up at a talent agency wrote quote Chicago Fire, the UL upper level uh can be anyone, but we need diverse SWS staff writers.

Savage also points to the Disney writing program, which is basically a boot camp that leads in most cases directly to full-time staff writing jobs on major shows. Over the past decade, Savage notes the writing program has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships, none of which have been given to white men. None of them. Now, here's the web page for the current crop of fellows in the Disney writing program. And see what you notice when you look at this. There's only one person who could plausibly be described as a white male in the entire cohort.

And when you look at that guy's bio, he informs you that he's a Tahano comedy writer who's proud of his queer crime uh queer crime comedy pilots. And and that's the other thing when we talk about the white males who are uh allowed to get jobs in this business, if you were to narrow it down even further, which this piece doesn't do, to straight white males, um then the situation becomes even more dire. And every single one of the bios on this web page begins with a statement about the person's ethnic origin. So NA is a first generation Iranian-American drama writer. Uh Alli is a Lebanese American writer from Detroit, Michigan. Monib is a first generation Afghan-American writer. Jason is a first generation Korean-American uh drama writer. Uh Ana is a first generation Indian-American dramdy writer. Fatima is a Sudanese American traumdy writer based in Los Angeles and so on. It was pretty obvious

that in the eyes of Disney and the rest of Hollywood, it doesn't actually matter if you're a good writer. Your most important attribute is your ethnicity. And if you look even vaguely white, then you better be writing queer comedies about Tahhano heritage because otherwise you're definitely out of luck. Now, I'm not going to summarize all of Savage's findings, but this this should give you some idea. He goes on to describe uh in much the same way how other fields from academia to the corporate press practice the same kind of anti-white discrimination particularly for entry-level jobs. The statistics from the university system in California in particular are actually so over the top that they're hard to believe. UC Irvine hired 64 tenure track assistant professors in liberal arts since 2020 and only three of them were white men.

And for its part, UC Santa Cruz only hired two white men out of 59 assistant professors in the humanities in that same time period. Savage's thesis is that starting around 2014, in response to political and social pressures, older and more established white men, the decision makers and hiring managers, began openly discriminating against younger white applicants who were starting their careers. And rather than stand on principle, Savage writes, the boomers effectively sabotaged younger generations. 2014, he writes, was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

And then we get this conclusion, which is where things go off the rails a bit. Quote, I'm not angry at the women and people of color who made it made it instead of me. People have the right, in most cases, the responsibility to take the opportunities that are offered them or even or even at the older white guys who ensured that I didn't. Mostly I'm annoyed at myself because instead of settling down, proposing to my then girlfriend, now wife, and earning a steady income that might support a family, I spent a decade insisting the world treat me fairly when the world was loudly telling me it had no intention of doing so.

So, he's not angry about the people who discriminated against him on the basis of his skin color. Uh, he's angry at himself. He's certainly not angry at the unqualified people, the quote unquote people of color, uh, who got the jobs that he should have gotten by all rights. He's angry at himself. And this was the moment in reading this article that I decided to look into Compact Magazine a little more closely. And in doing so, I found the following tidbit of information, which is interesting per Vanity Fair. quote, "At a recent get together, lefty mags were royal to learn that George Soros's foundations are supporting Compact, a publication that's flirted with authoritarianism. It was weird to me the whole effing time," says one attendee.

Now, the article goes on to note that sources, Open Society Foundations, have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to compact. And I have no idea why that donation was made or what it may have purchased. the leftist at Vanity Fair, they weren't sure either. But I can say that having read this article myself, uh, I find myself agreeing with commentators like Oruron McIntyre who have called Jacob Savage's article a permission piece. It's a way to finally admit something that the left had previously described as a conspiracy, except the admission is done in a way that lessens the impact and frames the narrative in a way that is beneficial to the left. And meanwhile, all the leftist journalists can act shocked by the findings, including the ones that are sharing this piece on X right now, shocked and appalled by it, even though everybody on the right has known all of this for years and been saying it and been

dismissed. Now, think of the mainstream articles that finally acknowledged COVID came from a lab in China, or the articles that acknowledged that the CO shot can cause serious heart problems. These were all permission pieces. audiences on the left were finally told a semblance of the truth, but there's never any accountability for the liars, nor is they there a full explanation of what actually happened, nor is there an apology. Basically, you get a permission piece when the left's hand is forced. They can't deny reality anymore because the truth has become too obvious.

Uh, and we've been seeing some of this, by the way, on the trans issue, too, with certain articles and mainstream publications, admitting that, well, maybe we shouldn't be doing this to kids. Maybe it's a bad idea to castrate kids and all this sort of thing and saying it like they're the first people to ever say it. So, that's how this goes. Now, in the case of the piece in Compact Magazine, there are a few elements um of obvious spin. The first is the article's implication that systematic anti-white discrimination only really took hold in 2014. And in fact, Savage even writes that if you were born in 1974 or earlier, then you were already established and didn't hit the wall of anti-white discrimination.

But that is a claim that makes the generational divide seem much starker than it really is. Because in reality, the left's efforts to systematically discriminate against white people and white males in particular, that's been in place for many decades. I mean, this has been going on for a very long time. Back in 2003, there was a major Supreme Court case about the University of Michigan's application process, which was similar to the process used by many other schools. If you were black, Hispanic, or Native American, then your application automatically received 20 points. And by contrast, if you earned a perfect SAT score, something only a few hundred students do every year out of millions of test takers, then you only got 12 points. And an outstanding personal essay would only get you three points. In other words, a white student from a middle- class background with a perfect SAT score and a flawless essay

received fewer points than a black applicant would receive simply for being black. And even after the Supreme Court struck down this kind of quota system, it persisted. As we all know, the universities just stopped admitting that they were doing it. And long before that, in the 1960s, there was uh the Philadelphia plan where federal contractors were required to start hiring so-called minority workers in the trades, a practice that continues today with a fairly explicit quota system for tens of thousands of white construction workers. Beginning in the 1970s, it became uh more difficult to get an apprenticeship, not because they weren't skilled, not because they didn't have potential, but because of the color of their skin. So, we could talk about many more examples because there are an infinite number, but put simply, the idea that DEI and anti-white racism only became a systemic barrier to white

education and employment in 2014, is not remotely true. The Savage is probably correct to point out that in the industries he's talking about, mainly media and entertainment, things accelerated in 2014. But plenty of people in other industries hit this wall well before then. Now, the other element of the story that's being deemphasized here is that when white men are passed over for jobs because of their skin color, there are plenty of downstream consequences. You know, it's not simply the fact that white men have to settle for worse salaries and less fulfilling careers. They're also less likely to ever own a home or to get married, start a family, have kids. They're more likely to become depressed and turn to drugs, which explains why overdose rates are so high.

And through it all, as fertility rates plummet and men are forced to work jobs that they're overqualified for, men realize exactly what's happening to them. It's not some great mystery. And that leads to justifiable rage as millions of working age men come to realize that their lives have been sacrificed for a leftist experiment. Now, the biggest and most important downstream consequence of this open discrimination against white men is that everything in society gets worse as a result. That is the second order effect that the compact piece doesn't really get into. It's the third rail, the part you're not supposed to talk about. But the truth, which everybody intuitively knows, is that things were a lot better back when white men were not being discriminated against by every institution in the country, but instead were running most of them. And the fact of the matter is that a hugely disproportionate number of our greatest

leaders innovators pioneers explorers philosophers and so on have been white men. I mean, without white men, we wouldn't have airplanes or spaceships or trains or phones or light bulbs or computers or the internet or batteries or x-ray machines or jet engines or rockets or a thousand other things that our society depends on to exist and to flourish. We never would have had a railway system or the printing press. we wouldn't have this country which was founded by white men and led by white men and expanded from coast to coast and settled and built up mostly by white men.

Now, these are all facts, historical realities that cannot be denied by reasonable people. It's just true. And while black women are encouraged to be proud of the historical achievements of black women, whatever those might be, and Asians to be proud of Asian achievements and Native Americans of Native American achievements and so on, white men are the one group on the in the entire face of the planet who've been forbidden to even acknowledge what other white men have accomplished, much less to express any pride in it, god forbid.

Instead, our society set out on a campaign to punish and exclude and alienate this very group. That is their reward for having carried the weight of Western civilization on their shoulders. But white men, as it turns out, you know, they're not just good at building and flying spaceships. They're also good at writing television shows and covering the news and teaching students at the university level and so on. In fact, in the aggregate, based on every existing piece of available evidence, white men are better at all of these tasks than the allegedly underprivileged communities that are replacing them. And if that sounds harsh, I really don't care. It happens to just be true.

And the underrepresented minorities so-called that I'm talking about in many cases can be some of the most vindictive people in the country. Back in 2015, as the author Wesley Yang pointed out, BuzzFeed published one of their insufferable listicles uh that were very popular back in those days. This one was titled 23 writers with messages for straight white male publishing. And we'll put up some of the um messages on the on the screen right now so you can see them. So you have girl bosses of various ethnicities saying things like sit down and let us abolish you and she's coming for you with the middle finger.

These are explicitly hateful, deranged messages directed at white men and they were published enthusiastically by a major news outlet. Like the kind of thing you would never see directed at any other race or group ever. And this kind of race hate was commonplace in 2015. And this is in publishing, which yet again, what have white men done in publishing. What sin have they committed? Well, I don't know. I mean, only like most of the greatest authors in the history of Western civilization have been white men. Not all of them, but most of them.

Okay? If you if you were make a list of the top 500, I think like 480 of them at least would be white men. So that's the sin that white men committed in publishing was just being like really really good at it and write and being great brilliant writers. And so for for that for that trouble, not only are they cut out, but they get a middle finger on the way out the door. You know that creepy feeling you get sometimes like you're being watched while browsing online? Well, here's the thing. You actually are. Every time you hop on the internet, your service provider can see literally everything you do. And get this, in the US, they can legally sell your entire browsing history. Yeah, even that incognito browsing isn't so private after all. Who would have thought?

That's why I started using ExpressVPN. this brilliant app that encrypts everything I do online and routes it through secure servers. Since I started using it, my internet provider can't see any of my browsing history, which means they've got nothing to sell because they've got nothing on me. The thing is, if you go to places where free speech doesn't exist anymore, places like North Korea or Cuba or the UK, well, you can expect to be monitored. That's unfortunately the way it is in all those countries. But don't assume that it's better here. And that is why you need ExpressVPN. But here's what I really love about ExpressVPN. It helps hide my IP address so those annoying data brokers can't build a profile about me to sell to advertisers. Plus, it's incredibly userfriendly. You don't have to be a tech wizard to use it. They've made it so simple that even your kids can figure it out. All you got to do is

tap one button to get protected. They've got apps for all your devices, and it's rated number one by CNET, The Verge, and other major tech reviewers. Find out how you can get up to four extra months by scanning the QR code on screen. Click the link in the description box below or by going to expressvpn.com/mattwalshow. And guess what? The girl bosses were right. I mean, they did abolish white men in the entertainment industry. The writers are mostly women and minorities now. And almost all their shows are garbage.

I mean, can you give me an example of a show, and maybe you can. I'm just throwing this out there. Can you give me an example of a show that is where where the writer room is predominantly consists of minorities and women and the show is good. Can you give one example of that? I think you probably can't. I think there's not one example of that. I think that this cohort has not managed to make one good show ever. is what it is. That's just the facts of the matter. I mean, it's almost as if they're intentionally bad.

You know, television peaked before all these people took over. And the only conclusion you can draw realistically is that girl bosses, I don't know, shouldn't be allowed to write shows. They're not good at it. Bring back the white men. I mean, they they knew how to do this. They made good shows. And if that ever happens, it will only happen if unlike this compact art article, we're honest about what white men have achieved in the past. You know, the left can only ever tear down what has been built. And white men are the primary builders of Western civilization. Make a list of the 1,000 greatest and most influential figures of the past two millennia in any field, not just publishing, any field.

And I don't know, 975 of them will be white men, if not more. It is suicidal to target this group of all groups for ostraciz ostracization and alienation. I mean, it's suicidal, but that of course is the point. You know, the compact piece is the tell that lets you know what's going on here. You're finally being allowed to say out loud that white men have been discriminated against for many years, but you're not allowed to talk about the extent of the discrimination. You're not allowed to talk about the full effects of it. And in polite company, you're still expected to elevate mediocrity in the name of racial justice.

I mean, call the article whatever you want, a permission piece, a limited hangout whatever but it's not going to be the way to course correct the self-inflicted collapse of our country. The way to fix it, or to have any hope of fixing it, is to admit that white men aren't simply victims. They were also key to building Western civilization. And by the same token, they'll be key to saving it. Thanks for checking out this video. If you'd like to listen to my full podcast on the go, you can check out the Matt Wall Show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Questions about this episode

What is "White Men Have Been Shunned. Our Lives Are Worse Because Of It." about?

The article discusses the growing perception that discrimination against white men in institutions like media and Hollywood has contributed to societal decline. It highlights a well-received essay by Jacob Savage in Compact Magazine, which provides research and statistics showing a significant decrease in the representation of white men in writing roles, attributing this shift to a decline in…

What is mentioned in this Matt Walsh episode?

24 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Compact Magazine, Permission piece, Jacob Savage, Disney Writing Program, SAT, The Lost Generation. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "White Men Have Been Shunned. Our Lives Are Worse Because Of It."?

The episode runs 21 min; the transcript is about 3,662 words in 30 timestamped sections.

More from Matt Walsh

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated December 19, 2025.