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Jacob Savage’s recent essay in Compact, titled “The Lost Generation,” pulled back the curtain on how diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have reshaped hiring in elite institutions and industries over the last decade. His piece stitches personal experience to industry statistics and paints a picture of careers closed off to a large cohort of talented applicants.
Savage recounts being passed over in Hollywood and points to stark industry data showing dramatic demographic shifts among writers and newsroom staffs. The numbers he cites — once-dominant groups shrinking sharply in certain roles while identity-based hiring swelled — are hard to dismiss and demand an explanation beyond simple progress narratives.
He extends the analysis beyond entertainment, noting similar trends at major publications and elite universities where the composition of editorial staffs and tenure-track hires changed substantially between the early 2010s and the mid-2020s. Those institutional shifts, Savage argues, were not accidental; they were the product of an ideological project that put category above competence.
On Glenn Beck’s program, Savage and Beck expanded the discussion into the social and psychological fallout: young people who play by the rules and still find doors shut begin to doubt the promise of meritocracy. That erosion of trust in institutions isn’t abstract — it’s corrosive to civic energy, workplace morale, and the sense that effort will be rewarded.
Conservatives should not celebrate hardship, but we must name its causes. When hiring decisions are governed more by identity checklists than by demonstrable ability, businesses lose confidence in their talent pipelines and workers lose faith in the compact between labor and reward. This is not a culture of inclusion so much as a system that redistributes opportunity by ideology instead of by achievement.
The economic consequences are predictable: inefficiency, resentment, and brain drain as capable people exit fields that no longer reward excellence. Policy makers and business leaders who care about productivity and social cohesion ought to be alarmed that merit-based standards have been sidelined by bureaucratic DEI incentives that prioritize optics over outcomes.
Fixing this doesn’t require cultural capitulation but rather a recommitment to fairness defined by performance, not by identity. Transparency in hiring, a renewed emphasis on measurable competence, and the dismantling of perverse incentives that reward demographic checkboxes over results would restore trust and revive institutions.
If the nation values its institutions, it must insist they reward merit again. Restoring that principle is not about shutting people out—it’s about opening doors to the best-qualified candidates, rebuilding confidence in public and private institutions, and ensuring the social contract between effort and reward actually holds.
