For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes, a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building momentum.
Success felt close. Back then it always did.
We’d written a pilot script that a veteran showrunner had agreed, in a very theoretical, very Hollywood sort of way, to “come on” to. That project had fizzled, so we were surprised when an executive emailed us out of the blue to meet. The showrunner explained he’d submitted us for an upcoming writer’s room he was going to run—the exec had loved our pilot and wanted to hire us.
This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.
But of course, by 2016, we were already too late.
The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”
We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.
They never did.
The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
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One of the unspoken reasons for the decline in marriage and births: young men of marriage age had their careers derailed in favor of diversity hires.
DEI is economic genocide.
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fifth-order: institutional trust gone. once you know positions are filled by demographics rather than competence, every credential becomes suspect (if not a priori worthless). is your doctor qualified or a diversity hire? your pilot? your engineer? you can’t prove any individual is incompetent, but you can’t trust any individual is competent either. medicine skepticism, academic failure, media skepticism, none of this emerged organically. it was manufactured by the DEI hire you can’t be sure is qualified to treat you.