The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2336 - How White Men Became The Targets Of America’s Most Powerful Institutions
17 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What does the Compact Magazine report reveal about white men in the job market?
A huge piece in Compact Magazine exposes how white men were discriminated against in the job market from 2014 on, the wages of DEI, plus healthcare imbroglios for Republicans, and of course, a profile of Susie Wiles at Vanity Fair that's creating waves on the Hill First. The Daily Wire Plus Christmas sale, it's happening right this very instant. New memberships are 40% off.
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The Christmas sale is live right now. 40% off new memberships, 50% off gift memberships. Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and join today. So one of the big questions that has plagued American politics for the last decade and a half is what the hell is going on? And in order to understand what the hell is going on, I think we need to understand the transformation that happened around the year
Between 2012 and 2014, something radically changed in American politics. Now, some of that is the rise of social media. Obviously, this is something that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU has discussed ad nauseum. It's the idea that because we're all addicted to our phones, because we are able to find our own little clicks of people on the Internet, and then...
Zoom around headlines, both true and untrue. This means that we have sort of poisoned our own brains. And there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I've talked at length about how algorithms are feeding you information that may not be true and generally is going to confirm your preexisting biases. But there's something else that happened too. And that's a real world thing.
That real world thing is the rise of DEI. So in 2012, which again, I still consider 2012 to be the most important election of my lifetime. The one that everybody forgets. That's the one that I think was really important. Why? Well, because in 2008, Barack Obama, America's first black president, was elected on the platform of unifying Americans around race.
And racial optimism in the country was at an all-time high by the polling data. And then in 2012, Barack Obama, who had been a very left-wing president, a very progressive president. Of course, he had pushed Obamacare through with the skin of his teeth, and he was unpopular.
And so he decided that the best way to win reelection was not to broadcast a unifying message, but to divide Americans by race, and then to cobble together enough racial coalitions in order to win a victory. And he defeated Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast candidate in the history of American politics, in what was a fairly solid victory.
And that seemed to change everything because by 2014, race relations in the United States were on the decline. And they were on the decline because Barack Obama, who made a lot of promises to a lot of people, needed to fulfill those promises, particularly on issues of race. The claim that Barack Obama made with regard to, for example, Trayvon Martin, is that Trayvon could have been his son.
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Chapter 2: How has DEI impacted hiring practices since 2014?
And yet the Atlantic succeeded in hiring fewer and fewer of these white males. Since 2020, nearly two thirds of the Atlantic's hires have been women along with nearly 50% people of color. So what you see is a deliberate attempt to force white millennials out This is also true with regard to the universities, not just in legacy media. All right, coming up more on America's DEI episode.
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Chapter 3: What significant changes occurred in race relations during Obama's presidency?
See site for details Tecovas. Point your toes west. There is a push to quote unquote diversify all of the institutions of higher education. As Savage points out, white men may still be 55% of Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, down from 63% a decade ago, but this is a legacy of boomer and Gen X employment patterns.
For tenure track positions, the pipeline for future faculty, white men have gone from 49% in 2014 to 27% in 2024, and in the humanities, from 39% to 21%. The white men who do get hired are often older and more established or foreign. Meanwhile, Yale's history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in hiring.
Since 2018, Yale has hired four older white men as full professors, but among the 16 tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a white man. The remedial action takes many forms. Berkeley commissioned regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would produce the fewest number of white male job offers.
At Dartmouth, the Mellon to Postdoc program provided 10 tenure track positions for new hires with a demonstrated commitment to addressing racial underrepresentation in their disciplines, and none were white men. So again, this has become de rigueur across the university system. At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7% of new tenure track faculty. In 2023, they were 21.5%.
This is true in the preserve of television as well. A whistleblower sent Jacob Savage a document from early 2017, an internal needs sheet compiled by a major talent agency that shows how steep the headwinds were for white males across the grid, which tracks staffing needs for TV writers' rooms. The same shorthand appears dozens of times. Diverse, female, women and diverse only.
These mandates came from some of the most powerful names in television. Noah Howley, Dean Devlin, Ryan Murphy. This was systematic discrimination documented in writing, implemented without consequence. It's striking how casual it all was. For example, Chicago Fire, the upper level can be anyone, but we need diverse staff writers.
As in other industries, the upper level positions were filled by people with gigantic resumes, very often of whom they were older white males. But the entry level jobs, the way that people actually got ahead, there was a glass ceiling put in place. Every fellowship grant and hiring incentive was suddenly skewed toward changing who got in the door.
So you're looking at the media, you're looking at institutions of higher education, you're looking at Hollywood and everywhere else. So as Jacob Savage puts it, 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. Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines. Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2013 alone, the same as the total number of white male millennials who have won since.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the decline of white men in elite institutions?
That doesn't mean that they are right to do so. It does mean, however, that the only way to destroy all of this, this new identitarian moment we are living in, an identitarianism of the left that adheres to the idea that group identity is really, really good, except if you're talking about white Christian men,
And an identitarian right that is formed in counter-response that says, fine, you want to play that game? We'll play that game too. The only way out of that is to go back to a system that we were all taught as kids and that was natural to us. Colorblind meritocracy. Colorblind meritocracy is good. It is right. Why?
Because meritocracy is the only system of human relations ever devised that has positive externalities. Meaning that when the most meritorious people, the people who are best at the job, get jobs, you get greater efficiency. You get better job performance. You get better innovation, better products. People are able to expend their best abilities to the benefit of everyone else.
Every other system, Every other anti-meritocratic system has negative externalities. It helps the people who are inside the system and hurts the people who are outside the system. Meritocracy benefits everyone because even if you didn't get the job, let's say you lost the job to a person who is better qualified than you, better at the job than you,
Well, number one, that means that the person who filled the job is going to perform the job better than you would have. And so that company will do better. They will perform better. The prices will be better. The products will be better. And second, you will end up in a job where you are most meritorious. If you want a happier human society, meritocracy is the way.
And yet we were told that meritocracy is inherently bad. Why? Because people looked at the outcome numbers and they judged for themselves that if outcomes were not equal, therefore the system was unequal and bad. If you don't use a meritocracy, then you have to prejudge.
Either you're going to judge a system based on the effects of the system, or you're going to prejudge a system based on your perception of fairness between groups. Cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell would put it. And there is nothing just about the idea that a person should be hampered in their capacity to succeed because of their immutable characteristics. That is just wrong.
That's why this article is really important. It explains an awful lot about our current political moment. And it does say that we need to end grievance-based politics. Grievance-based politics need to end. Yes, white male American millennials, Christians, have reason for grievance. The solution to that grievance is meritocracy. It is not, in fact, reverse grievance.
Because otherwise, we're just going to ping pong between grievances. It's just a question of who grabs the government gun and crams down their preferred solution today. That is not what America was built on. It is not what is going to cause America to succeed.
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Chapter 5: How do media and academia reflect shifts in diversity and inclusion?
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Okay, meanwhile, the other big controversy of the day is an interview series that Susie Wiles, the president's chief of staff, did with Vanity Fair. So I just have a question. Number one, why are you doing big interviews with Vanity Fair?
It seems to me that at this point, if you're a member of the Trump administration, you should well know at this point that Vanity Fair is probably going to take the spiciest things that you say about your colleagues and put them in Brins. I mean, Vanity Fair was apparently taping the interviews. And so Susie Wiles said some pretty spicy things about the administration.
So there are kind of two issues. One is why Susie Wiles would do that. That's less interesting to me, frankly, than what Susie Wiles actually said. Because whenever you get a window... into a room that is typically closed. It's interesting to see what the people inside the room are saying. Why Susie Wiles would do that? I mean, I assume that the president knew about it.
I assume that she wasn't freelancing it. I assume that there is some rationale for why she wanted to go talk to the people at Vanity Fair, presumably because she figured, okay, if they write a hit piece about the administration, then the administration will survive it. The administration always survives hit pieces. And maybe, just maybe, Vanity Fair will actually do some sort of decent coverage.
Maybe that was the logic. Maybe on a personal political level, Susie Wiles is looking beyond this term and she's figuring, OK, maybe I'm not inside the J.D. Vance team. I'm sort of auditioning for another role. It's unclear what is driving Susie Wiles to do that interview. What's much more interesting to me is what Susie Wiles actually said.
So, first of all, we should point out that she appears to be in no danger of losing her job over this. According to the New York Post, President Trump defended White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. So apparently in this interview, she said that Trump has an alcoholic's personality. Meaning that he is, you know, hyperactive and obsessive.
And Trump said, no, she meant that I'm, you see, I don't drink alcohol. Everybody knows that. I've often said that if I did, I'd have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I've said that many times about myself. I do. It's a very possessive personality. I said that many times about myself. I'm fortunate I'm not a drinker.
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