Discrimination Against White Men EXPOSED, DEI Narrative COLLAPSES ft. Amber Duke
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tate Brown @realTateBrown (everywhere) Guest: Amber Duke @ambermarieduke (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
You've probably seen a lot of chatter about DEI on the timeline, especially, and this is really particularly strange as you're seeing condemnation of it from people who previously would lambast you for complaining about it.
You know, I think what was happening here, I don't know if you've had the chance to read the piece yet.
It was probably one of the biggest pieces of all time.
It had like 6 million views on just one tweet regarding it.
Absolutely massive piece.
It was this gentleman, Jacob Savage, who he was scalping tickets in Los Angeles.
And he had done this entire write-up doing a deep dive on some of the data regarding these DEI practices in Hollywood and how they've had this sort of oppressive effect on white men specifically.
I won't read through the entire article.
I do recommend it's a good piece.
He wrote here, this is a specific instance of some data that he presented.
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%.
Massive drop.
Keep in mind, white men still make up about 35% of the country, 30%, 35% of the country.
The Atlantic's editorial staff went from 53% male and 89% white to in 2013 to 36% male and 66% white.
White men fell from 39% of tenure track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
So this is a great piece.
I mean, it went everywhere.
I mean, JD Vance was talking about it.
This was JD Vance's take on it.
A lot of people think DEI is a lame diversity seminars or racial slogans at NFL games.
In reality, it was a deliberate program of discrimination, primarily against white men.
This is an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.
And Coulter pointed out this data point, obviously, that I just read, that 14.6% of tenure track assistant professors hired at Yale had been white American men.
And the humanities, the number was just six out of 76.
Sorry, the other way around, but it was 6.7.
That would have caused a big issue.
7.9%.
Horrific, horrific stuff.
I mean, there's no other calculation to make than just like full-blown hatred for white men.
This poster here, Lindy Capital, he posted some graphs showing the dramatic drops among white men in a lot of these institutions.
And he outlines, obviously, I'm running a little bit out of time here, but he outlines, obviously, a lot of the incentive structures that these companies have had to basically root out white men and favor women and non-whites.
And if they reached their goal, they received an interest rate discount on their debt by banks.
So the incentive structures were there.
This wasn't just like a conscious, like philosophical movement.
There was legitimate financial interests at play in conducting this rooting out.
Matt Walsh here, he wrote, the campaign of discrimination and exclusion against white men is insane, not just because it's racist and bigoted, which it is, but also because no demographic has contributed as much to Western civilization as white men.
Make a list of a thousand greatest, most important, most influential figures in the history of our civilization.
And like 975 of them will be white men.
We haven't just been discriminated against any other group, but specifically the group that more than any other built all of this.
And this is the thanks they get.
This is a very, very salient point.
We're being punished for success, suffering for success, if you will.
So with that, I will bring in Amber and we're going to see what she has to say.
All righty.
Well, how are you doing today?
Can you give the people a quick intro who you are and what you do?
I wanted to bring you on to discuss, obviously, this piece that everyone is talking about.
I mean, from JD Vance to Milo to Ann Coulter, everyone is jumping on this piece and they're really scandalized by the findings.
Obviously, the author Jacob Savage sort of combed through all of this data regarding the DEI practices, specifically in Hollywood, the implications it's had on the market at large, but also like personal anecdotes from him and his friends on how this is impacting them.
I wanted to get your reaction to that piece, what your takeaway was, and broadly, what you think this means for the movement or really America as a whole, seeing these numbers laid out like that.
I think the numbers is really what was so shocking.
Everyone saw DEI happening in real time.
They saw this really concerted push from left-wing activists to not just have equal representation, but actually overrepresentation by minority groups in various industries, the media, Hollywood, academia.
He focuses on those three mostly in the piece.
But I don't think anyone realized just how bad it really was.
And particularly for young men, people keep asking, why are young men turning right wing?
Why are they seemingly open to radicalization and extremism?
Well, maybe it's because you don't let them have jobs.
And just to walk through some of these numbers, because they really are so stunning in the media, he talks about the Atlantic, which is the sort of, you know, left-wing, long-form profile type outlet.
Since 2020, nearly two-thirds of the hires have been women, along with nearly 50% of people of color.
And now, just as a reminder, white men make up about 30 to 35% of the population, white people overall, about 65 to 70%.
In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69% people of color.
So if you're a boomer-white guy, right?
This is the point the piece makes.
You're kind of locked in.
You're grandfathered in pre-DEI.
You're probably not going to get outright fired.
Maybe your advancement will be stunted a little bit in whatever industry you're in.
But if you're a young Gen X to a Zoomer, you are completely being overlooked for these positions.
And it's clearly not the case, which was this is the common left-wing argument about DEI, Tate, is that the problem was not that they didn't want meritocracy.
It's that people who were meritorious, but were people of color were being overlooked simply because of their race or gender.
The fact that they are now over hiring at such a massive, to such a massive extent clearly demonstrates that that's not true.
I mean, are we really supposed to believe that this 69% of people of color, despite being such a minuscule part of the population, are better qualified for those roles than the 35% of white men or the 65% of white people in America?
I mean, there's so much to get into in this piece because I think there's also some valid criticism coming from people on the right of some aspects of the piece.
But I think overall, again, it has this effect where sort of like the Atlantic has done for years with their long-form concept.
I think Compact is sort of supplanting them in many ways because they're putting this on people's kitchen tables.
They're laying out the data and people are saying, wow, you know, I've heard people complaining about this, but I didn't realize how bad things were.
And I think that point that you made is very, very salient, which is for kind of layman's terms, you're seeing ladder pulling from a lot of these older guys where, like you said, a lot of these boomers were sort of grandfathered into this.
They knew that they had job security, but they were pulling the ladder up from people that came from the same background as they were because for a variety of reasons, the incentive structures all bended towards hiring minorities, hiring women, various other groups that were not like straight white men.
And so it's, that's, I think, the really sinister part of all of this is that you're seeing these, again, these straight white guys, these, you know, conventional hires that were at the, in the boomer generation, really pulling the ladder up behind them.
And this is something that was really endemic to the DEI takeover.
For example, in academia, you would see that these white male university presidents were so terrified of having protests on campus, of having students camp out in the president's office that they would just acquiesce to whatever demands that they had.
I mean, I remember at Georgetown, when it was discovered that the university had sold slaves at one point in its history in order to save the university from bankruptcy, one of the responses from student activist groups, one of the demands that they made was that the university needed to make sure that new professors who were hired were like 50% people of color or something in that vein.
And I went and looked at the actual racial breakdown, the racial demographics of professors at Georgetown at that time.
And it turned out that people of color were actually already overrepresented as a portion of the population in the Georgetown professor roles.
So they were actually asking to make an overrepresentation problem worse in response to this, you know, hundreds of years old controversy.
And the people at the top, you know, regardless of whether it was white men or otherwise, were so terrified of these people.
They didn't want bad PR.
They didn't want social media campaigns.
They didn't want to have to deal with the annoyance of having student protesters running around campus all day.
So they just completely abdicated leadership and responsibility for their institutions.
I mean, because that seemed to be the main sort of, I don't know if gripe, because I think everyone is acknowledging this is a good piece and this was good for the country at large.
But one thing people pointed out is that pretty much all of the blame was laid at the feet of sort of boomer white men.
And it wasn't addressed enough was the action and the activism of young women and ethnic minorities, because in a lot of ways, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say, I'm sure some of them were, but I don't think it's fair to say that all these boomers were just complete ideologues that wanted to ensure that young white guys were completely locked out of the system.
I think a lot of them were, like you alluded to, were reacting out of fear.
They were reacting out of like terror.
And there was a lot of cowardice to not do the right thing because they were feeling threatened.
They felt like their position of standing might be threatened if they didn't acquiesce to this activist insurgency that was occurring at the bottom levels.
And so in a lot of ways, again, a lot of the blame is laid at their feet because ultimately they were the ones that refused to stand up for what was right.
They displayed immense cowardice, but a lot of them were just reacting to this activist base that I think a lot of people are a little too afraid to critique in addition to the larger issue.
This was not an ideological move by the people at the top.
This was a move of cowardice.
And it definitely speaks to, I think, the just immense abdication of responsibility.
As I said, that they were willing to completely change institutional cultures for the sake of basically new hires.
And we see this in media outlets too.
I wrote about this in my book.
It's called The Snowflakes Revolt.
I talk about a lot of these issues in the media in terms of the shift towards really basically trying to overempathize with the feelings of young staffers who are making ridiculous demands of their leaders.
And we would see in these media outlets that a lot of the people who were complaining about editorial decisions that were supposedly racist or not sympathetic enough to LGBT rights, that these people were not even in the editorial process.
It was people like cartoonists or people who worked in marketing.
These were not people who were even on editorial staff.
And a lot of them were part-time, but they would get together, they would create these unions.
And so that's another element here that I think needs to be explored in the media and Hollywood space is that a lot of this pressure comes from union leadership as well.
Once these young people are able to coalesce into a union, that obviously gives them greater bargaining rights.
And no boss who's trying to run a profitable company is going to want to get in a long strike or union fight, right?
That's just bad for business.
And so when you actually have an institutionalized way of these people protesting as opposed to just these sort of loosely collected people sitting in the president's office, that actually becomes a danger to your bottom line.
I mean, that's what we saw with the writer's strike.
It was like a year or two ago with SAG AFTA, where obviously they went on strike, basically held all of Hollywood hostage for it was a few months, if I recall.
And that entire sort of movement, that whatever you want to call it, had a distinct leftist flavor to it because pretty much all of the demands that they were making, again, were pretty much indistinguishable from sort of these left-wing activists that you would see across the country.
And the sort of the sort of makeup of this union, again, skewed very young, skewed towards groups that you would see among activists.
And all the all the sort of support they would receive were mainly from like older boomers that, again, didn't really have to worry about losing their jobs because all that was expected of them was to sing along, hand the keys over, and then retire in five years.
And I think we need to take from this piece too, a really fundamental question, which really cuts at the heart of the advocation for DEI, which is the idea that representation matters because if you don't have certain voices in the room or people from certain backgrounds in the room, that there's going to be an inherent bias that is skewed against those voices,
that they have unique insight that is going to actually provide more value to the institution just by nature of them being black or being a woman, et cetera.
Well, let's run through these institutions that the author is writing about, the media.
They have been hiring, as we demonstrated, 50 to 60% of their new hires are people of color or general minorities.
Same thing in Hollywood.
They talks about TV writing.
He talks about academia.
Would anyone argue at this point that all three of those institutions, any of the three, are better off now than they were prior to this big George Floyd push to overrepresentatively hire POCs?
Or do people distrust these institutions more than ever?
Is the content bad?
Right.
Like we haven't seen any value add from this diversity shift because as we all know, the real diversity that matters is ideological diversity, intellectual diversity, where you're actually having debates about what TV shows are people actually going to watch.
Are we appealing to the wrong audience?
Is this writing snappy?
Or are we just trying to prove some kind of woke point?
So pretty much everything has gotten demonstrably worse.
Trust in institutions has gone down at the precise time that this DEI push was really ramping up.
I mean, the author points out like 2014 is where you start to see the groundwork laid.
But yeah, things really started ramping up during the George Floyd BLM era.
But yeah, something's very interesting.
We had a guest on Timcast IRL last night who was of the left.
There was no question about that.
And we kind of got into it in the after show because we got into this sort of debate over immigration and these sorts of things.
And he was making this point that really what he values above all in regards to our immigration system is it further diversifies the country.
He said he was a proponent of diversity.
And when I posited the question, what specifically about diversity has intrinsic value?
He kind of just kept dancing on the question because he was really just advocating for diversity for diversity's sake.
And then eventually the mask slips and he just admits that I really just don't like when places are very white.
He clearly, and this was a white guy, but he clearly had some bone to pick with white people.
He had some sort of, you know, axe to grind.
And it was really hits at the heart of, I think, what's going on with a lot of these things is that, again, most of the sort of boilerplate lines they're able to give about diversity, like you're saying, like, well, you know, it increases like different ideas in the, in whatever room the decisions are being made.
It's like, again, everyone is this point with how much democratization we've seen of information.
Trust me, everyone has different ideas about a variety of topics.
Like we're not at a shortage of ideologues.
There's no question about that.
It's bizarre to me to advocate for a policy because, again, you just have a prejudice against white people fundamentally.
You are discomfort.
You're uncomfortable with being around like a very white place.
And I think that's kind of at the core of what's going on here.
This stems from just hatred, bitterness, and resentment towards white men.
I mean, that's really what it's all about.
All of these academic intellectual arguments are just after the fact justifications for racism.
That's the reality here.
And I think that definitely needs to be said stronger.
And that was one of the criticisms of the piece too, was that they say, well, we don't really blame the people who took the jobs from us because, you know, if you were offered an opportunity, you would take it.
But I think that kind of ignores that a large amount of the advocacy for these policies came from these groups that benefited, right?
This was self-interest at the expense of another racial group.
And so that needs to be acknowledged and called out for what it is.
I mean, that kind of illustrates the, I think, the biggest kind of gripe people had with it.
Again, I want to reiterate, like, it's a good piece.
It's directionally correct.
I like that term.
I've learned that term recently.
We're still trying to flush out what that even means, but it's directionally correct as far as like, it has a benefit to the political zeitgeist in many ways.
But, and this is, I think, an accurate assessment of the piece is in many ways, it's a permission piece because what it does is it allows people specifically to the left of like Ted Cruz that have been lambasting and trying to push down people that are conservatives for years who have been pointing this out, saying, hey, like white men are getting discriminated against in a variety of ways.
And previously where they would try to get you fired or again, try to freeze you out of whatever career path you would have available to you for making this case.
All of a sudden, this piece drops.
And then now all of them are like, yeah, this is an issue.
This is a big issue.
Like, duh.
We've all been saying like, yes, we've been saying this for years.
Like, welcome to the team.
So I think there's some value in saying welcome to the team.
But at the same time, that is a big critique of it is that A, again, it's this sort of permission piece.
And then B, that it begs the question of like, okay, what now?
I mean, Jeremy Carl, he wrote a fantastic response because obviously Jeremy Carl has been writing about this for like decades.
And he pointed out like, look, I mean, again, I'm glad you laid out the data.
We've been saying this, but it begs the question, what now?
What action can we make?
Because the piece ends just basically demoralizing.
Like, I don't know what I'm going to tell my kids when they try to follow their dreams.
And it's like, okay, it's useful to point out the issue.
Conservatives are very good at pointing out issues, but what about the solution?
How do we get out of this?
Like, how can we ensure that your kids don't have to run up against that wall?
And I think describing it as a permission piece is pretty perfect.
It kind of reminds me of when there was that exodus from the New York Times with Barry Weiss et al.
And they started writing about how crazy things had gotten on trans issues and how the how the newspapers were totally captured by ideologues.
And we were all like, hey, welcome to the party.
We've been waiting five years for you to get here.
Yeah.
And it's like the exact same thing happening here, right?
It's for the people who like don't really watch Matt Walsh's show or they think that Charlie Kirk's comments on the DEI pilots were distasteful because they just hear the one sentence said by the people, you know, trashing him after his death.
It's for those people to read an ostensibly, you know, mainstream argument and publication from a guy who doesn't have like a long history of being a conservative activist and say, oh, yeah, actually, I kind of agree with that.
Yeah, it is frustrating when people who were like died in the wool leftists until like two years ago come along and then just start like lecturing conservatives on like how we ought to conduct ourselves.
I'm not saying he specifically is doing that, but a lot of people that are like, no, this is great.
It's like, okay, like welcome, but like, you know, wait your turn.
Like we're busy doing things over here.
But yeah, I think Matt Walsh specifically made an excellent point regarding the sort of the implication of DEI in which he said, if you look through, for example, the history of Western civilization and you were to compile a list of like the thousand most impactful people in the country, I'm paraphrasing his tweet.
If you were to compile a list of the thousand most impactful people throughout civilization, he ballparked like 975 of them would be white men.
Again, this isn't necessarily chest beating.
He's just making the point like, this is how you thank them.
I mean, you kind of ride with the hot hand in many ways.
Why punish them?
Because again, if we believe in a meritocracy, you're just going to hire the best people that are, you know, resume-wise.
And if that skews white, it's a white men.
It skews to white men.
I don't see why that's like such a pernicious thing.
I don't really see white men organizing on the basis of identity.
That's still like very frowned upon all across the political spectrum.
But you see with other groups that they are sort of advocating as a group.
They are advocating for, look, we're not, we don't care about merit.
We want to stare at the table.
And that to me is specifically pernicious thing.
And that line that he used, this is how you thank them, seems very on point.
And the second, I'll get into what's next because you raised that.
The first one is that when looking at the media, one thing I find really interesting about your point about how groups organize and how white men and I think white people kind of generally have excluded themselves from that paradigm.
One of the really fascinating dichotomies to watch in the media over the past 10 years is that as they've made this concerted effort to start hiring more people of color, what is still really underrepresented in the media are just normal Americans.
And what I mean by that is when the media decided in the early 1900s that you had to go to journalism school to prove that you could meet some amorphous standard of objectivity in order to become a journalist, whereas it used to be a working class trade.
What happened was that most of the people who work for these major publications are sort of all cut from the same class.
They all have journalism degrees.
They all went to elite universities.
They mostly grew up in cities.
They tend to have parents who are white collar.
There aren't a lot of journalists who have parents who are blue collar.
I'm one of the few.
And if you look at the pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, one thing that's really stunning is that they have the same educational attainment as U.S. senators and Supreme Court justices.
I mean, it's wild.
Like it really, they really are like the elite of the elite.
And as far as I can tell, the effort to hire minorities hasn't changed that.
You're still getting people from relatively the same background.
So it's not really actually experience or background diversity at all in the way that it was sold to us.
Now, on the what's next, there was a really amazing video that came out yesterday, actually, from the EEOC chair, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, telling white men, if you have been discriminated against in your jobs, we are going to go to bat for you.
Please reach out.
We want to make sure that the people who, you know, were racist against you are held accountable, that your workplaces are places of equal opportunity.
So there is movement from the federal government.
Also, last week, the Department of Justice sort of quietly rolled back their disparate impact liability, which means that if a workplace is discriminating, not intentionally so, not because they don't like black people, but because the outcome is different.
So if you have a policy that leads to you hiring more white men and fewer black men, for example, even if the policy itself does not have some different standard applying to white men versus black men, if the outcome is different, that's disparate impact and you can be held liable under civil rights law.
The DOJ said we're basically not going to prosecute any of those cases anymore.
We're not going to investigate any of those cases.
One of the big ones that just drove me absolutely insane was during the Biden administration, the same day that President Joe Biden went to Sheets to do a campaign stop and basically show how much of a working class guy that he is.
He's Scranton Joe.
He went to get his schmuffin or whatever it was at Sheets.
This is a great family-owned American institution.
It's based in the Mid-Atlantic for people who aren't familiar.
The same day, his EEOC announced a lawsuit against Sheets under the Disparate Impact Clause.
What did Sheets do?
They said that they weren't going to hire certain criminals.
That's literally it.
They have a policy that they review every applicant, job applicant's criminal record.
And there are certain things, we don't know exactly what they are because their hiring standards are not fully public, but there are certain things where whatever's on your criminal background check could cause you to not get hired.
Now, I assume it's probably things like violent crimes, felonies, right?
If you meet some certain threshold of a criminal history, then you don't get hired at Sheets.
Great.
unidentified
I don't want the person working in the cash register at Sheets to be a hardened criminal, right?
But because black people have higher crime rates and tend to have lengthier criminal backgrounds or are more likely to commit violent crime, that had a disparate impact on Sheets' ability to hire black people.
And so the Biden administration sued them.
The Trump administration dropped the lawsuit and is now getting rid of all similar investigations related to disparate impact, which is huge.
Well, and that's kind of the tricky thing about sort of undoing a lot of this because, like, from the EOC's perspective and other related government organizations, if they were to subpoena sort of these leaders that have sort of built out this discrimination apparatus, it's really difficult to pin them down because, I mean, in the piece and also broader commentary, they've outlined how discreet a lot of these things are.
Because, you know, you look at the movies when you would see like discrimination against like black people and they'd be like walking into a help-wanted sign and they'd be like, no, get out of here, whatever.
Like it was very on the nose.
But like when white guys are applying to these places, there's like an entire incentive structure all across the United States that is pointing away from them.
And so these companies, they just have these really discrete things like, we want to hire someone that comes from like a unique perspective, like a diverse background.
And then they can like, you know, ask a few pointed questions in the interviews to have like a justification to say, ah, he just wouldn't be like a great fit for a company culture.
They have all these like really like gay terms that they use to justify this discrimination.
And that's what's going to make it so difficult if the government, for example, is to take action on these sorts of things.
Because outside of the data, they have a lot of plausible deniability with a lot of these things.
And that's what makes it so difficult to, again, put together a case here because it's going to have to be case by case in a lot of situations.
But yeah, so much of it is just calculated, prudent.
And that's what makes it also so sinister.
That's how you can tell it legitimately is a full-throated effort to ensure that you can crowd these people out and freeze them out forever.
I think you have to start with the really obvious cases because especially from 2020 to 2023, people were admitting it out loud, right?
I mean, they were not, they were, a lot of them weren't discreet.
So you start with those.
The ones that were more discreet and subtle, I think you have to have whistleblowers who are brave enough to come forward, which is why the cowardice demonstrated in the piece by certain people is so infuriating because it perpetuated the system.
And I mean, I also think getting to the point about just like moving forward and what the EEOC is doing,
having this come from the federal government and really open up that permission structure as we're talking about from the government is really important just to show people that they have someone who's on their side and that there is an actual force with teeth that can back them up.
I want to tell one more quick story on this point of the subtlety.
When I was working at WMAL, which is a conservative radio station in DC, they were owned by a corporate conglomerate called Cumulus Media, which owns a lot of the conservative media stations around the country.
And on their workplace database, I was shocked one day when I logged on and I found out that they were offering bonuses to people who recommended diverse candidates to be hired.
If the candidate ultimately got hired, you would get like a $2,000 bonus in your check.
So it's exactly what you said, Tate.
It's the diverse backgrounds, right?
We're going to actually give you money if you recommend some black woman and she ends up getting hired at the radio station.
So it really is unbelievably pervasive.
I think this piece is a good start, I guess, and at least illuminating the problem and just how bad it got.
But we're going to need serious action to correct this.
And so I'm Amber Duke, everybody.
You can find my work at dailycaller.com.
I'm also on Substack under State of the Day.
And every Friday, I'm on Rising, every Tuesday and Wednesday on Reason on YouTube.