DEI, the Dispossessed Generation, and the Digital Koryos
John Carter
John Carter is a major writer for the New Right Vitalist movement. His writings can be found on Substack.
Recently, an essay was published in Compact, which many are hailing as the essay of the year. The title, “The Lost Generation,” emphasizes the destruction that the cultural revolution of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which swept through every single one of our institutions over the last decade, has wrought upon an entire generation of young white men.
Reading it was an intensely personal experience for me and, I am absolutely certain, for many others. The response to the essay has been an outpouring of suppressed rage that has been simmering for years in an emotional pressure cooker of silenced frustration. The author, Jacob Savage, provides a ground-level view of the DEI revolution’s human cost, beginning with his personal experiences as an aspiring screenwriter, and then widening the reader’s perspective via interviews with would-be journalists and academics. Every subject described a similar pattern of frustrated ambitions in which, starting around the middle of the 2010s, their careers stalled out for no other reason than their melanin-deficiency and y-chromosome superfluity. Young white men were systematically excluded from every institutional avenue of prestige and prosperity. Doors were closed in academia, in journalism, in entertainment, in the performing arts, in publishing, in tech, in the civil service, in the corporate world. It didn’t matter if you wanted to be a journalist, a novelist, a scientist, an engineer, a software developer, a musician, a comedian, a lawyer, a doctor, an investment banker, or an actor. In every direction, it was Diversity Is Our Strength and The Future Is Female; every job posting particularly encourages applications from traditionally underrepresented and equity-seeking groups including women, Black and Indigenous People of Color, LGBTQ+, and the disabled . . . a litany of identities in which “white men” was always conspicuous by its absence.
The Lost Generation does not rely only on the pathos of anecdote. Savage includes endless reams of data demonstrating how white men virtually disappeared from Hollywood writing rooms, editorial staff, university admissions, tenure-track positions, new media journalism, legacy media, and internships. He shows how, after the 2020s, they even stopped bothering to apply, because what was the point? The comprehensive push to exclude young white men from employment wasn’t limited to prestigious creative industries, of course. The corporate sector has also adopted a practice of hiring anyone but white men, as revealed two years ago by a Bloomberg article which gloated that well over 90 percent of new hires at America’s largest corporations weren’t white.
The Bloomberg article was criticized for methodological flaws, but judging by the outpouring of stories it elicited (just see the several hundred comments my own essay got, the best of which I summarized here) it was certainly directionally accurate.
The real strength of Savage’s article isn’t the cold statistics, though, but the heartrending poignancy with which it highlights the emotional wreckage left in the wake of this cultural revolution.
Hiring processes are opaque. If an employer doesn’t extend an offer, they rarely explain why; at best, one receives a formulaic “thank you for your interest in the position, but we have decided to move forward with another applicant. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.” They certainly never come out and say that you didn’t get hired because you’re a white man, which is generally technically illegal, for whatever that is worth in an atmosphere in which the unspoken de facto trumps the written de jure. Candidates are not privy to the internal deliberations of hiring committees, which will always publicly claim that they hired the best candidate. Officially, a facade of meritocracy was maintained even as meritocracy was systematically dismantled from within.
The power suit-clad feminists who body-checked their padded shoulder into C-suites and academic departments in the 1970s flattered themselves that they were subduing sexist male chauvinism by outdoing the boys at their own game and forcing the patriarchy to acknowledge their natural female excellence. Growing up, I would often hear professional women say things like “as a woman, to get half as far as a man, you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard.” The implication was that women were just overall better than men, because the old boys’ club held the fairer sex to a higher standard than it did the good old boys. Of course, this was almost never true; these women were overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs motivated by anti-discrimination legislation that opened up any corporation that didn’t put a sufficient number of females on the payroll to ruinous lawsuits. Moreover, a fair fraction of them were really being recruited as decorative additions to the secretarial harems of upper management. Nevertheless, it helped lay the foundation for the Future Is Female boosterism that stole the future from a generation of young men.
There was a time, not so long ago, where I naively assumed that my own situation was simply the inverse of the one women had faced in the ’70s and ’80s. I was aware that I was being rather openly discriminated against, but imagined that this simply meant that I had to perform to a higher standard; that if I was good enough, the excellence of my work would shatter the institutional barriers and force someone to employ me. It took me several long and agonizing years to realize that this just wasn’t true. The crotchety patriarchs of the declining West may have been principled men capable of putting stereotypes aside to recognize merit; in fact, the historical evidence suggests that they overwhelmingly prized merit above any other consideration (just as the evidence suggests that their stereotypes were overwhelmingly correct). The priestesses of the present gynocracy hold themselves to no such standard. They don’t care about your promise or your performance, at all. If anything, performing well is a strike against you, because it threatens them. Nothing makes them seethe more than being outperformed by men. They champion mediocrity as much to punish as to promote.
Young white men had been raised to expect meritocracy. They’d also been raised to be racial and sexual egalitarians. People in the past, they believed, had been bigoted, believing superstitious stereotypes about differences of ability and temperament between the sexes and races that had no foundation in reality, pernicious falsehoods that were developed and propagated as intersectional systems of oppression with the purpose of justifying slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Naturally they were appalled to have such charges laid at their feet, and so they agreed that we were all going to try and correct this injustice, and we’d do it by carefully eliminating every potential source of racial or sexual bias, eliminating all the unfair barriers to advancement within society, in particular, although not certainly not exclusively, via university admissions and institutional hiring. That was the original official line on DEI: That it wasn’t about excluding white men heaven forbid, no it was simply about including everyone else, widening the talent pool so that we could ensure both the fairest possible system of advancement, and that the best possible candidates were given access to opportunity. In practice, we were told, this wouldn’t be a quota system: everything would still be meritocratic, but if it came down to a coin flip between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom was a white man and the other was not, the “not” would win. Fair enough, the young white men thought at first: We’ll all compete on a level playing field; in fact, we’ll even accept a bit of a handicap in the interests of correcting historical injustices, and may the best human win.
But the DEI commissars had absolutely no interest in a level playing field. That the playing field wasn’t already as level as it could be was, in fact, one of their most infamous lies. The arena has always been level: physics plays no favorites in the eternal struggle for survival and mastery. If some always end up on top — certain individuals, certain families, certain nations, certain races — this is invariably due to their own innate advantages over their competitors. An interesting example of this was provided by the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks cast down the old Czarist aristocracy, stripping it of land, wealth, and status, and then discriminated against it in every way possible; a century later, their descendants had clawed their way back to power and prominence. The only possible conclusion from this is that the Russian aristocrats were, at least to some degree, aristos — the best, the noblest — in some sense that went beyond inherited estates.
The young white men did not think of themselves as aristocrats with a blood right to a certain position in life, but as contestants in a fair competition, who would rise or fall on their own merits and by their own efforts. They then abruptly found themselves competing in a system in which it was simply impossible for them to rise, but which also lied to them about the impassable barrier that had been placed in their way. If you noticed the unfairness, you were told that this was ridiculous, that as a white man you were automatically and massively privileged, that it was impossible to discriminate against you because of this, and that in addition to being a bigoted racist you were also quite clearly mediocre, a bitter little man filled with envy for the winners in life, the brilliant beautiful black women who had obviously outcompeted you because they were just so much smarter, so much more dedicated, and so much better because, after all, they had succeeded in spite of the deck being stacked against them, whereas you had failed despite having been born with every unearned advantage in the world.
An entire generation had their future ripped from their hands, and were then told that it was their fault, their inadequacy. They were gaslit that there was no systemic discrimination against them, that their failure to launch was purely due to their individual failings . . . while at the same time being told that those who were so clearly the beneficiaries of a heavy thumb on the scale were the victims of discrimination, that the oppressors were the oppressed, and that to cry “oppression” yourself was therefore itself a form of oppression.
Do you see how cruel that is? How sadistic? It is more psychologically vicious by far than anything the Bolsheviks did to the Russian aristocracy. At least the Bolsheviks were honest. Although, it must be said, the psychological sadism of the gay race commissars is part of a tradition, Communists have often been noted for their demonic cruelty.
By and large, as a group, the young white men internalized this implication that they were to blame for their own failures. After all, they’d been raised to be good liberals, good egalitarians, good anti-racists, good feminists. To even hint that you thought that you were being treated unfairly as a white male was to cast one’s lot in with one of the bad people, the hate-filled reactionary KKK Alt-Right MAGA Nazis. The only acceptable way in which to pronounce the words “white” and “male” was to expectorate; you were to wrinkle your nose in disgust when you say those cursed and filthy words. Complaining made you a bad person. Not only that, but it made you look weak, it felt like whining, like sour grapes, like poor sportsmanship. No one likes a sore loser, you know. The world doesn’t owe you anything; stop being so privileged, so entitled, you didn’t build that, you know. It’s their turn now. Best to take your setbacks with a shrug and a stoic grin, and try harder next time. Git good. Skill issue, my dude.
And they did. They tried harder the next time. And then when that didn’t work, they redoubled their efforts, and then doubled them again. But nothing could break through a wall that was supremely indifferent to any demonstration of ability or accomplishment.
Every once in a while, they’d compare notes with other young white men, and mutter to one another that they were having the same experiences . . . and sometimes, rarely, they might have a friend on the inside, who’d whisper to them in confidence that the hiring committee had already decided that they had to hire a woman or a person of color or whatever, and not to take it too hard when they didn’t get an offer . . .
And as this torture went on for a decade, one by one, in their millions, they cracked.
Many simply succumbed to despair. Alcoholism, opiate abuse, video games, porn. The black dog of depression ate their hearts. They abandoned their ambitions and retreated from a world that had no place for them. Hundreds of thousands were lost to suicide. White men have had the highest suicide rate by far for the entirety of the 21st century: They’re around one-third of the U.S. population, but account for over 2/3 of an-heroes. I had Grok run the numbers. Based on CDC data, the AI estimates around 400,000 excess white male deaths via suicide among white men since 2010, as compared to what would be expected from the average across other groups.
Others redirected their efforts. They abandoned any attempt to join the institutions, whether that meant getting hired at a university or getting a big break with a cover story in the Atlantic or getting into medical school or even just getting into their safe school; instead, they tried to make a go of it on their own. Some got into cryptocurrency trading. Others found their way into the startup ecosystem, or tried to turn side-hustles into businesses: The EXIT group set up by Bennett’s Phylactery was established specifically as a mutual aid network to facilitate such activities. Others became indie authors self-publishing science fiction novels on Amazon. Others became podcasters, livestreamers, TikTokers, influencers, Substackers. Most got by on gig jobs. The unifying theme is that they gravitated toward livelihoods that weren’t gatekept. Even the Internet wasn’t a perfect refuge: YouTubers might be dominated by white men, but the YouTube platform is a corporate entity every bit as captured by the Bio-Maoists as everything else. Content creators, therefore, had to be careful about what they said . . . become too popular and you might lose your channel.
Many, though far from all, broke through their conditioning and discarded the liberalism and equalism that had been used to chain them.
Jacob Savage himself is not one of those who broke his conditioning. At the conclusion of his otherwise excellent article, he fumbles the ball in the most regrettable fashion by declining to assign blame to the intersectional coalition of women and racial minorities who agitated relentlessly for DEI and instead elects to blame, of all people, himself. He decides that he would have been better off, happier, at any rate more content, had he more quickly resigned himself to the fate that the commissars had assigned him. Rather than pursuing his ambitions, he should have abandoned them at the first sign of resistance and embraced, presumably, one of the few remaining avenues left open to young white men . . . learned a trade, perhaps, and spent the rest of his days unclogging the toilets of those worthies the revolutionaries had decided should be his betters. In the end, despite everything he experienced, despite everything he saw, Savage was not able to abandon his liberalism. He could not fully embrace the righteous anger to which he is entitled.
This may well have been necessary to bring this message to a predominantly liberal audience, but it is still emotionally wrong. Savage should be furious. We should all be furious. What has been done to us is a crime of the most monumental proportions, not only against young white men, but against our entire civilization.
Jeremy Carl, author of last year’s book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, also took Savage to task over his ideological squeamishness.
While praising Savage for drawing attention to the systematic discrimination that young white men have faced, Carl has little sympathy for the temperamentally liberal laptop class professionals upon whom Savage focuses. If you were a working-class white man, all of this started decades ago: Offshoring and illegal immigration eating into their livelihoods; black migration into urban centers forcing white flight to the suburbs in which their once tight-knit communities ceased to exist; employment in the civil service turned into a racial reparations program; avenues for upward social mobility closed off to their sons as an increasing fraction of university admissions and scholarships were reserved for women and minorities. By and large, the liberal creatives and professionals whom Savage profiles celebrated this. “Learn to code,” as they used to say.
It’s Savage’s reluctance to allow himself to get angry at the women and racial minorities who stole his future that most disappoints Carl. As he puts it at the end of his response, “If the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” He is far from the only person to feel this way. Similar responses were all over Twitter.
The one direction aside from at himself that Savage is willing to point the finger of j’accuse is at the Baby Boomers, specifically the old white men who have held on to their positions throughout the Cancelled Years by becoming institutional champions of diversity. Savage demonstrates how in industry after industry the top positions were retained by these older white males, who patted themselves on the back for being good allies by blocking young white men from access to the entry level positions they reserved exclusively for women and racial minorities. This was a particularly poisonous tactic, as it enabled the diversicrats to continue screeching about under-representation even as all new hiring was diverted away from young white men.
There’s a lot of truth to this; indeed, this is something that I’ve noticed myself, but it’s only a half truth. Older men already in their positions held on for dear life, to be sure. They also knew that to speak out against DEI was career suicide: They’d be forced out immediately if they were anything less than enthusiastic. Plenty of examples were made in the years leading up to the Great Awokening: Larry Summers being forced to step down as president of Harvard for suggesting that the under-representation of women in physics was consistent with the greater male variability hypothesis; James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, being forced out as the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for publicly suggesting that there might be something to racial differences in IQ; Matt Taylor, lead scientist of the Rosetta mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov - Gerasimenko, being driven to tears by an Internet mob because he wore a loud shirt featuring prints of hot women at the press conference celebrating the first unmanned landing on a comet. There was no degree of status or power that could protect you. That is not to excuse their cowardly complicity, of course; merely to put it in context. The old white men were not driving the cultural revolution. By and large, they were being held hostage by it.
At the same time, older white men were also among the silent victims of this regime. The overwhelming majority of old white men are not in any particular position of authority, and those who found themselves between jobs in the 2020s found work particularly hard to come by. If you’re an engineer in your 50s or 60s, good luck getting past HR. If you have a position, good luck getting promoted. Or for that matter, keeping it. By the way, we just hired Sunpreet and his 50 cousins for 10 rupees a day; they’ll be replacing you in a month, and if you want to get your severance package we’ll ask that you train them to do your job and sign this non-disclosure agreement.
Singling out old white men as the villains is timid misdirection. It simply echoes the hue and cry against “beardy old white guys” that was raised by the very people who initiated the cultural revolution of the 2010s in the first place. Old white men are a safe target, and mostly the wrong one.
The pusillanimous traitors of the Baby Boom generation have their share of the blame, to be sure. So do the young women and racial minorities who agitated for DEI. Nor should we forget the politicians and judges who established the legal framework for affirmative action, equal employment, anti-discrimination, disparate impact, and all the rest, which is an element that Savage largely neglects and which predates “wokeness” by a couple of generations: It was the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II who laid that foundation. Let us also not neglect the financiers who quietly implemented Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG, which attempted to starve corporations of investment capital if they did not implement diversity hiring; BlackRock’s Larry Fink, in particular, has a lot to answer for. ESG investing even impacted the start-up ecosystem: Venture capital was preferentially diverted toward women and minority founders. Quite a few of those projects turned out to be scams. Remember Theranos, anyone? And how about those Alzheimer’s drugs?
There is a whole lot of blame to go around.
DEI infected and ruined every single institution. Indeed, this in itself is a large source of the fury that burns in the hearts of those young white men. It isn’t just a matter of personal despair, of looking out across the societal landscape and realizing that it is a wasteland offering you no avenue for personal advancement. It’s also outrage at what has been done to the institutions themselves.
The young white men were brought up to love and respect the institutions. They wanted to find their places within them, to be sure, but they also wanted to do their part to build, maintain, and improve them. To have the gate repeatedly slammed in your face is insult enough. To then see the glorious edifice that your forebears spent several centuries erecting and perfecting crumble under the weight of the incompetence of those admitted in your place adds unbearable injury to insult.
Institutional trust has collapsed entirely in large part because of DEI. It has turned everything to shit. Scholarship is shit. Movies are shit. Television shows are shit. Journalism is shit. Music is shit. Software is shit. Hospitals are shit. Industrial engineering is shit. Everywhere one looks, everything is in a state of disintegration, in some cases literally: Bridges falling down, airplanes plummeting out of the sky. DEI has led to a competence crisis, and as a result our complex systems are collapsing.
And the young white men, who understand better than anyone why this is happening, and are the single group best suited to reversing it indeed, the only group who can reverse it are forcibly held on the sidelines, watching helplessly as their civilization falls apart. The flower of Western youth withers on the vine while the fruits of Western civilization rot unharvested on the branch, food for locusts and crows, as termites chew through the heartwood of the dying tree.
The enshittification of everything cannot be emphasized enough. It is the single most damning, delegitimizing aspect of the DEI kakistocracy. The people controlling the institutions are pretenders raised above their stations, working far beyond their natural abilities. They are midwits proclaiming themselves geniuses, mediocrities putting on the affectation of excellence, peasants LARPing as nobility. They are liars in every way, not only in that they lie about COVID or crime statistics or the effects of immigration or the motivations behind their foreign policy or the rate of inflation or whatever else, although of course they lie about that all the time; their most fundamental lie is that they present themselves as something they are not, as being worthy of the offices they hold. That they are unworthy is demonstrated by the consequences of their rule, which have been disastrous. They have brought about a cultural dark age.
The question is, what do we do about it?
Assuming anything can be done, that is.
We certainly can’t go on like this. This situation is politically explosive. Young men in general are the most potentially disruptive demographic in any society, which is why every healthy society has understood that you deny them opportunity at your very great peril. Savage’s advice to meekly accept their lot isn’t going to cut it. The rage is too widespread. That rage is in large part what pushed Trump into the White House, and for all the caterwauling about the Orange Dictator, the general feeling among the young white men is that Trump is a big softy, an out of touch Boomer who doesn’t have the steel to do what’s necessary, but is tactically useful because he provides room to maneuver. It doesn’t help when Trump meets with Indian CEOs to discuss bringing in even more H1Bindians to deprive even more young white men of good jobs in the tech sector, particularly when the CEO in question was caught on camera straight-up ordering his minions to not hire white men.
There is a growing sense among the young white men that, if everything is going to rot anyhow, they might as well just burn it down themselves. If nothing else, it would be immensely satisfying.
Savage wrote his article in the plaintive register of a lament for “a lost generation.” He depicts young white men as powerless victims of a callous system that unfairly cast them aside, and thereby attempts to gain them the Oppressed status that has been claimed by every other group. As with his castigation of the old white men, this is a half-truth, and one that leads to a blind alley, besides. The cult of the sacred victim that lies at the heart of gay race Communism has no place for white men. Structurally, it cannot: By its very nature, the cult requires an object upon which to focus its odium. If young white men were to be accepted as congregants, another group would need to be placed on its blood-stained altar. Every other group has already been embraced by the church; therefore, one of those groups would have to be excommunicated. None of those groups will accept that.
Moreover, white men are the natural and indeed necessary focus of the death cult’s detestation. The cult of the victim is a cult of weakness, helplessness, powerlessness; its entire raison d’etre is to cast down the high and raise up the low. Hatred of the healthy, the beautiful, the strong, the brilliant is its very essence. The simple, unavoidable truth revealed by history is that, for whatever reasons, white men stand so far apart and above the rest of the human species that comparison becomes a matter of embarrassment for all involved. White men are responsible for an overwhelming proportion of the world’s greatest works of art, literature, music, and drama; for almost every single development in the exact sciences; for almost every single technological advancement; for practically every advance in philosophy, in exploration, in statecraft, and in war. Whites have generated more genres of fiction than most peoples have written books, more genres of music than most peoples have songs, more schools of philosophy than most peoples have philosophers (insofar as philosophy can even be said to exist outside the West, which is a debatable proposition).
It is not accidental that white men were singled out by the victim cultists as the focus of their opprobrium. The victim cult’s entire purpose is to take Western civilization away from the men who built it, destroy that civilization, and then wipe out the people who built it. The telos of the cult is Global Zimbabwe.
So, let us flip the script and abandon this abortive attempt at gaining status and sympathy via initiation into the victim cult.
Young white men were castigated as demons in human form, presumptive racists and sexists, Nazis by blood. Then they were locked out of education and careers, excluded from society itself.
By necessity, they retreated to the one environment in which they could still have some measure of freedom: The virtual wilds of the Internet. Here they found only one another for company. They formed loose associations in group chats and Discord servers. They started comparing notes: Their experiences with school, with employers, with the job market, with women — what worked and what didn’t. They began to explore ideological territories that had been labeled off-limits, old reactionary tracts and forgotten fascist memoirs and classical histories upon which their society had inscribed “Here Be Dragons.” Some began to launch little guerrilla raids on the conceptual infrastructure of society, attacking media narratives with blizzards of memetic brainrot, assaulting load-bearing societal myths with carefully reasoned evidentiary argument and mocking rhetoric honed to a razor’s edge.
There’s a remarkable analogy here with the ancient Indo-European tradition of the koryos, the wolf-pack war-band of wild young men. The koryos was a coming-of-age ritual which began with the ceremonial sacrifice of a dog, during which the boys took on the symbolic identities of wolves. The wolf-boys were then ritually cast out, banished to the woods, where they would live as wolves, which is to say as inhuman monsters loyal only to their pack, in a state of war with all human society. For some months they would be expected to live by hunting and raiding, after which they would be welcomed back as men. That this is the origin of the werewolf mythology should be obvious.
In treating young white men as they did, by demonizing them and casting them out, liberals inadvertently created psychological conditions remarkably similar to those facilitating the organic emergence of a koryos. While this koryos is so far entirely virtual, existing within the hyperreal realm of semiotics and discourse, it is also quite possibly the largest koryos that has ever been created, a barbarian horde of the fibre-optic steppe whose raw numbers would impress Attila.
Attila might have raised an eyebrow at the scale of this virtual koryos, but his lip would certainly have curled in contempt at the nature of its activities. Physically, it consists of sedentary men locked in their basements, playing social games with words and symbols. This sublimation has happened before; when frontiers are closed, society becomes domesticated and bound by laws and convention, and opportunities for conquest disappear. The wild spirit of the war-band of young men turns inward, spiritualizing itself in philosophical schools or monasteries, with the object of conquest becoming not mastery of space but mastery of instinct, or of the abstract landscapes of logic. In his book Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, Costin Alaramiu suggests that Plato’s Academy was modeled somewhat explicitly on the koryos as an attempt to preserve the aristocratic spirit of the steppe within a society that had become too urban and democratic, an insight he probably gleaned from Nietzsche, who perceived the same sublimation of instinct in the monastic life of Buddhist monasteries.
In our modern case, the virtual koryos is also a great sexual inversion occasioned by the invasion of women into traditionally masculine institutions. Public life, political life, the outward-facing life of action, the pursuit of status within formal hierarchies of competence — these have always been the domain of men. Private life, domestic life, the inward-facing life that maintains and polices social mores, the navigation of ambiguity within the informal networks of psychological and emotional influence that weave society together between the edges and nodes of formal hierarchies: These have always been the domain of women. Driven out of the formal institutional hierarchies dominated by women, men have had no choice but to take ownership of those informal social spaces that women have necessarily abandoned. The result has been the injection of the wild, boisterous energy of young men into precisely those domains of the social order that require quietness, tranquility, and softness, even as the application of feminine instinct has degraded the institutions into kindergartens that cannot fulfill their necessary functions. Formal hierarchies that rely on calm argument and the rumbled timbre of commanding authority speak instead in the shrill tones of moral hysteria and relentless nagging, eliciting not respect and obedience but raised hackles and resentment; informal networks that communicate best through whispered pillow-talk and gently insinuated suggestions take on instead the harsh imperative bark of the battlefield and the howl of the hunt. This results in chaos: The prestige and competence of the institutions collapses, while the destructive creativity of youthful male energy rages unchecked through the structures of assumptions and axioms that harmonize society.
Millions of young men all over the Western world have been networked together into a distributed discursive community that feels itself to be engaged in a permanent state of spiritual warfare with the surrounding society. Their communities started as predominantly masculine out of necessity, but over time this has jelled into a more self-conscious maintenance of exclusively masculine spaces. Their shared experiences, of being hunted via doxxing campaigns and social media account bans, of coordinating raids on comment sections and Twitter replies via group chats organized in the hidden corners of the Internet, of honing their rhetorical skills via ruthless discursive duels with their brothers as they fought over points of fact and doctrine, of fashioning the symbolic content of their virtual world into memetic spearpoints with which to pierce people directly in their brainstems, of hiding their power levels when in the IRL company of normies, all these shared experiences have molded them into a cohesive cultural force which may have started as something purely oppositional to the parent society that cast them out, but increasingly lives by and for itself. They have fashioned a mythology out of the archetypal grammar of memes, with which they tell the sagas of their influencer heroes; they have cobbled together a religion from esoteric ideologies, with Hyperborea edits as their devotional hymns.
The mainstream culture they once lamented their exclusion from has long since become for them a thing of disdain and contempt, which they refer to with derision as the longhouse. Here again we see a historical form being recapitulated in a sublimated fashion: The primordial tyranny of the Den Mother and the Village Elder who conspire to break the spirit of young men, to domesticate them into draft animals for the service of the village, which is really to say for the service of the Den Mother and the Village Elder. The longhouse is given modern expression in the Safe Space ruled by the nice ladies of the Human Resources department, with the constant surveillance of every word and deed via the digital panopticon forming the modern analog to the physical longhouse’s communal lack of privacy.
When the Indo-Europeans encountered the longhouse cultures, they found them repellent, even blasphemous, an offense against nature. Men rendered small and sickly by a diet of grains, ruled over by tyrannical women who polluted their minds with superstitions and sacrificed their babies to dark goddesses. Because it was right, and because they could, and because it was profitable, the Indo-Europeans put the longhouses to the torch, cast down the idols of the old demon gods, slaughtered the men, and took the women for their concubines.
This cataclysm is remembered in our deepest mythology, memorialized in our oldest heroes. Constellations related to this foundational myth of Western civilization occupy almost a fifth of the Northern hemisphere’s night sky: Cepheus and Cassiopeia, king and queen of Aethiopia, who offer their daughter Andromeda to the sea monster Cetus as a sacrifice to appease Poseidon (whom Cassiopeia had angered by boasting that Andromeda was more beautiful than the sea god’s Nereids), only for the hapless princess to be saved by Perseus who, flying home on Pegasus after slaying Medusa, turns the beast to stone by showing it Medusa’s head.
Paulos draws out the meaning of the Perseus myth and its connections to the modern situation in his evergreen essay, “Heroes Rise//Monsters Fall,” where he describes the clear analogs between the theological control systems of the old agrarian city states and the contemporary gynocratic order:
“These massive systems of polygamy, rather than having a masculine character, are in fact organized around feminizing principles of control and surveillance, for they are impossible to sustain without systemic suppression of male impulses to challenge and reproduce. Furthermore, they can only be possible in sedentary societies with centralized control of food distribution: only where ostracism is death and no exit is possible can the majority of the male population be kept in subjugation. Powerful men rule and enjoy, and the women, being under the protection of powerful men, with their free time and proximity to power, devote themselves to creation of religious structures of opinion and taboo, like how wives of wealthy men work at nonprofits and NGOs, or a childless middle-class woman becomes a social worker.
“These religious systems create beliefs which reinforce the regime and structures dedicated to detecting and stamping out any spark of assertion or male rebellion. Men are inculcated into these systems and made to believe in their legitimacy; the greater their dispossession, the more powerful these systems of suggestion, and the greater their required reverence. Therefore, they are made to participate in their subjugation and are denied the possibility of accumulating wealth or creating a family. Some, as many as possible, are made eunuchs. The rest are enslaved through force and taboo. Perhaps this INCEL class is even pacified with pornography. The numerous clay images of fertile females found in Neolithic settlements would then not be female goddesses, but ancient C-GIRLS (clay girls!) intended as substitute wives for un-partnered men. You see the enemy has always been the same! In this way the ruling class, extended to include almost all women, cements its power and protects itself from challenges. Does this seem familiar to you???”
The gorgon seems to have played a central role in the control theology of the Neolithic culture: Depictions of the serpent-headed demon women referred to as gorgoneion abound in the archaeological remains of the pre-Greek Mediterranean. The name “Perseus” means something like “destroyer,” possibly from the Greek verb persein, πέρθειν, “to waste, to ravage,” which with the agentic suffix “-eus” becomes “sacker of cities.” Since no one sacks cities alone, Paulos therefore infers that of course Perseus was not some lone hero but must have been the leader of a war-band, that the presence of such a group is clearly implied by aspects of the myth, and though he does not use the term, this is functionally a koryos. It was therefore the koryos, the band of young men, which destroyed the gorgonein state:
“The fearsome reputation of the gorgon culture is widely regarded, but the exact center of its power and means of approach are unknown, leading to an extended reconnaissance . . . Perseus and his men, therefore well-prepared, infiltrate the city and to their astonishment, find the guardians sleeping. The narrative state, trusting in the reputation of its magic, has left its gate unguarded . . . His decisive stroke, the cut that kills a god, is the signal. Within an hour the grim night-work is done. The chief priestesses and eunuchs lie slaughtered in their temple, the sacred masks are secured, and the raiding party is already making their escape . . . In fact, what has been accomplished with Perseus’ adamantine stroke is a great ‘cutting away’ of state power from the thicket of custom that cultivated, but also immobilized it . . . The whole arc of the European Faustian spirit begins with this cut.”
Within Indo-European society the koryos was an institutionalized ritual. Boys were deliberately inducted into it, and then reabsorbed back into society. That is not what has happened in our case: the virtual koryos was created unintentionally; it emerged organically from a mixture of necessity and instinct, of blood memory awakened via a kind of anemoia, nostalgia for a place we’d never been, or rather a condition we’d never experienced, but which would have been recognizable to our remotest ancestors. The usurpers within the institutions have no intention of ritually readmitting the young white men that they banished, of course. But the young men of the virtual koryos will not remain in the wilderness forever. The outpouring of fury that The Lost Generation precipitated suggests that the moment of the Lost Boys’ return is growing near. One way or another, they will return, and if they will not be welcomed as prodigal sons, then they will come as sackers of cities, with fire and sword. From their perspective, there are no other options, and since it is their perspective that is the active principle of history . . . there are no other options.
The wisest thing that the institutions could do would be to immediately repent and relent: Not only eliminate DEI, and to do so in good faith, without just rebranding it with some other euphemism, although of course this is absolutely necessary to open themselves to the young men under conditions of absolute meritocracy, with no more favoritism being shown to any, and to resign themselves to the biological reality that under such conditions it will overwhelmingly be talented white men who rise to the very top levels of performance, and are therefore rewarded with the commanding heights of the social order. Of course, the pretenders would find this humiliating, but it is much better for them than the alternatives. At this point, however, it is no longer really clear if the young white men would even be interested in such acceptance. The longhouse has become a nauseating sight. Joining it is not so attractive anymore . . . yet it remains a concentration of great wealth . . .
OK, but what do we mean by “burning down the institutions,” exactly? Clearly, and perhaps this is a disappointment to you, but we’re speaking in metaphor here. I know many will sneer things like “you people won’t do anything, it’s all talk,” forgetting of course that in the virtual realm, talk is virtually the only thing that exists, that symbols become objects, that combat itself becomes an abstract thing. But also, equally obviously, it would be absurd to imagine angry mobs of young men literally throwing Molotov cocktails around on university campuses and corporate offices, not that such a thing is impossible, of course, only that it would accomplish nothing. It would be a nihilistic spasm of performative violence, in the aftermath of which the perpetrators would be thrown in jail and the system would just carry on as before. The same consideration applies to more deliberate terrorist-type actions along the line of Breivik or Tarrant: Spectacular as such gestures may be, they’re ultimately just gestures, which do nothing to weaken the system per se, and invariably backfire by alienating the general population and providing the system an excuse to crackdown on dissidents.
The systems we contend with are largely immaterial: Ideologies, laws, regulations, organizational hierarchies, flows of capital which are themselves evanescent numbers in digital ledgers. There’s a physical infrastructure underlying it, yes, but this infrastructure is dispersed around the world and entirely robust against physical attack. The Internet on which their system relies, every bit as much as the outlaw culture of the virtual koryos does, is quite literally designed to withstand nuclear war. It can’t be destroyed through physical violence, and neither can any of the systems built on top of it.
Since we contend with immaterial forces, we must consider immaterial strategies, not so much nonviolence as violence by other means, what the Chinese might refer to as Unrestricted Warfare or the weaponization of every point of contact, and what our own military theorists refer to as Fifth Generation Warfare or 5GW: The warfare of psychological operations, pranks, economics, legal action, and cultural subversion. That isn’t to say that physical violence, violence in its most vulgar sense, plays no role at all, but rather that it becomes one implement in a large toolset, and one very rarely reached for. When it is used, it is almost always for its symbolic effect: In hyperreal warfare, everything is semiotic, everything is intended for an audience.
Beyond their immateriality, one of the challenges in addressing DEI is the sheer scale of the criminal enterprise. The rolls of the guilty number in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. They permeate the institutions. Putting them all on trial individually would be a Herculean task. Moreover, in most cases their individual culpability is quite minor. Odious as their ideological commitments may be, they’ve probably not done much more than make a remark on a hiring committee to the effect of, “But are we sure we want to hire another white guy?” Some of them have done more than that, but very, very few of them are guilty of anything that rises to the level of illegality for which you could throw them in jail for even for a few months, let alone justify their mass slaughter.
Yet as a class, the damage they have done has been immense. As a class, they’re responsible for destroying millions of lives. As a class, they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of suicides on their hands. As a class, they’ve stolen careers from millions, and through this they have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars, all of which represents families that were never started, babies that were never born, inventions that were never brought to market, scientific breakthroughs that were never made, era-defining creative works that were never produced. The civilizational damage these termites have done to the arts, to scholarship, to the sciences, and to technology, is almost impossible to overstate.
To not hold them accountable would be a monstrous miscarriage of justice.
This is really a special case of a more general tactic that the managerial class has spent the last century perfecting. Every question is handled by a committee or a system or some other impersonal mechanism. The result of this is to diffuse accountability through a giant formless mass of human oatmeal. All of them are a little bit culpable, but no one person is entirely or even primarily responsible. It is therefore difficult to know where to direct one’s fire. There are very few high-value targets, and simply removing one person here or there has no actual effect on the system, since individual functionaries are easily replaced.
The answer to this is actually quite straightforward, requiring only the ruthless will to carry it out.
Since the locus of responsibility is at the systemic level, the systems must be targeted. Which is to say, the institutions. Which is also to say, the people staffing the institutions, as a class. Because they act collectively, and refuse all personal accountability, indeed using organizational opacity to make personal accountability impossible, collective accountability is the only possible solution.
The end goal is simple: To take their power, and to take their wealth. This requires something more than memes and podcasts. Ultimately, we are talking here about access to material resources. Young white men need to be able to afford houses, they need to be able to support families, they need access to real, tangible property and prosperity.
The ideological work is already largely done, in any case. The totems of “racism,” “sexism,” “antisemitism,” “tolerance,” “democratic values,” and all the rest have already been cast down and broken; these sacred idols of the Boomer truth regime, of post-war liberalism, lie shattered on the temple floor, the old priestly incantations no longer have any power to compel, the young white men have freed their minds of these. The moral legitimacy of the regime rests upon these broken idols and is therefore broken. The practical legitimacy of the regime relies upon its promises of technocratic competence and technological progress, and these too lie in ruins after years of failures, collapsing quality, and transparent lies. The regime has been completely outmaneuvered at the spiritual level.
Political defeat is a necessary consequence of spiritual defeat, and it really cannot be emphasized enough that no victory is possible without political victory, without seizing control one way or the other of the state. It’s fashionable right now to be contemptuous of democracy, and I share this skepticism, being inclined toward warrior aristocracy and monarchy in some form or another myself. Nevertheless, our current political structures are at least in form democratic, and winning elections is therefore a more or less necessary step, though of course far from sufficient given the existence of the permanent bureaucracy and the judiciary, which by and large are controlled by the enemy and insulated from legislative and executive power. There’s also understandably an exhaustion with the whole process given the interminable bureaucratic and judicial games that are played by our opponents, which so often frustrate electoral victories. It would be so much easier if some enterprising colonel would simply launch a coup d’etat, no? Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that, after all, Bukele came to power democratically, in the teeth of the united opposition of El Salvador’s deep state. Nationalist-populist parties across Europe are advancing relentlessly despite the Eurocratic establishment using every dirty trick in the courts to block patriotic candidates and to hem them in with cordon sanitaires in the legislatures; in Britain, Reform is expected to sweep the next election with well over 300 seats, and is already dominating in local council elections. Then, of course there is Trump, who has now won three elections in a row.
So, through the grace of providence, Trump is in the Oval Office; riding in with him as staffers and political operatives are many representatives of the angry young white men of the virtual koryos. Rod Dreher was wringing his hands about the impiety of the groyper-adjacent young staffers he encountered in the imperial capital, who snigger at “antisemitism” and “racism,” hold “democracy” in contempt, and want to put the institutional legacy of the 20th century to the torch. Of course, a woman like Dreher is more concerned by “antisemitism” than by anything else, not realizing that this is mainly an in-group identifier, a means by which comrades signal to one another that they do not worship the idols of their enemies, that they reject these attempts to shame them into not taking their own side, and that they are on no one’s side but their own.
This insinuation of the virtual koryos into the state opens up important opportunities for the next phase, which should be to begin dismantling the captured institutions, appropriating their wealth, and lustrating their inhabitants.
The obvious place to begin is in the courts, and the necessary elements for a courtroom feeding frenzy are already in place. The 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard established that affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional; of course, universities have by and large ignored this ruling (thereby leaving themselves open to further legal action). In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services that “reverse” discrimination against majority groups does not need to achieve a higher burden of proof than cases involving discrimination against minority groups. In the 2024 case Duvall v. Novant Health Inc., a white male plaintiff was awarded $4 million in compensatory damages due to having been unjustly fired following a DEI-driven shakeup. The ongoing Missouri v. Starbucks lawsuit led by Missouri Attorney-General Andrew Bailey is challenging the legality of corporate DEI programs, providing a blueprint for future lawsuits against other corporations. On June 11, 2025, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum promising enforcement of Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Most recently, just a couple of days ago and in clear response to the Compact article, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission put out the word to white men to bring DEI-related discrimination to their attention (unfortunately, there’s a 180-day statute of limitations on EEOC complaints, but this is only one potential avenue of many).
We’ll start with the specific case of the universities, which are almost uniquely dependent on the government, and are by far the worst ideological offenders, indeed arguably the source of the problem. The universities are all quite clearly guilty of grievous violations of civil rights law, and there is no reason not to turn that body of law against them via class action lawsuits seeking to extract ruinous penalties. This can be paired with a broad spectrum of federal actions: DOJ investigations paired with massive fines; cutting off the supply of research grants; cutting off the supply of federal student loans. Similar actions can probably be pursued at the state level. Here it is worth pointing out that Trump is being very stupid in allowing 600,000 Chinese exchange students to be brought in for the purpose of propping up the universities; quite aside from the national security risk, there is no reason to prop them up, and he should instead be doing the opposite.
Meanwhile, private class action lawsuits — for example, from young white men and their parents, or young white male academics — can be launched on the basis of admissions and hiring discrimination. Apart from possible punitive damages, these would turn up internal documents in discovery, which could then be used to inflict reputational damage. University faculties and staff are notorious for leaving internal paper trails in which they admit to flagrant violations of civil rights law in the service of racial justice.
The overall strategy would be to starve the universities of capital flow while simultaneously raiding their capital reserves, with the goal of driving them to bankruptcy. The process can be accelerated enormously just by removing accreditation: Without the ability to grant degrees, a university ceases to be a viable enterprise. When it enters receivership, its assets — real estate, patents, copyrights, whatever remains of its liquid capital, trademarks, physical plant such as laboratories and IT infrastructure, everything — are acquired by a third party, which then has the opportunity to reconstitute the institution under new leadership.
Employment contracts of the recaptured institutions are rendered null and void, and former employees are strongly disfavored for re-employment. This is the lustration component. Exceptions can be made in cases in which individual employees, particularly those with essential technical knowledge, can demonstrate that they resisted or opposed DEI in some fashion; however, the presumption must be that the majority of those hired within the last 10 or 15 years were hired because of DEI, or support DEI, or more likely both. The old white men of course can be pensioned off into retirement, which will buy the complicity of most. The diversity hires are no loss.
In their place, the reconstituted universities should then prioritize recruitment of the young white men who were previously and wrongly excluded. Young white men with the right credentials exist in abundance, thanks to decades of the overproduction of doctorates: Finding good candidates won’t be a problem. They will then have the opportunity and resources to start fresh, to prove themselves, to rebuild and reimagine these institutions essentially from the ground up, bringing all of their youthful energy to the process. In practice, this amounts to much the same thing as the popular “building parallel institutions,” with the crucial difference that it includes a healthy infusion of startup capital.
The result of this would be to achieve almost immediate turnover of the personnel in higher education. Universities would no longer be fortresses of civilization’s enemies, but realigned with Western civilization. Enemies would be punished, and friends rewarded, at massive scale. This is essentially the Henry VIII strategy: To dissolve the monasteries, destroying the power of the Catholic Church in England, and using its massive store of wealth to build the Church of England in its place, and inject new vitality into the private economy.
It should be noted that the universities are already struggling. The demographic cliff resulting from an extended fertility drought is structurally reducing their customer base. Meanwhile, the feminization of the campus environment is coding academia as women’s work. Young men are simply avoiding university entirely. The intrinsic low status assigned to women’s work further contributes to prestige collapse.
All of these factors weaken the universities, making it that much easier to go after them. Their eventual collapse is overdetermined, but that which is falling should also be pushed.
So much for the universities. What about the private sector? The movie studios, the publishing houses, the television networks, the large corporations, the financial institutions? These are, of course, also just as guilty of systematic discrimination on the basis of race and sex; they are at least equally tempting targets for plunder or expropriation; and, crucially, they are also failing due to a decade of substandard products and services. Hollyweird just had one of its worst years on record, for instance.
Once again, class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Canceled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job.
As an example, every white male software engineer who’s struggled to find employment over the last few years could target IBM, which under Arvind Krishna is on the public record as discriminating against white male software engineers as a matter of policy. IBM/Red Hat are already involved in a lawsuit with an executive alleging that he was fired because he’s a white man, by the way. Maybe you limit the plaintiffs to engineers who actually applied to work at IBM; maybe you just open the lawsuit to every engineer with plausible qualifications and the wrong demographics, whether they submitted a resume or not. It doesn’t even matter if they necessarily would have been hired on the strength of their GitHub commits alone: Since they were white males, they were automatically (and illegally) disqualified. Dismantle IBM, send its H1Bindians back to the subcontinent, send its HR ladies to the unemployment line, and put cash money in the pockets of hundreds of thousands of engineers (and a whole lot of lawyers, who will probably also be young white men, because lawyers of diversity are probably not going to take that case).
Then repeat with Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google . . .
And of course, repeat for other corporations, across other industries, as necessary.
Blackrock has something like $13 trillion in assets under management, and around $160 billion of its own liquid capital. For its role in ESG, its direct assets should simply be fined away from it, Larry Fink should be thrown in jail, and its assets under management put in more responsible hands.
All of this no doubt sounds enormously destructive. Taken to its logical conclusion it would dismantle much of the U.S. corporate infrastructure. Concentrations of capital would be plundered and redistributed to ordinary private citizens, parceled out into millions of tiny payments. The American economy would lie in smoking ruins, but what did you think reparations meant? Vibes? Essays?
In practice, though, it probably would not be necessary to take things to quite this extreme. Making an example of a few high-profile corporations in a few key sectors would induce sheer pants-shitting terror in board rooms all over the country, and they would begin falling over themselves to very publicly and ostentatiously clean house and make amends. Many are in any case probably eager to do so: Diversity hires perform at a low level, political agitators are disruptive, and the consequences for the bottom line are plainly ruinous. The threat of bankruptcy via class action lawsuit would provide corporate boards and their officers with an excuse to lay off en masse the overburden of barnicular deadweight that they have accumulated in recent years, after which they could begin hiring on the basis of ability once again.
Courtroom looting of corporate America on this scale would indeed be economically catastrophic in the short term. A wise prince would not want this to continue for too long; after breaking his enemies, and satisfying his supporters’ hunger for justice and booty, he would seek to stabilize things. The only way to do this would be to gut the Civil Rights Act itself. It was precisely this notion of civil rights, this idea that “discrimination” is a priori evil, that led to the generational persecution of white men in the first place. Paired with the assumption of biological equality, every “disparate outcome” becomes evidence of discrimination, and therefore cause for legal penalty or regulatory intervention. The crescendo this reached during the Canceled Years was merely a hysterical zenith of a pattern that had been in effect since the mid-’60s.
From a purely practical perspective, so long as civil rights protections were only being applied to minority populations comprising a relatively small fraction of the population, their burden was manageable, a mere annoyance. As mass immigration grew, the fraction of “minorities” in the population, however, the injustice borne by the majority population — and particularly the injustice suffered by its best exemplars — became intolerable, to the degree that the option of picking up the civil rights sword has become not simply attractive, but necessary to survival. In the long term, however, over a large scale, this is simply untenable. It would break the economy completely, making every decision to hire and fire, to admit or exclude, to publish or reject, the seed of a potentially ruinous lawsuit. The only way to prevent this situation from spiraling out of control would be to re-establish absolute freedom of association, perhaps even via constitutional amendment (currently an implicit right to freedom of association is found within the emanations and umbras of the First Amendment, but this is interpreted narrowly as a right to join; to be meaningful, it must also be a right to exclude). Organizations — whether universities, corporations, neighborhood associations, churches, civil society groups, or volunteer organizations — must be allowed to discriminate in whatever fashion they choose, without fear of legal penalty. In practice, this would lead to the rapid re-establishment of meritocracy wherever it actually mattered, since employers who discriminated against the highest-performing groups would simply be out-competed by those who did not. Water would find its own level again, and nature would begin to heal. *
