Was There a Woke War on White Millennial Men? |
Media Criticism
Robby Soave | 12.19.2025 4:10 PM
Jacob Savage is a screenwriter from Los Angeles. And he may have written the definitive testament that explains why one specific demographic had it so rough this past decade. We're talking, of course, about white male millennials.
As a white male millennial myself, I approached his article—which was published earlier this week in Compact, and subsequently made a huge splash on social media—with some trepidation. After all, it can be pretty lame to whine about one's own victimhood. Moreover, blaming your bad economic prospects on sinister, larger-than-life forces is part of the conspiratorial mindset. And the tendency to pinpoint wokeness as the motivating ideology behind every destructive trend is starting to feel like punching down, to borrow a term from the woke lexicon itself. Donald Trump is president again, many social media platforms have largely abandoned content moderation, people who hurl obscenities at others are often rewarded (or at least see their punishment mitigated), and entertainment companies are more afraid of crossing the right than interested in catering to the left. Piers Morgan declares in the title of his new book that "Woke Is Dead," which might be something of an overstatement: I'm fairly confident that there are still zealots asking for trigger warnings and safe spaces on college campuses. But let's agree that we have at least defeated wokeness for the time being. To use a metaphor beloved by my fellow millennials, it now exists as a formless evil with........