Here is an update of Joe Queenan’s classic satire, adapted for the “Lost Generation” debate sparked by Jacob Savage and provocative column by Ross Douthat, amplifying a controversial essay by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine. The duo directly linked structural dysfunctions in the American elite to the rise of the anonymous “Dissident Right.” Specifically, Savage argued that otherwise splendid young white men were now pouring into such “ornamental” occupations as shitposting, physique-posting, and amateur eugenics because good careers in the “culture industries”—Hollywood, publishing, academia—were no longer available to them.
Lauding this “Lost Generation” as a “shadow elite” forced into the digital wilderness, Savage skewered American society for reneging on its promises to high-IQ young men such as L0rd_Humungus, RawEggNationalist, and BronzeAgePervert—Natural Born Posters all.
Yes, it was Savage and Douthat’s contention that intellectually curious young males who would once have found gainful employment as New Yorker fact-checkers or creative executives at Disney were now being offered a brutal, Darwinian choice: Perform degrading ideological acts with people named “CatboyKami,” or starve.
When I read Savage’s account of the brilliant minds trapped in the “digital underground,” my initial reaction was: This guy is coping. Surely, Savage didn’t expect me to believe that Ivy League graduates were pouring into the “Groyper” movement just because Netflix wasn’t hiring. Surely he didn’t expect me to believe that young men were being forced to choose between a career in marketing or a career in memes. Surely, Savage was mistaken.
But when I went out to investigate, I found to my astonishment that Savage was right. In a series of encrypted chats with anonymous posters going by such names as Based_Consultant, Trad_Wife_Hunter, Deus_Vult_CPA, and Pepe_The_Analyst, I found that these men did find themselves trapped inside an economic leviathan, and that brutal Darwinian logic did lay at the root of their decisions to enter the radioactive world of dissident posting.
Where Savage and Douthat had gone wrong was in assuming that young men were entering the “Dissident Right” out of a deep spiritual hunger or a rejection of liberalism. In fact, every anon I spoke with said that his decision to enter the degrading world of competitive racism was actuated by one factor: the widespread implementation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“The 2020 DEI surge drove me into this business,” Based_Consultant told me as he prepared to thread a 40-part analysis on the decline of Western civilization titled “Why The Longhouse Must Burn.” “If the Democratic Party had just allowed meritocracy to remain blind, I could have secured that Junior Associate role at Bain & Company and remained a centrist liberal. Absent the opportunity to climb the corporate ladder—out of fear that I don’t contribute enough ‘lived experience’ to the team—I’ve been forced to abandon liberalism and take a job as a radical reactionary.”
Other anons echoed this sentiment.
“Do I feel degraded by appearing on Twitter Spaces with avatars of Greek statues, where I have to praise Caesarism and perform perverted intellectual acts on helpless, supplicant egalitarians?” asked Trad_Wife_Hunter rhetorically. “Of course I do. But do I blame myself? No sir. I blame the HR department at Conde Nast. If there was any way I could have landed that internship at Vanity Fair without writing a diversity statement, there’s no way I’d ever go near a ‘vitalist’ bodybuilding forum.”
Adds Deus_Vult_CPA: “My father supported himself for 45 years by being a mediocre white executive who coasted on his handshake. But that option isn’t available to me. Sure, I have a healthy portfolio filled with blue-chip opinions and a Master’s degree from Yale. But the confiscatory levels of affirmative action in the C-suite prevent me from failing upwards. That’s why I have to do this. That’s why I have to post the frog.”
Pepe_The_Analyst, star of such viral threads as “The Physiognomy of the HR Department” and “We Are So Back (To Segregation),” feels that America is jeopardizing its intellectual future through unfair hiring practices.
“It’s a vicious cycle we’ve gotten into,” he says, as he prepares to dox a journalist for The Atlantic. “In an earlier, more innocent time, a guy like me would have gone into the non-profit industrial complex, maybe launched a centrist think tank, traded favors at the Council on Foreign Relations. But with the demographic mandates being what they are, what’s the use? So I went the ‘national divorce’ route.”
As I came away from my DMs with Based, Trad, Deus, and Pepe, I felt a new admiration for Jacob Savage and Ross Douthat. Before I’d been apprised of these recent developments in the dissident sphere, I’d naively assumed that the men who went into the “underground” were revolting, anti-social, exhibitionist nihilists who didn’t mind being cancelled to own the libs. But after reading Savage’s article and going out to check the facts for myself, I was flabbergasted by the connection between our floundering hiring protocols and the rise of the anonymous right-wing influencer.
As Based_Consultant so aptly puts it: “If the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action were actually enforced by corporate HR, and you were allowed to be a generic white guy without any apology whatsoever, there’s no way I would be tweeting ‘Total Aryan Victory.’ But thanks to the refusal of the private sector to heed the warnings of people like Christopher Rufo and Elon Musk, I’ll probably be doing this stuff for the rest of my life. I blame all of this on the Ford Foundation.”
