♦ The Bible is flying off the shelves. Sales of the Good Book spiked 20 percent in 2024, marking a twenty-year high. Industry experts anticipate that 2025 sales will be higher still.
♦ Matthew X. Wilson penned a useful reflection on the appeal of transgressive right-wing figures such as Nick Fuentes (“How to Take Disaffected Young Men Seriously,” Public Discourse, November 4, 2025):
Very broadly, I think that disaffected right-wing young men generally share the following deeply rooted sentiments in common: first, the sense that everyone’s identity, community, and culture is being elevated, celebrated, and supported except for theirs; and second, the sense that the left is deliberately working to dismantle traditional conceptions of American identity and culture—to transform America’s cultural and social fabric into something unrecognizable—and that members of American conservatism’s old guard have been either naïve doormats in this insidious project, or worse, willful co-conspirators.
Disaffected young men see an economic system that doesn’t seem be working for them, with everything from being able to afford to get married and have children to the ability to buy even a modest house appearing far out of reach. They see a culture that has spun completely out of control; while woke illiberalism seems to have slightly receded after peaking in 2020 and 2021, conditions remain abysmal everywhere from elite university campuses to everyday spaces like public school classrooms and corporate workplaces. They observe the feminization of society and the quiet persistence of deeply embedded DEI structures that seem designed to give a leg up to everyone except straight white men. They see that tribalistic identity politics continues to be acceptable, but as usual, only for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Everyone gets to be affirmed, celebrated, and to feel like they belong except you.
But perhaps most importantly—and this is the case for nearly every disaffected young man I’ve encountered—there is an existential concern that they are losing their communities, their culture, and their country to extreme levels of immigration and the resultant rapid balkanization of society on identity-based lines.
Wilson goes on to note that condemnations are likely to be ineffective. As one young friend put it to me, “Charges of racism and anti-Semitism are sooo Baby Boomer.” Wilson:
The best way for older conservatives to respond to the rise of someone like Fuentes, I believe, is not to broadly condemn his young listeners as fellow travelers in Nazism and racism and just be done with the matter. Not only does such a strategy risk pushing young men further toward peddlers of those poisonous ideologies; it is also a lazy shirking of the governing class’s responsibility to offer young people concrete ideas and affirmative proposals to renew their hope in America’s future. To win back disaffected right-wing young men, it is imperative to offer them reason to believe that their lives may well be better than those of their parents and grandparents—that they will be able to comfortably raise children in a country their grandparents would recognize, and that America’s trajectory is on the upswing, rather than on an unstoppable course toward late-stage illiberal multiculturalism (see: the YooKay) and irreversible ethno-religious balkanization.
I agree with Wilson that a successful approach must lead with a positive vision for America’s future. It also should include a call to accept responsibility for building that future, which may require making sacrifices, perhaps heroic ones. Nattering on about Jewish conspiracies is a way of shirking that responsibility.
♦ If you think Wilson’s approach will be easy, read “The Lost Generation” (Compact, December 15, 2025) by Jacob Savage. His earlier essay, “The Vanishing White Male Writer” (Compact, March 21, 2025) documented the discrimination against white men in literary publishing. “The Lost Generation” broadens the scope of his research to encompass journalism, academia, and the art world. Savage focuses on the past decade, but what he documents was already occurring in academia when I was a graduate student in the late 1980s.
The facts are shocking. Here’s an example: “The Disney Writing Program, which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men.” The same pattern can be found at universities. “Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).” The University of California system exerted even greater discrimination against white men. “UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).” The same story in the art world: “The ‘Big 4’ galleries represent 47 millennial artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.”
The systematic elimination of white men from culture-making jobs has not been a conspiracy headed by Ibrahim X. Kendi. Rather, as Savage emphasizes, it has been an openly announced, much celebrated project led by Baby Boomer and Gen-X white men. Whether to protect themselves against DEI censure or because they are true believers, people like Jeffrey Goldberg (editor of The Atlantic) have remained loyal to the older white guys who were already in place, while guillotining the careers of younger white men.
Why did we have to wait for a screenwriter shafted by DEI to do elementary research about awards, fellowships, and faculty hiring over the last decade? Conservatives donate millions to D.C. think tanks, and nobody at those institutions exposed the damning facts about the discrimination that we all knew was taking place. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the conservative movement has for a long time been cowed or complicit.
Savage’s article should stand as a warning to any Boomer or Gen-X conservative who thinks he has the moral authority to police Gen Z online extremism.
♦ “Faith does not begin in continuity, but in rupture,” observes Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo. He is reflecting on Genesis 12:1, God’s command to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Cardozo continues:
Authentic belief requires an inner emigration—a bold refusal to remain imprisoned by habit, culture, or collective sentiment. The religious life is not an extension of the past but a revolution against spiritual complacency. God’s call to Avraham is therefore the most radical upheaval imaginable, and yet—and this is the paradox—it demands that one remain deeply oneself.
♦ Thirty-eight percent of the adult residents of Manhattan are married—a figure about 12 points lower than that for the nation as a whole. Fifty-one percent of Manhattan’s adult males and 48 percent of its adult females have never been married, a rate much higher than the national rate of 37 percent for men and 32 percent for women. Among the 1.6 million residents of the island, 24,312 have served in the U.S. military (1.8 percent, compared to 6.1 percent nationwide). The low level of military service stems in part from the high level of foreign-born residents in Manhattan (30 percent, compared with 14.3 percent nationwide), as well as from Manhattanites’ educational status (since the rate of military service declines with attainment of advanced degrees). Sixty-five percent of Manhattanites have a bachelor’s degree or higher; the national rate is 36 percent. None of these percentages are surprising. As I’ve often noted, Manhattan is an island off the coast of America.
♦ A few years ago, I penned an op-ed, “Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates” (Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2021). To say I’ve stopped altogether is not accurate. As I explained, I’ve simply become more skeptical of elite degrees and less inclined to treat them as a sign of promise in young people. Rose Horowitch recently gave me more reasons. She reports remarkable statistics about the large numbers of students at fancy universities who claim disability designation for ADHD, anxiety, and depression (“Accommodation Nation,” The Atlantic, January 2026). “At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of students are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent.” It’s 38 percent at Stanford. By comparison, “only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations.” That difference speaks volumes. Either rich kids at top universities are more emotionally fragile and psychological vulnerable than median kids at ordinary schools are (a red flag when it comes to hiring), or they lie and dissemble to get disability status to secure more testing time (which is not a good trait in an employee).
♦ I learned with sadness that Norman Podhoretz passed away on December 16. The first time I met him was at a party in New York. He came up to me, jabbed his finger into my chest, and said, “You’re wrong about Jack Kerouac!” (I had recently published a sympathetic article about the Beatnik writer, “The End of the Road,” October 2008). I held my ground, but just barely. Norman was a formidable man! After we finished jousting over Kerouac, I told him that his book, Breaking Ranks, had played an important role in my life. I had stumbled upon his account of his defection from the dominant left-wing consensus in a used bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue north of Columbia University. An undergraduate at the time, I was beginning to doubt liberal pieties. I thanked Norman for helping me break ranks. May his memory be a blessing.
♦ The smartphone’s invasion of daily life and the coming onslaught of artificial intelligence raise a crucial question: What does it mean to be human? The Center for Christian Studies (our partner for the annual First Things Lecture in Austin, Texas) is offering a seven-day course to address this question. Center of Christian Studies director Keith Stanglin will lead the class, and our own Carl Trueman will be one of the guest lecturers. The class begins on Monday, January 29 (7:00–8:30 p.m.) and meets on subsequent Mondays through March 9. You can participate in person or on Zoom. The regular class fee is $150 for the seven sessions. Subscribers to the Journal of Christian Studies (published by the Center for Christian Studies) or First Things can sign up for $100. If you subscribe to both, the fee is only $50!
♦ Joe Schmitz of Macon, Georgia would like to form a Readers of First Things group (ROFTers). If you’d like to a gather monthly to discuss articles in the most recent issue of First Things, you can join by getting in touch: jeauxschmitz@gmail.com.
♦ As I write, year-end contributions are flowing into the office. I’m very grateful for the generosity of thousands of readers. You support ensures the strength and excellence of First Things.
