White Guys: The Original DEI Hires
Once upon a time in Silicon Valley, a barefooted, turtlenecked messiah named Steve Jobs declared he would change the world. Armed with little more than an outsized ego, a penchant for quoting Bob Dylan lyrics, and an army of engineers who actually knew how to build things, Jobs conjured what biographers have dubbed his “Reality Distortion Field.” This was no mere leadership style—it was a force of nature, a gravitational pull of pure conviction that convinced people to ignore reality, suspend disbelief, and accept that Apple was not merely a company but a revolution.
Apple, under Jobs’ reign, became a cult disguised as a tech company. It sold sleek, overpriced machines which encouraged users to “think different,” which conveniently translated into “paying more for the same hardware.” Yet, the narrative was irresistible: Apple was for the people, the anti-corporation corporation, the underdog for creative disruptors. Never mind that it aggressively monopolized its ecosystem, exploited overseas labor, and hoarded cash like a dragon on a pile of gold. The story was the thing, and at the center of the story stood the white, male genius—the innovator, the visionary, the natural-born leader.
This archetype is hardly unique to Jobs. The myth of the singular, exceptional white man is the bedrock of American ideology. “All men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, conveniently omitting that he was defining “men” as white, landowning, cisgender dudes who had more powdered wigs than moral consistency. This idea—that white guys are the natural stewards of innovation, leadership, and civilization itself—has been the unspoken (and sometimes loudly spoken) hiring policy of every major institution in the West. And, ironically, this makes them the true DEI hires.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs have long been framed as an assault on “meritocracy,” as if corporate boardrooms had ever been filled by the best and brightest rather than the best connected and the loudest parrots of corporate buzzwords. The reality is that the most fragile beneficiaries of a rigged system are now throwing tantrums because their monopoly on power is being questioned. For centuries, white men have been handed opportunity after opportunity, with no diversity statements required. They inherited wealth, networks, and institutions built on their predecessors’ successes (or, most often, their predecessors’ theft and exploitation). Their entitlement to leadership is so deeply ingrained that any deviation from the status quo feels to them like oppression. It seems that electing a black man president was the last straw.
Enter the backlash. As soon as the mere suggestion arose that maybe—just maybe—people who weren’t born into the old boys’ club might also deserve a seat at the table, the self-proclaimed paragons of meritocracy began wailing about “wokeness.” Conservative think tanks, billionaire-funded media empires, and Twitter’s most obnoxious contrarians launched an all-out war against DEI initiatives, alleging that prioritizing diverse talent somehow meant abandoning quality. This argument falls apart when one remembers that these are the same people who think Elon Musk is a genius and that nepotism is just “keeping it in the family.”
The most telling part of this existential crisis is how far these men are willing to go to maintain their unearned supremacy. If inclusivity threatens their reign, they would rather burn the entire system to the ground than share power. Whether it’s dismantling affirmative action, gutting institutions that push for diverse hiring, or decrying any form of social progress as “cultural Marxism,” their response to even the slightest challenge is an apocalyptic meltdown. They claim to be fighting for fairness but are, in reality, fighting to preserve their historical advantage—because they know, deep down, that they were never competing on a level playing field in the first place.
And so, as the world shifts beneath them, they flail, they rage, they tweet insufferable threads about how hard it is to be a straight white male in 2025. But the truth is simple: if being the best and brightest was ever actually a requirement, they would have been the first to go. Their DEI hire status is expiring, and instead of adapting, they’d rather torch the office on their way out.
And that, my friends, is the real reality distortion field.