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Telling Off White Men - And in the Wall Street Journal, no less.
Front Page Magazine ^ | 7 Mar, 2025 | Bruce Bawer

Posted on 03/07/2025 5:31:54 AM PST by MtnClimber

The op-ed was entitled “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” and it appeared the other day in the Wall Street Journal. White men, it charged, have a “victim mentality” – even though they’re back on top. Not only has Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, but for white dudes, everything’s coming up roses:

The manosphere won. Bro podcasters top the charts. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declares his company needs more “masculine energy.” Elon Musk shares a post saying only “high-status males” should run the country. The White House kills diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and so do multiple companies, from Target to McDonalds.

Yet white men keep complaining: for over half a century they’ve “blamed others for their job losses, educational failures, economic problems and drug addictions….Somebody else is always at fault. The mighty white guy, it turns out, is quite the delicate flower.”

Who wrote this intrepid j’accuse? Her name is Joanne Lipman. I checked out her Wikipedia page. She was raised in suburban New Jersey; her mother was a “programmer analyst,” her father a CEO. At Yale she got she got a summa cum laude in history. She’s worked at Conde Nast, as “chief content officer” for Gannett, and as editor-in-chief of USA Today. She’s on the Council of Foreign Relations. And she married her husband, an “entertainment lawyer,” at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

Yes, it’s all right out of one of those New York Times wedding announcements. Which is another way of saying that Lipman is a member of the progressive cultural elite from Central Casting.

But back to her article. Whatever else it might have been, it was a perfect specimen of Conde Nast copy – not a sincere effort to argue a serious point, but a slick stretch of prose intended to gratify upscale left-wingers by telling them what they want to hear, even if it turns the truth on its head. How clever to assert that the very people who’ve complained about victim mentalities are the ones who really have a victim mentality! How cunning to contend that it’s the “mighty white guy” who’s really “the delicate flower”!

It’s cute. It’s facile. It’s oh so glib. It’s adorably contrarian. And it’s patently untrue. Indeed, it’s pretty offensive. In 2025 America, men – most of them white – still do the dirty jobs, the deadly jobs, the thankless jobs. Many of them choose not to go to college because the environment is so toxically anti-male. Instead they take hard jobs, real jobs, and work long days until they’re bone-weary – only to turn on the TV in the evening and hear themselves demonized by the likes of Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow.

Of course, when it comes to dishonesty, Lipman gave Sharpton and Maddow a run for their money. Instead of fairly representing the argument against DEI, she actually harkened back to the 1970s to cite an episode of All in the Family on which Archie Bunker “complained about a female colleague whose pay was equal to his.” Lipman quoted Archie: “What’s the point of a man working hard all his life, trying to get someplace, if all he’s gonna do is wind up equal?!”

Does anyone really believe that this line of fifty-year-old sitcom dialogue sums up your average white American male’s point of view in the year 2025? No. It doesn’t even sum up what your average white American male was thinking in the 1970s: Archie, the working-class bigot from Queens, was a fool, a buffoon, a cartoon character – the fever dream of Malibu mega-producer Norman Lear.

Yes, Lipman included in her op-ed the obligatory “to be sure” sentences, acknowledging that in recent decades, while women have begun “earning more college degrees than men,” the loss of manufacturing jobs has resulted in the denial to “white men without college degrees” of “opportunities for a robust middle-class life.” She admitted that the media have long depicted men as “idiots” and that “white guys aren’t all sexists or racists.” Gee, thanks. Talk about faint praise. Still, she insisted that white guys have it far too good to be complaining.

Of course, the timing was perfect for Lipman’s dose of nonsense. In the November election, every county in the nation shifted to the right. Wokeness seems to be crumbling. What a time to go solidly against the grain, to rally the PC crowd! What could be more wonderfully contrarian than defending DEI at a time when a presidential administration that was a total DEI freak show (a gay Transportation Secretary who took paternity leave; a health official who was a portly man in a bad wig; an imbecilic black lesbian press secretary; a “genderfluid” nuclear-waste administrator who stole suitcases at airports; and a mushmouthed vice president whose only credential was being Indian, Afro-Jamaican, and female) has yielded to a dream team of men, women, gays, blacks, Hindus, etc., all of whom are presentable, and all of who are there on sheer merit?

And this is all that most white men have been asking for – equality, fairness, meritocracy. Period. Reading Lipman’s piece, I recalled the time when comedian Adam Carolla, who began his career doing menial work on construction sites, testified to a congressional committee that he waited seven years after applying for a job as a fireman to be granted an interview. Waiting in line at the fire department he asked the black woman behind him when she’d applied. “Wednesday,” she said.

Carolla’s was not a unique personal story. Many men have them. When I went to grad school in the 1980s, which I was able to afford because of a teaching assistantship that covered my tuition, it was virtually impossible to get fifth-year financial support – if you were a white male. Fortunately, I finished my Ph.D. in four years. But the one black woman in the program didn’t. She ended up getting not only fifth-year support but sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and (if memory serves) even tenth-year support. That’s how desperate the department was to have a black female Ph.D. to point to.

Does Lipman really buy her own snide line about white men’s wimpy fear of “the scary DEI monster,” her premise that DEI is a tool of social justice, a cure-all for sexism and racism – rather than the decidedly unjust enemy of merit, skill, and effort? I sorely doubt it. She’s not the kind of writer who’s mounting the barricades in the name of illuminating reality, speaking truth to power, setting the facts straight. No, I think she’s just one more soldier in an army of smug, complacent pseudo-journalists whose role, as they see it, is to ratify the knee-jerk mindsets of upscale, Democrat-to-the-death readers – in this case, affirming those readers’ disdain for the the overwhelmingly white male riffraff who farm their food, build their homes, connect their electricity, and maintain their roads.

I understand, then, why Lipman is a hot ticket at Conde Nast, where such glib garbage belongs. But why would the Wall Street Journal, one of the few remaining bastions of reasonably sane commentary in the legacy media, choose to run such a piece – especially since its most steadfast readers are, by and large, white males?


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: brucebawer; joannelipman; wallstreetjournal; wallstreeturinal; wokeism; wsj; wsjhatespeech; wsjsedition
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To: MtnClimber

They are only concerned about the top 10 percent of white guys. The other 90 percent are invisible.

Also they include Jews with whites. Remove them and the story is a lot different.


21 posted on 03/07/2025 6:01:12 AM PST by alternatives?
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To: MtnClimber

White Karens are the worst followed up by black girl bosses. The next 12 years is going to be very tough for them because I know Vance is gonna secure the next election.


22 posted on 03/07/2025 6:03:38 AM PST by wildcard_redneck ( )
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To: All

Be glad White men are just complaining for now.


23 posted on 03/07/2025 6:04:50 AM PST by escapefromboston (Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.)
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To: MtnClimber

Stupid bitch doesn’t deserve a rebuttal. Just needs to be ignored. That will bother her more.


24 posted on 03/07/2025 6:06:59 AM PST by HYPOCRACY (Long live The Great MAGA Kangz!)
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To: FLT-bird

The problem is we let it go on too long. I graduated from college in 1975. When I went to a headhunting firm for an interview, I was flat out told behind closed doors that as White man I’d be hard to place. But if I was a woman or especially a Black or Hispanic woman, I could have my pick of jobs with Fortune companies.

For whatever reason the country and White men in particular put up with that crap. We didn’t stand up to it when it started and push back. Now we have a huge hole to dig the country out of. I’m not sure one four-year term is going to be enough to correct 4-5 decades of this stuff.


25 posted on 03/07/2025 6:09:09 AM PST by redangus ( )
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To: MtnClimber

Grade “AAAA” Bullshit


26 posted on 03/07/2025 6:10:04 AM PST by antidemoncrat ( )
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To: MtnClimber
from bloomberg:

65% of the population is white. this means less than 10% of available whites were hired.

imagine if the top 500 companies only hired 10% of the available blacks and hispanics... 1.2% of all positions.

this is called DISCRIMINATION and we shouldn't put up with it.

27 posted on 03/07/2025 6:10:31 AM PST by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: MtnClimber

A white woman I knew found it impossible to find a job in public relations, a field in which she was well qualified. Her prospective employers told her that although her credentials were excellent, they had to fill the position with a racial minority. And on one occasion, when the minority didn’t work out, they told her that they had to find another.

In desperation, she considered a name change, translating her English last name to Spanish. But she eventually quit and went into business baking cakes.


28 posted on 03/07/2025 6:13:36 AM PST by Fiji Hill
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To: MtnClimber

Gee, I wonder if the huge swing of young male voters to Trump in 2024 has anything to do with her attempt to diminish the discrimination these males feel? Nice try honey.


29 posted on 03/07/2025 6:18:21 AM PST by DeplorablePaul
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To: MtnClimber

There were more Archie Bunkers out there than people want to believe. That’s why the show was so popular. Many of us saw parts of our dads and uncles in Archie. And while he was supposed to be a buffoon, in fact he was more the poster child for the hardworking, socially conservative ‘Silent Majority’ that elected Nixon in a landslide. People Norman Lear would have never met and obviously had great disdain for.

On the other hand, Meathead was supposed to be the epitome of the right-thinking young foil to the Archie’s of the world. In fact, he came across as an overbearing, progressive asshole who had no problem living off Archie’s hard work while denigrating him and his culture at every opportunity. Kind of like Ms. Lipman.

Mr. Lear probably didn’t know it, but he really created a show that resonated with much of America in a way he never intended.


30 posted on 03/07/2025 6:18:34 AM PST by redangus ( )
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To: MtnClimber

Well, while Harvard seems to have been first over the cliff to ruin its reputation with worthless summas for mastering the deepstate garbage, Yale seems to be playing catch-up.


31 posted on 03/07/2025 6:21:11 AM PST by AndyJackson
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To: Cletus.D.Yokel

Jewish people are not to blame because you are a loser.


32 posted on 03/07/2025 6:22:39 AM PST by MeanWestTexan (Sometimes There Is No Lesser Of Two Evils)
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To: MtnClimber

The Wall Street Urinal is a POS. Toilet paper wasted to print far-left communist garbage.


33 posted on 03/07/2025 6:23:00 AM PST by FlingWingFlyer (SCOTUS stuck it to Americans again. Africa and other failed communist dumps are our responsibility.)
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To: MtnClimber

Appears to be more of a potential candidate for employment in a house of ill repute, not journalism...


34 posted on 03/07/2025 6:26:13 AM PST by lgjhn23 ("On the 8th day, Satan created the progressive liberal to destroy all the good that God created...")
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To: MtnClimber
Of course, the timing was perfect for Lipman’s dose of nonsense. In the November election, every county in the nation shifted to the right. Wokeness seems to be crumbling. What a time to go solidly against the grain, to rally the PC crowd! What could be more wonderfully contrarian than defending DEI at a time when a presidential administration that was a total DEI freak show (a gay Transportation Secretary who took paternity leave; a health official who was a portly man in a bad wig; an imbecilic black lesbian press secretary; a “genderfluid” nuclear-waste administrator who stole suitcases at airports; and a mushmouthed vice president whose only credential was being Indian, Afro-Jamaican, and female) has yielded to a dream team of men, women, gays, blacks, Hindus, etc., all of whom are presentable, and all of who are there on sheer merit?

Of course they were!

They were the very best at what they did.

They were there to be showcases of DEI.

They did their jobs with utmost excellence.

35 posted on 03/07/2025 6:29:29 AM PST by Pontiac (The welfare state must fail because it is contrary to human nature and diminishes the human spirit.)
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To: Jonty30; Cletus.D.Yokel; AFB-XYZ
To them, white people are the enemy and the solution is elimination.

You know why? Whyt peepo make sh!tty slaves is why.

36 posted on 03/07/2025 6:29:47 AM PST by numberonepal (WWG1WGA)
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To: TTFlyer

Yeah, it do be that way. They say it don’t, but it do.


37 posted on 03/07/2025 6:31:00 AM PST by numberonepal (WWG1WGA)
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To: escapefromboston; Cletus.D.Yokel
Be glad White men are just complaining for now.


38 posted on 03/07/2025 6:35:28 AM PST by numberonepal (WWG1WGA)
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To: numberonepal

Quite possibly.
I can see a thirst for revenge over history and Christianity being seen as a polytheistic religion being another religion. I know some think they would be advancing God’s Kingdom by eliminating Christianity. I’ve heard say the words to this effect.


39 posted on 03/07/2025 6:36:51 AM PST by Jonty30 (I have invented blackened salmon salad by baking it in the oven for too long. )
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To: hinckley buzzard

“Baser is a real writer, but he missed on Archie Bunker. The program was such a raving success because so many Americans, men and women alike, identified with Bunker’s populist reaction against the liberal mind virus. Norman Lear, who had intended the opposite, was distraught at what he had done. He had inadvertently tapped into a deep well of discontent.”

You are right. I remember seeing a guy in the 70’s wearing a T-shirt with Archie Bunker’s image and the caption: “In your heart, you know he’s right.”


40 posted on 03/07/2025 6:40:07 AM PST by I-ambush (From the brightest star comes the blackest hole. You had so much to offer, why didya offer your sou?)
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