The time has come to shed the beta male coil and what passes for it as “leadership” and be real men again. Donald Trump is back in office, and this time, he’s there for chewing gum and kicking butt — and he’s all out of gum. Commentators like Joe Rogan and Dan Bongino (until his appointment as FBI deputy director) present an alpha male persona on the air, and in the latter’s case, what could be more manly than leaving a multimillion-dollar radio job to help run the top law enforcement body in the country?

While there are extreme examples like the Tate brothers who are the bad apples that ruin it for the rest of us, overall it’s a pretty good time to be an old-fashioned guy. You know, the blue-collar worker whose sons follow in his footsteps as they decide a trade is right for them and can take advantage of a resurgence in vocational education to get a financial and career jump on their college-bound peers kind of guy.

Yet there’s always some Karen to lament about the situation, isn’t there? In this case, it’s the former editor of USA Today, Joanne Lipman, who asks in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” The delightfully named Lipman asserts, “For 50 years, we’ve been hearing from men who feel threatened by the gains of women and minorities. Now that the manosphere is in charge, the victim mentality has to go.”

In her litany of charges, Lipman harkens back a half-century to a time when white Detroit police officers protested the “reverse discrimination” favoring black and female officers, and Archie Bunker complained in front of a sitcom audience, “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?!”

Eventually, she muses, “With white guys now dominating government, popular culture, the airwaves and our brain space, it’s puzzling why the victim mentality still persists.” She concludes, “The cries that DEI has somehow ruined white men’s lives are particularly head-scratching considering that, as a recent Wall Street Journal analysis revealed, corporate diversity initiatives have had relatively little impact on the workforce. Yet white guys are still insisting that they’re being terrorized by the scary DEI monster, blaming it for everything from the California wildfires to the Potomac plane crash to the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. And the most powerful and privileged among them continue to complain the loudest.”

The funny thing about reading her diatribe is that yours truly and Mrs. Lipman are almost equal in age, so we both grew up in the era when Archie Bunker ruled the airwaves and the nation was still trying to figure out just how much affirmative action was needed to give the aggrieved minorities and females parity with the “good old boys club.” Perceived discrimination against women didn’t affect her career, it seems, as Lipman eventually went from an Ivy League school to the aforementioned Wall Street Journal as a reporter, advancing to become editor there, and then moving on to USA Today to become its editor-in-chief. As for me, a simple living product of a Midwestern public state university, I respect her career and ability to be a working mother, particularly since most of her employers have succeeded with her in charge.

But there’s no denying that the cultural pendulum has swung way too far the other way when it comes to white males, as they are often portrayed as bigots or buffoons in mass media. In the case of Archie Bunker’s character, it was a little of both. For a white male to be a sympathetic character, they often had to be a beta male or have a pronounced softer side. That didn’t play well with the laid-off factory workers from the Rust Belt, and it’s taken a toll as expressed in suicide rates. According to the CDC, males make up 50% of the population but nearly 80% of suicides.

Most men believe that gender and cultural background aren’t interchangeable when it comes to these matters. Placing someone in a position over their physical or mental ability level just for the sake of DIE (the proper acronym given its effect) is detrimental to society at large and can lead to tragic results. It creates scapegoats like Army Captain Rebecca Lobach and former Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, whose errors in judgment or performance may not have been gender-related but will always, fairly or not, leave that DEI mark on their legacy. Far from being victims, we white males, whether alpha or beta, just seek to have the same opportunities as everyone else because we know there are certain situations and vocations where we are more suited to succeed.

That’s not a complaint or a privilege; that’s just common sense.