How a White Man Got Rich Denouncing ‘Rich White Men’

By Daniel Greenfield July 03, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 If you give Garrett Neiman $29.95, he will tell you how terrible rich white men are in his new book, “Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys’ Club and Transform America“.

Neiman, previously the author of “The Case For Why I Should Pay Reparations”, is a rich white man who, as far as his bio indicates, has never worked at an actual job in his life. While his booking agent informs us that, “in his spare time, Garrett likes to run, travel and try new restaurants”, the Harvard grad gets paid by rich white men to tell us how awful they are.

This woke sadomasochism finally culminated in the nepo baby writing a book funded by the Ford Foundation about the evils of people like them. In a perfect synergy, the book’s introduction comes from Robin DiAngelo: a white woman who got rich calling white women racists.

In his opening chapter, Garrett reveals his privilege of asking “a wealthy white couple if I could borrow their lake house for a month rent free so I could write under ideal conditions.” And then from the lake house, he took a break from his demanding job advocating for racial reparations at a black-led organization to write a book about the sheer awfulness of rich white people.

Especially all those who don’t provide free lake houses for professional class warriors.

Garrett, who has spent his career jumping from one social justice venture to another, is a pro whose entire existence serves no other purpose than to expose the hypocrisy of social justice.

What does it take to “uproot the old boys’ club”? A book deal with Hachette, one of the biggest publishers in the world owned by Arnaud Lagardère, a French billionaire, whose company also put out, “In Defense of Looting”, and representation from the William Morris Endeavor Agency: which also reps Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and is run by super-agent Ari Emanuel.

Arise oppressed workers of the world, cast off your chains and phone your agent.

Also helping Garrett uproot that old boys club is the WEF, he’s a World Economic Forum Shaper, a Milken Institute Young Leader, a Goldman Sachs Intriguing Entrepreneur, a McKinsey Associate and other vanguards of the working class revolution.

“I wasn’t always aware of the ways unearned advantages have helped me to get ahead,” Garrett writes before becoming aware of “my trajectory as a wealthy white man.”

That’s why in 2019, Garrett raised “$1.3 million from a dozen major donors to launch a new field building organization fueling America’s Black-led racial repair movement”. Fresh from leading a “black-led” movement, Garrett joined Prosperity Now, a “leading racial economic justice organization”, as a Senior Racial Equity Fellow to help black people close the wealth gap.

Even though the most obvious way for Garrett to close the wealth gap with black people would be to stop being a rich white man by giving all his money (and his job) to black people.

But if Garrett were no longer a rich white man, how would he get jobs denouncing them? As a poor white man, Garrett’s existence would challenge the concept of white privilege. So he must remain rich, not because he enjoys life in Ann Arbor, but to serve as an example of everything that is wrong with our society, and to get jobs and book deals based on his wrongness.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Garrett once “courted billionaires and other powerful white men, ‘only to discover they were part of the problem,’” Prosperity Now’s press release informs us.

Prosperity Now is funded by Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation and Bank of America.

Garrett claims that he’ll be helping Prosperity Now “manage and reduce predictable white backlash” with the support of Target, Wells Fargo, MetLife and other black minority groups.

In 2013, a puff piece on Neiman begins by noting that, “when foundations started tightening their belts after the economy took a nosedive five years ago, Garrett Neiman knew where to turn to find support for his fledgling charity: wealthy individuals.”

Wealthy individuals continue to subsidize his prolonged career in social justice.

The Left is built up out of Garrett Neimans, Ivy League grads who create non-profit startups and then hop from one startup to another. Garrett’s bio informs us that he “has co-founded three nonprofit organizations” since 2008. His girlfriend, an Indian doctor, apart from being a med student, managed to found two of her own groups. What starts out as a gimmick for getting into a good college then becomes a lifelong career of leftist politics funded by… rich white men.

To understand the woke nightmare we’re living, it’s as good a place to start as any.

Garrett Neiman co-founded Liberation Ventures, the “black-run” movement, with Aria Florant, a fellow Harvard student and McKinsey vet. The incestuous hellscape of Harvard students and McKinsey consultants, the intertwining of corporate DEI and billionaires funding class warfare is how we ended up with a parasitic professional managerial class of activists with careers, not convictions, who get jobs campaigning against their own existence.

What does Neiman truly believe?

Currently, the Talented Mister Nieman describes himself as a “wealthy white man”, and the “beneficiary of inheritance”, but a few years ago when he was pitching Harvard, he related how “my dad worked seventy hour weeks turning around a struggling day care center”.

When convenient, Garrett is a poor white man and when convenient, he’s a rich white man.

In a hilariously performative outburst, Garrett reveals learning that his great-grandfather did not like black people. “When my Dad shared our family secret with me, I inherited the ghost of my great grandfather’s racism. I felt the Monster living inside me. I still do,” Garrett agonizes. He waits until his Indian girlfriend gets home to tell him. “By the time she got home, I felt like I was covered in blood, that I had done something horrible I didn’t know I was capable of. A voice in my head was pleading. I’m the same person. I promise. Please believe me. Would she understand? Would she see me differently? Would she trust me less? Would she still love me?”

(Conveniently left unasked is the question about how racially tolerant his girlfriend’s Brahmin great-grandpa was. Or how racially tolerant anyone born in the 19th century really was.)

Garrett calls this white shame, but it’s really a theatrical posturing of exaggerated sensitivity, mining the distant past for materials to dramatize into fake promotional moral crises. The more hidden racism Garrett discovers, the more he can dedicate his career to atoning for it by getting racial equity jobs and writing books denouncing the horrible racism of rich white men like him.

It’s little wonder that Robin DiAngelo saw in Garrett another of her kind.

Present day elites may wear different outfits, but fundamentally they function the same way. There are economic elites, ‘rich white men’ who actually do productive things, and social elites who gatekeep, gobble up resources and wreck society in order to shore up their power.

Garrett, like most leftists, dishonestly equate the two, and that stands to reason because the leftist activist class, from Engels to Neiman, fall into the category of social elites, who create nothing, but gain power by manufacturing status from their posturing on the public stage.

The old social elites were often useless, but at least ornamental. Garrett, who boasts of having worked with Google, interviewing Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and of having been a voting member of Stanford’s Board of Trustees, has all the status of the elites he decries, is certainly not productive, not remotely ornamental, and has built his career on wrecking America.

“Today, on Juneteenth, I am committing to dedicate the rest of my career and life to advancing racial justice,” Garrett Neiman declared three years ago.

Black people, white people, and all people might benefit if Garrett gave up his commitment to cashing in on black pain and white guilt and got a real job. Any job. His great-grandfather, whom he denounces as a racist, started a pickle plant. Garrett could go and run his own pickle plant, but that would mean actually working for a living. Becoming a rich white man by advancing racial justice is much easier than becoming rich by working for a living.

That’s why the stores are empty and the social justice organizations are full. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.