Before I understood the vast scope of how activist Left ideology would be driving cultural change, I noticed that “THE” definition of racism had changed overnight to power+prejudice. It was somehow just a done deal, presented as though we had all come to a new agreement on what was a sea change.
At the same time, the somewhat hidden nature of the fact that this definition was changed allowed them to play their favorite game of Motte and Bailey/shared vocabulary but two very different dictionaries. Who isn’t against racism meaning treating people differently and negatively based simply on their perceived racial identity? So one agrees to support anti-racism and finds out eventually that it’s not about shared power and opportunities, but about one particular category of people having absolute power if they fit into some ever-changing racial identity.
So I used my few opportunities to call out this new definition of racism only to be met with blank looks. It’s not that my acquaintances or members of the church groups were SJWs—it’s that they couldn’t imagine how this new lingo could potentially lead to big adverse changes.
Maybe I recognized the import because I had seen feminists making a similar move when they pushed the simplistic construct that rape is ever and always about nothing but power, and not about sex.
A fascinating conversation between Jake and the great Peter Boghossian! I am familiar with Prof. Boghossian from his work with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose during the Grievance Studies Affair. I’ll discuss in this comment only the portions of the discussion Jake highlighted over at the Black Sheep. Okay, let’s start with the part of redefining the word racism. The history that Jake discusses here was not known to the vast majority of Americans before he rediscovered it last year. The names Patricia Bidol, Robert Terry, Alan Hurwitz, and Judith Katz would be totally foreign to most people. Only Stokely Carmichael would be familiar to your average person. Stokely Carmichael destroyed SNCC by ousting John Lewis as Chairman and expelling all the white activists from the organization. I was not aware of Terry’s book “For Whites Only” from 1970. It’s sounds like Robin DiAngelo basically wrote a carbon copy of it! No surprise there, she’s a lazy plagiarist and grifter, so I’d expect nothing less. These radical white “anti-racist educators” were contacted by well-meaning Detroit area corporations including GM, who wished to better understand racism, to come in and teach them their ideas. The activists saw this as a golden opportunity to indoctrinate these corporate executives and get their radical ideas into the boardroom using their infamous “insider-outsider strategy.” They would indoctrinate the board of directors and then through protests and agitation make them bend to their will. The ironic part is most black Americans hated these ideas when polled on them. But they trashed anti-racist literature largely by black social scientists and endorsed by most black Americans and moved forward with their own. They claimed the whole time they were doing this for the black community-all while speaking over them and ignoring their wishes. Talk about a white savior complex! They had one bad! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Redefining Racism is one of the most important books of the 21st Century and it is worthy of the Pulitzer Prize! Stokely Carmichael, James Elder, Patricia Bidol, Robert W. Terry, and Judith Katz are NOT civil rights heroes! Real civil rights heroes would be folks like W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, and the great man who’s birthday we celebrate today-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As to what you discussed about Atheism and DMT, I am a pious Lutheran and a believer. I’ve had extraordinary experiences in my life that deepened my faith and proved (at least to me) that a God does exist and created this whole universe. I’m not really into Atheism and never like the New Atheist types like Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Though I did find some of their opinions to be worthwhile. I would disagree with Jake about not trusting the Bible. First off, I am a contextualist. I understand the Bible was written by men not by God and that the stories contained within it didn’t literally happen. They are a series of metaphors and parables. I derived my moral compass and the way I live my life from them. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have had a profound effect on my personal morals and values. As for DMT, I’d previously heard Joe Rogan discuss his experience with the drug. I definitely think people being able to obtain a higher plain of consciousness and getting closer to some sort of higher power is very interesting and I believe the effects of the drug require further study. On the part about capitalism, I think Jake is right. We have to blame individuals for holding bad personal values NOT capitalism itself. To make change we need to get people naturally to adopt better values. As to capitalism, it can used for good or evil. For instance, capitalism is neither racist nor anti-racist. When used however, it can be a powerful weapon to combat it. I’ll use a few examples. While slavery may have enriched individuals, businesses and universities, it did not enrich the South or America as a whole. As Thomas Sowell has explained, if anything it slowed the South’s economic growth. In the colonial days, Virginia was the wealthiest state in the Union. But by the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Pennsylvania has surpassed it. The free states generally were more prosperous than the slave states. In the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the train car companies joined the NAACP in suing the state of Louisiana to end racial segregation on rail cars. This is because in addition to being immoral, racial segregation was expensive. Lastly, in Apartheid South Africa companies were often penalized by the government for hiring black employees to higher positions then was legal. This is because they knew they were missing out on higher profits by not elevating the best talent regardless of race. Also, a number of whites-only townships rented out rooms to blacks and racial minorities as it was better for business to do so. In fact, one whites-only township was majority-minority. Not to mention white South African employers preferred hiring blacks to poor whites because the former were hard working, punctual and dependable and the latter were not. Jake is right about how national reconciliation will be accomplished. A truth and reconciliation committee probably wouldn’t happen. As the mainstream press and Washington establishment are beginning to realize, nobody trusts them anymore. The more they see this the more they’ll get outside their bubble and start covering the people of this country accurately in turn leading to the opening of a national dialogue.
I have come to my own conclusion about the term "racism". I would define it as thus:
A political mythology built by the [ left/SJWs/Cultural Marxism/whatever ] to:
(1) assert white/European/Western people are the villains of human history,
(2) keep minority groups living in a perpetual state of persecution complex and grievance to exploit, and
(3) keep said "white" people in a state of guilt ridden self-loathing and maintain a taboo against organising around their own self-interest.
The funny thing is that it is mostly white people actually enforcing the above definition. It is also the template for how other terms like "sexism" and "homophobia" are structured. The common sense semantics are long gone and we are living in the 1984 world of language curated for political outcome.
Hello Peter! I’m a huge fan of your work to sustain our democracy through free-speech advocacy and criticizing social bodies that have lately been promoting harmful rhetorics and woke agendas. As a twenty-something conservative minded individual, I really resonate with many of your discussions over the years.
I write to you today as a metaphorical unicorn... Though I'm conservative, a Trump voter, and a pro-life Christian I am a DEI Specialist... I've been in this role since 2020 and have even recieved certification as a Diversity Practitioner. With that being said, I am curious of your thoughts on this. As a conservative, I'm VERY aware of the sentiment DEI has on our side of the table. I even agree with that the vast majority of DEI practice pushes harmful narratives and agendas that have been disguised as DEI, and I don't participate or align with these things at all.
For additional background on my work: I serve a large non-profit organization that specializes in care for individuals with disabilities, veterans, individuals needing recovery or rehabilitation, etc. The most vulnerable people in our society (in my opinion). My DEI practice more involves things like consumer self-advocacy, employee relations, and aiding the organization's culture in these really divisive times. I believe DEI has been a vessle to navigate these social challenges that our consumers and employees face where there are no real groups (at least within my organization) established internally that is equipped with the knowledge of culture, people-skills, and sociology as I'd say DEI is. Also, I've managed to put the radical absolutist thinking of BLM and LGBTQ groups at bay and help to establish a workspace that truly promotes freedom of thought. After Trump won this previous election, I urged leaders in the company to continue a bi-partisan approach and respect everyone's voting choice despite whatever qualms they had. This has been so helpful in reducing many internal conflicts that could disrupt the quality of care our consumers recieve, and has bettered many working enviornments where radical liberals and conservatives can find balance. Another instance you might be interested in, was an occasion where and LGBTQ therapist was ready to ostricize a pychiatrist as "not safe" because the phychiatrist wouldn't grant a consumer for top surgery. After discussions with that therapist and further investigation, we were able to repair their working relationship and remove the harmful narratives that sprung from that instance by helping the therapist to know that the psychiatrist was well in their clinical power to choose this and shouldn't be deemed harmful for giving their medical opinion. The psychiatrist wasn't even against trans-related procedures, but didn't feel experienced enough in that area to put their medical liscense at risk for allowing it.
I really believe that DEI has been harmful and many organizations and private practioners aren't certified and take an approach that is so divisive and sickening to society. We shouldn't force white people to sit in a circle and take responsibility for slavery or racism, nor blindly support causes that contribute to the breakdown of society (like forcing pronouns in bios). Many people will have to answer to their DEI practices, and as someone who has never contributed to those actions, I'm looking forward to that day of accountability.
I really would love to talk more with my conservative allies to find a way to hold general DEI practices taken up by radical movements accountable while still sharing it as a tool that has been pivotal to my experience in the human and health services field. (I'm not talking about college campuses because DEI has no place there in my humble opinion.) I would love to have your opinions about this as a representative of free thought which I too am so passionate about. I am fully willing to abandon this effort if I find that I will be forced to do things for a woke agenda that conflicts with my ethics and morality. But, I disagree with our political leaning and would like a leader adept in socio-political critique to help.
Thank you for your time and attention to this post. Again your content has really inspired me throughout my work and has kept me in check, and I look forward to hearing a response.
Before I understood the vast scope of how activist Left ideology would be driving cultural change, I noticed that “THE” definition of racism had changed overnight to power+prejudice. It was somehow just a done deal, presented as though we had all come to a new agreement on what was a sea change.
At the same time, the somewhat hidden nature of the fact that this definition was changed allowed them to play their favorite game of Motte and Bailey/shared vocabulary but two very different dictionaries. Who isn’t against racism meaning treating people differently and negatively based simply on their perceived racial identity? So one agrees to support anti-racism and finds out eventually that it’s not about shared power and opportunities, but about one particular category of people having absolute power if they fit into some ever-changing racial identity.
So I used my few opportunities to call out this new definition of racism only to be met with blank looks. It’s not that my acquaintances or members of the church groups were SJWs—it’s that they couldn’t imagine how this new lingo could potentially lead to big adverse changes.
Maybe I recognized the import because I had seen feminists making a similar move when they pushed the simplistic construct that rape is ever and always about nothing but power, and not about sex.
Yes. And the definitional change has also infected dictionaries as well. Look up “woman,” as an example.
❤️
A fascinating conversation between Jake and the great Peter Boghossian! I am familiar with Prof. Boghossian from his work with James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose during the Grievance Studies Affair. I’ll discuss in this comment only the portions of the discussion Jake highlighted over at the Black Sheep. Okay, let’s start with the part of redefining the word racism. The history that Jake discusses here was not known to the vast majority of Americans before he rediscovered it last year. The names Patricia Bidol, Robert Terry, Alan Hurwitz, and Judith Katz would be totally foreign to most people. Only Stokely Carmichael would be familiar to your average person. Stokely Carmichael destroyed SNCC by ousting John Lewis as Chairman and expelling all the white activists from the organization. I was not aware of Terry’s book “For Whites Only” from 1970. It’s sounds like Robin DiAngelo basically wrote a carbon copy of it! No surprise there, she’s a lazy plagiarist and grifter, so I’d expect nothing less. These radical white “anti-racist educators” were contacted by well-meaning Detroit area corporations including GM, who wished to better understand racism, to come in and teach them their ideas. The activists saw this as a golden opportunity to indoctrinate these corporate executives and get their radical ideas into the boardroom using their infamous “insider-outsider strategy.” They would indoctrinate the board of directors and then through protests and agitation make them bend to their will. The ironic part is most black Americans hated these ideas when polled on them. But they trashed anti-racist literature largely by black social scientists and endorsed by most black Americans and moved forward with their own. They claimed the whole time they were doing this for the black community-all while speaking over them and ignoring their wishes. Talk about a white savior complex! They had one bad! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Redefining Racism is one of the most important books of the 21st Century and it is worthy of the Pulitzer Prize! Stokely Carmichael, James Elder, Patricia Bidol, Robert W. Terry, and Judith Katz are NOT civil rights heroes! Real civil rights heroes would be folks like W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Julian Bond, and the great man who’s birthday we celebrate today-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As to what you discussed about Atheism and DMT, I am a pious Lutheran and a believer. I’ve had extraordinary experiences in my life that deepened my faith and proved (at least to me) that a God does exist and created this whole universe. I’m not really into Atheism and never like the New Atheist types like Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Though I did find some of their opinions to be worthwhile. I would disagree with Jake about not trusting the Bible. First off, I am a contextualist. I understand the Bible was written by men not by God and that the stories contained within it didn’t literally happen. They are a series of metaphors and parables. I derived my moral compass and the way I live my life from them. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount have had a profound effect on my personal morals and values. As for DMT, I’d previously heard Joe Rogan discuss his experience with the drug. I definitely think people being able to obtain a higher plain of consciousness and getting closer to some sort of higher power is very interesting and I believe the effects of the drug require further study. On the part about capitalism, I think Jake is right. We have to blame individuals for holding bad personal values NOT capitalism itself. To make change we need to get people naturally to adopt better values. As to capitalism, it can used for good or evil. For instance, capitalism is neither racist nor anti-racist. When used however, it can be a powerful weapon to combat it. I’ll use a few examples. While slavery may have enriched individuals, businesses and universities, it did not enrich the South or America as a whole. As Thomas Sowell has explained, if anything it slowed the South’s economic growth. In the colonial days, Virginia was the wealthiest state in the Union. But by the eve of the Civil War in 1860, Pennsylvania has surpassed it. The free states generally were more prosperous than the slave states. In the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the train car companies joined the NAACP in suing the state of Louisiana to end racial segregation on rail cars. This is because in addition to being immoral, racial segregation was expensive. Lastly, in Apartheid South Africa companies were often penalized by the government for hiring black employees to higher positions then was legal. This is because they knew they were missing out on higher profits by not elevating the best talent regardless of race. Also, a number of whites-only townships rented out rooms to blacks and racial minorities as it was better for business to do so. In fact, one whites-only township was majority-minority. Not to mention white South African employers preferred hiring blacks to poor whites because the former were hard working, punctual and dependable and the latter were not. Jake is right about how national reconciliation will be accomplished. A truth and reconciliation committee probably wouldn’t happen. As the mainstream press and Washington establishment are beginning to realize, nobody trusts them anymore. The more they see this the more they’ll get outside their bubble and start covering the people of this country accurately in turn leading to the opening of a national dialogue.
I have come to my own conclusion about the term "racism". I would define it as thus:
A political mythology built by the [ left/SJWs/Cultural Marxism/whatever ] to:
(1) assert white/European/Western people are the villains of human history,
(2) keep minority groups living in a perpetual state of persecution complex and grievance to exploit, and
(3) keep said "white" people in a state of guilt ridden self-loathing and maintain a taboo against organising around their own self-interest.
The funny thing is that it is mostly white people actually enforcing the above definition. It is also the template for how other terms like "sexism" and "homophobia" are structured. The common sense semantics are long gone and we are living in the 1984 world of language curated for political outcome.
Hello Peter! I’m a huge fan of your work to sustain our democracy through free-speech advocacy and criticizing social bodies that have lately been promoting harmful rhetorics and woke agendas. As a twenty-something conservative minded individual, I really resonate with many of your discussions over the years.
I write to you today as a metaphorical unicorn... Though I'm conservative, a Trump voter, and a pro-life Christian I am a DEI Specialist... I've been in this role since 2020 and have even recieved certification as a Diversity Practitioner. With that being said, I am curious of your thoughts on this. As a conservative, I'm VERY aware of the sentiment DEI has on our side of the table. I even agree with that the vast majority of DEI practice pushes harmful narratives and agendas that have been disguised as DEI, and I don't participate or align with these things at all.
For additional background on my work: I serve a large non-profit organization that specializes in care for individuals with disabilities, veterans, individuals needing recovery or rehabilitation, etc. The most vulnerable people in our society (in my opinion). My DEI practice more involves things like consumer self-advocacy, employee relations, and aiding the organization's culture in these really divisive times. I believe DEI has been a vessle to navigate these social challenges that our consumers and employees face where there are no real groups (at least within my organization) established internally that is equipped with the knowledge of culture, people-skills, and sociology as I'd say DEI is. Also, I've managed to put the radical absolutist thinking of BLM and LGBTQ groups at bay and help to establish a workspace that truly promotes freedom of thought. After Trump won this previous election, I urged leaders in the company to continue a bi-partisan approach and respect everyone's voting choice despite whatever qualms they had. This has been so helpful in reducing many internal conflicts that could disrupt the quality of care our consumers recieve, and has bettered many working enviornments where radical liberals and conservatives can find balance. Another instance you might be interested in, was an occasion where and LGBTQ therapist was ready to ostricize a pychiatrist as "not safe" because the phychiatrist wouldn't grant a consumer for top surgery. After discussions with that therapist and further investigation, we were able to repair their working relationship and remove the harmful narratives that sprung from that instance by helping the therapist to know that the psychiatrist was well in their clinical power to choose this and shouldn't be deemed harmful for giving their medical opinion. The psychiatrist wasn't even against trans-related procedures, but didn't feel experienced enough in that area to put their medical liscense at risk for allowing it.
I really believe that DEI has been harmful and many organizations and private practioners aren't certified and take an approach that is so divisive and sickening to society. We shouldn't force white people to sit in a circle and take responsibility for slavery or racism, nor blindly support causes that contribute to the breakdown of society (like forcing pronouns in bios). Many people will have to answer to their DEI practices, and as someone who has never contributed to those actions, I'm looking forward to that day of accountability.
I really would love to talk more with my conservative allies to find a way to hold general DEI practices taken up by radical movements accountable while still sharing it as a tool that has been pivotal to my experience in the human and health services field. (I'm not talking about college campuses because DEI has no place there in my humble opinion.) I would love to have your opinions about this as a representative of free thought which I too am so passionate about. I am fully willing to abandon this effort if I find that I will be forced to do things for a woke agenda that conflicts with my ethics and morality. But, I disagree with our political leaning and would like a leader adept in socio-political critique to help.
Thank you for your time and attention to this post. Again your content has really inspired me throughout my work and has kept me in check, and I look forward to hearing a response.