How ‘Power + Prejudice’ Redefined Racism
With Jake Klein
In my interview with Jake Klein, we discuss his book Redefining Racism: How Racism Became Power + Prejudice. I read a pre-release of Jake’s manuscript some time ago, and I was struck by how thorough and well-researched it was. He does a fantastic job of really explaining the genesis of this concept and how it crept into our discourse.
Jake also spoke about how the majority of black people did not agree with many of the policy proposals that were designed to help them. He spoke to “conquering words,” as a way to influence people—something I’ve been speaking about for decades. This is the main way the latest ideology spread and became the zeitgeist. It changes the meaning and emotional valence of words, making them easier to accept.
From here, we spoke about the next culture war. I speculated that it could be legacy vs. non-legacy institutions (media, education, civil rights groups, etc.). We segued into my DMT experience and the alleged ontology of DMT realms. There are many accounts of atheists becoming believers when they’ve taken DMT, but to my knowledge not one of a believer who’s become an atheist.
We ended by discussing libertarianism, the meaning crisis, Rings of Power on Amazon, capitalism, and a few other topics. I hope you enjoy our conversation!
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.
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.