So, uh, to kind of wrap things up, you have a new book out, Redefining Racism. It's excellently composed. Thank you. It goes through various arguments and historical analysis kind of where racism ended up and how you are arguing for a consolidated, more clean, as you say, colorblind version of combating racism. Isn't it, I wonder to what extent racism has become a thought terminating cliche, or in other terms, a totem that itself just needs to be let go of. It has too much cachet. When I started my work in the taco sphere, it was because of this anti-racist racism at the Evergreen State College. And I looked at that for a long time and I examined it and I broke it down and I regurgitated it. And at the end of the day, I switched over to the other contentious issue of the day, gender, because racism seems to be so entrenched to so many people's lives and identities racism itself not just their race but racism itself that it just seems like a perpetual motion machine that just continually serves itself and is just kind of uh just a cultural engine and then in 2020 it re it reached its zenith And now it's kind of fallen to the wayside. There was this rather comical article in the New York Times, of all places, talking about how black women were trying to save the republic, and now they're just tired, and they're going to go take naps because their candidate lost, you know, it's just, but this kind of post George Floyd era where Kendi and Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates are kind of no longer the standard bearers. And racism itself is kind of, it's dubious to me. Why do we care so much about, why do we spend so much time on it? How important is it? You said it's utterly evil, but I think that's almost giving it too much power. It shouldn't matter at all. That's

my position. Well, there's a distinction between race and racism, right? Race shouldn't matter at all. That I agree with fully. And racism, you know, apart from maybe a small regression, you know, over the last decade or so, in large part due to these woke figures that you name, but then there's also been, you know, I think a right wing counter reaction and some corners, you know, is apart from that regression is the least important it's ever been in hundreds of years. And I think that's wonderful. I started writing this book in the period of peak wokeness, really before actually, I had a lot of this story even before the George Floyd riots started. And what the book does is it tells the history of this definition of racism that I was hearing around a lot back then, and you'll still hear it in academic spaces and many places it will come towards you, which is that racism is power plus prejudice. And that sounded strange to me the first time I heard it because I've always understood racism to be prejudice or discrimination by race. And now what they're saying is, no, no, no, we want to do that if it helps take down the power group and restore basically, frankly, some communist version of equality. It goes back to that concept of

legal plunder, basically, but it's moral plunder.

Yeah, I think that's a great phrase for it. So I wanted to understand where that came from. And so I tracked the lineage of that idea. And what I found is something not contradictory to, but distinct from, I think, the narrative that you uncovered at Evergreen and that, you know, our friends, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay and Brett Weinstein and people like that have uncovered this critical theory and postmodernist academic grounding, that certainly undergirds the ideology of it. But where in practice, who first defined racism as power plus prejudice, and who got that to take it off, got that to take off so that, you know, it's being used everywhere. Like I first heard it in a cable news interview. And that it's often being used to excuse away racism when it does something in the name of woke social justice values. And what I found was that it came from white high school teachers in the Detroit who had been inculcated with black nationalist ideas and specifically Marxist black nationalist ideas, like traditionally Marxist, namely from a guy named Stokely Carmichael, who was the founder of the Black Power Movement, who, he moved to Africa at one point in his career, like to form a communist, like pan-African black ethno state and becomes friends with like poorly and becomes friends with, uh, uh, mass murdering dictators, you know, such as Idi Amin. Um, so, so wacky, wacky guy. Um, and what, what he was the head of a group called SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which at one time was a very important and positive civil rights group, but then got taken over by Carmichael and the Black Power segment. And when they did, they kicked out all their white activists and said, teach our ideas back in the white community. That merges with these white, again, not academics, high school educators who were trained in. In bad

metaphors such as knapsacks.

Yes. Yes. I mentioned Peggy McIntosh in that essay in the book, but this predates that. That's about 20 years later, I think. This group dynamics psychological tool that's developed out of this organization called the National Training Laboratories. It still exists. Um, and this, they use psychologically manipulative techniques. The organization was literally founded by this psychologist named Kurt Lewin, who worked for the OSS during World War II, running psychological warfare operations. from that to teach by white people teaching white people these ideas based on black nationalism. They called it back then new white consciousness. And this was idea of like being aware of your nature, like as a white person, this predates critical race theory. This predates critical whiteness studies. Critical whiteness studies seems to take all this stuff up, but it's not the source of it. And they teach this for a while and they keep just trying to build their way into institutions. And eventually it explodes with Robin DiAngelo, which we lived to witness. And it's this cult philosophy over the years, they've managed to, believe it or not, as crazy as Robin DiAngelo sounds, sanitize a lot of it. But it's the exact same ideas. Like, you know, you wouldn't hear Robin DiAngelo say this, but you would hear the earlier ones, that the best you can be as a white person is an anti-racist racist because all white people are racist by definition. You know, they called their philosophy new white consciousness, which is culty. It literally was culty. The techniques that they learned at the NTL Institute were also used by famous cults, namely one called Synanon, which like, you know, it started as like, we're going to be a drug rehabilitation center like AA, but they shaved each other's heads and they used this technique that, um, it wasn't created at NTL, but it was derived from NTL techniques called attack therapy, where they just yell at each other and like break them down and cause all these like psychological issues to like get them to change. Yeah. Struggle sessions. And the, you know, so I think this white anti-racism, we've long called it a cult, but I think I make the argument here. It's not just like a cult. It is a cult. It uses the same cult dynamics techniques that were used by famed cults. It has the same intellectual lineage in large parts. You just are mixing different things into it instead of this Alcoholics Anonymous-like stuff, instead of a lot of other things that cults might be based in. It was this anti-racism, this new white consciousness that they developed. So that's the book. And I do think it matters. Like, I really believe in anti-racism properly defined. Like, I, this book comes out of my work against identity politics, identity politics, identity politics about race are inherently racist. I want to have that colorblind society. I think we have regressed and I don't want to see that regression get worse because, you know, I think we know the cruelty that was done to people because of racist beliefs. And, you know, I just think, I think it matters. Like, yeah, it's not as serious now as it was, you know, in the early 1960s, but we're forgetting something. And I think that it's important we remember that. And that's why, you know, this book is about protecting the definition of racism. It's telling the story of these people that work to redefine racism, to make it a tool towards their activist ends, that manipulated language to just kind of slyly swap out the concepts that we've all been using, that we all used to understand each other. But then by just telling people, no, no, no, you didn't understand it fully. It actually meant this. They've managed to change their ideology without many people being even aware that that's been done to them. So I hope by telling this story, I hope I can get some liberal-minded but left-wing people to realize what's been done to them and return to the truly anti-racist philosophy of the civil rights movement. I

think we can make a case, mutually beneficial, that if somebody starts by watching Am I a Racist? Like, oh, yeah, this stuff is kind of silly. Then they graduate to the Evergreen story documentary that I did. And you're like, no, this is actually totally crazy. And I think your book fits in the slide to where why the people were acting as they were acting at evergreen that's one of the biggest responses to the evergreen documentary that i did it's like why are they acting this way what do they want why are they acting this way and it's a totally that you can scan it as a cult but i think it and and at the center of her at the root of it is robin d'angelo and ideas are explicitly stated at the very beginning of their whole transformation into an anti-racist college. They brought in Robin DiAngelo's ideas and then they had her come in and teach. You're like, this is absolute insanity stuff to make, to, to use as the foundation for a college, let alone for a society or like a little social experiment. And no wonder it turned out the way it is. But I think that your book fits into actually like breaking down historically and ideologically through the kind of their own version of rationality or purification. simplification or vanilla vacation maybe is another term, uh, purification of these ideas from, uh, from, from a, from a lineage that's what 80, a hundred years old now. So

the story that I tell starts in the year 1967, but of course you can start this at any point because everything has a, you know, a precedent and, you know, you can look at, my story picks up with classical Marxism. So you could go back and look at the origins of classical Marxism. You could look at tribal psychology and how something like Marxism was even able to take off and appeal to people. But I started in the year 1967 because there were major riots across the United States that year. And the biggest of them was in Detroit. And it was the reaction to those riots that got the funding for these people to spread their philosophy. So at the time, Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, was the governor of Michigan. And he and the mayor and city business leaders, they wanted to stop riots like this from happening again. So they engaged in what was widely referred to as riot insurance, where they paid off black nationalists to go do their projects. And one of the things that got funded by that organization was an organization called New Perspectives on Race. And this New Perspectives on Race publishes the high school curriculum for an anti-racism course, where power plus prejudice is used as a definition for the first time, where it first appears on print ever. And it's just a single bullet point. Doesn't explain why it's there. Doesn't explain how they came to that definition. And so it took a lot of research to kind of uncover that mystery. And that's the story I tell. So that's why it starts in 1967. But you could really start it at any point.

Yeah.