“Systemic Racism” Is the Biggest Conspiracy Theory of Them All

“The reason, as we will shortly see, that it is fair to characterize systemic racism as a nutty and sweeping conspiracy theory is that racism is, again and again, simply assumed to be the universal, underlying, unitary cause of multifarious phenomena for which other, more parsimonious, accurate, and complex explanations are blithely ignored or dismissed.”

“[W]e all start with a profound and powerful tendency to believe that what we see repeated everywhere must be true. The beginning of wisdom…is to recognize this as a fundamental illusion. The most important truths tend, on the contrary, to be rare and secret, covered over by what is repeated everywhere.” – Arthur M. Melzer

It is, by now, a commonplace occurrence for prominent figures on the Right to be tarred with the charge of supporting one or more ideas labeled as “conspiracy theories,” whether QAnon, Pizzagate; the Great Replacement; climate change denialism; Cultural Marxism; wildfire-starting Jewish space lasers; the Hunter Biden laptop controversy and the larger Biden-Ukraine shenanigans linked to it; the claim that the 2020 election was stolen through either outright fraud or just due to Big Media’s and Big Tech’s fat thumbs on the scale; that the media is generally anti-conservative or engages in an anti-conservative censorship and disinformation campaign involving government collusion, deplatforming, blacklists, and shadow-banning; any number of claims about the Coronavirus (COVID-19), whether that it was a “plandemic,” that it was the result of a leak from a lab linked to gain-of-function research supported by Anthony Fauci, that the vaccines are infused with Bill Gates’ microchips, or that the vaccines have significant, serious side effects and are not actually especially safe or particularly effective. I will leave it to each individual reader to decide which of the items on this list are true (which, of course, some are), which are utterly loony conspiracy theories (yes, there are some of those here as well), and which fall somewhere in between these poles. My focus here is different. While former President Donald Trump’s election fraud claim is often called the “Big Lie” by some, what truly deserves that moniker, coined in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, is the lie that has been repeated so often and been spread so far and wide by every establishment media outlet, educational institution, pandering politico, and multinational corporation that its total topsy-turviness has become invisible to us. I am speaking, naturally, of “systemic racism.”

With the welling up of open anti-Semitism on most elite college campuses in the United States and the exposure of Harvard University’s elevation to its vaunted presidency of an unqualified, serial plagiarist Claudine Gay as a blatant affirmative action hire, the toxic DEI empire that has so thoroughly infiltrated our institutions finally has been subjected to some much-needed mainstream scrutiny. But after Gay was finally ousted long after her white peer, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, was removed after their disastrous congressional testimony concerning such campus anti-Semitism, Gay and her backers still had the temerity to claim that her race was the cause of her downfall—rather than, as is obvious to most fair-minded observers, the principal reason for her undeserved and rapid ascent through the Harvard bureaucracy. But why do such topsy-turvy accusations of racism still have any traction whatsoever? Surely, it is because the nutty idea that systemic racism continues to run wild in America has been seeded in all of our minds.