One of the most diabolically clever notions the Left has ever devised in order to advance its Marxist agenda has been “systemic racism.” Systemic racism is everywhere and nowhere, requires no evidence of actual discrimination in order to make its case, and will result, if followed to its logical conclusion, in the implementation of an unlimited number of wealth confiscation and redistribution schemes.

It’s so useful that “experts” keep finding it in more and more places, and absurdity is no bar for how low they will go. Their audience, after all, is Leftists, who are already accustomed to swallowing absurd claims on an industrial scale. And so the latest claim, that even wild animals are suffering from the effects of this all-pervasive malady, was just another day for the Left’s propaganda mill.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported Saturday that “scientists” — that is, the infallible high priests of the Left’s secular religion, never to be questioned or regarded with the slightest degree of skepticism — “claim that there are fewer wild animals in neighborhoods where mostly people of color live – and their absence is affecting residents’ mental health.” Violence among racial minorities? It was because there were no squirrels, Your Honor.

It seems that “a research study that looked into the genetic diversity of wildlife in neighborhoods across the United States found government rules that previously mandated separated neighborhoods based on race, is still having lingering after-effects on where animals choose to live decades on.” And inevitably, “the study suggests that areas where mostly white people live have a greater diversity when it come to animals living in the area.”

This pseudo-intellectual rubbish was actually published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which the Daily Mail tells us is a “peer-reviewed scientific journal,” a designation that should mean something and perhaps once did, but now only means that woke professors examined the work of other woke professors, found it ideologically acceptable, and slapped the authors on the back.

As ridiculous as all this is, however, it should not be taken lightly. The study claims that “the practice of redlining essentially drove out woodland creatures from minority neighborhoods leading to negative effects on the mental and physical well-being of minority residents.” Redlining, a practice that was “most commonly used in the 20th century and was based on racial and ethnic discrimination,” involved “financial institutions, insurance companies, and other businesses” drawing “lines on a map to define areas where they will or will not provide services, such as mortgages, insurance, or loans.”

That sort of thing has been illegal since 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was passed, but these Leftist academics have a clear goal in claiming that minorities and even wildlife are still suffering from the effects of this discrimination. That goal, of course, is radical and forcible resettlement of people in order to achieve “equity.”

Inconceivable? Hardly. This business about wildlife suffering the effects of “systemic racism” coalesces neatly with the Left’s handwringing about racist trees. Remember that back in November 2021, alleged Vice President Kamala Harris appeared at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where she interrupted a presentation to ask if NASA could “measure trees” in the cause of “environmental justice.”

The video showed the NASA presenter discussing “climate adaptation strategies” when Harris interrupts to ask, “Can you, can you measure, um, trees?” The presenter responded “Yes!,” and Harris plowed on: “‘Cause part of that data that you are referring to, and it’s in EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhood where people live.”

What Harris had in mind was “tree equity,” the idea that minority communities suffer disproportionately from global warming because they generally live in urban areas that get even hotter than the rest of the country does as the internal combustion engines keep eating away at our protection from the sun’s rays, because there is a relative lack of trees compared to the rich, white suburbs. So what we need to do, you see, is plant a lot of trees in urban areas, or forcibly move the poor into wealthy areas, and vice versa.

Old Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda actually spends $3 billion of your money and mine on “tree equity,” because as it turns out, according to the Tree Equity Score website, trees are “critical infrastructure that every person in every neighborhood deserves.” In fact, like so many other things these days, they’re “a basic right that we must secure.”

However, trees are currently distributed in a racist manner: “But a map of tree cover in America’s cities is too often a map of income and race. That’s because trees often are sparse in low-income neighborhoods and some neighborhoods of color. Ensuring equitable tree cover across every neighborhood can help address social inequities so that all people can thrive.”

Back in the early days of the Soviet Union, the Communists forcibly turned the wealthy out of their homes, so that they could be divided up into apartments for The People. Nothing like that could ever happen in the United States, right? With all the fashionable talk these days about the need to eradicate “systemic racism,” it would be unwise to be too sure.

References:

pjmedia.com - Robert Spencer