Thomas Sowell: Idea of 'systemic racism' a lie that has 'no meaning' and is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda

By Andrew Mark Miller of The Washington Examiner. 

"Economist Thomas Sowell expressed the belief that the term “systemic racism” has “no meaning” and that it reminds him of Nazi Germany.

“It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses,” he said, adding that the phrase’s currency is reminiscent of Nazi “propaganda tactics” and that people accept the lie after it’s “repeated long enough and loud enough.”

"It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels during the age of the Nazis," Sowell, who is black, told Fox News host Mark Levin on his show, Life, Liberty and Levin, during a Sunday airing. "It's one of many words that I don't think even the people who use it have any clear idea what they're saying. Their purpose served is to have other people cave in."

"They're absolute hypocrites," Levin said about today’s liberal Left. "They claim they want equality for all. They claim that there'll be the withering away of the ... police departments ... and yet every time you look at a Marxist state, it is an authoritarian, top-down, centralized police state."

The subject of the 2020 race came up during the interview, and Sowell, who identified as a liberal in his younger days before becoming a conservative, said that if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected and Democrats control Congress, it “could well be the point of no return for this country.”

The famed economist also discussed his new book on charter schools entitled Charter Schools and Their Enemies, speaking in favor of competition and agreeing with Levin’s belief that minority communities are often the ones that get hurt by opposition to charter schools.

Sowell, 90, was born to a poor family in North Carolina before moving to Harlem, New York, and ultimately earning degrees from Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. 

An author who currently serves as the Rose and Milton Friedman senior fellow on public policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Sowell has touched on race and perceived racial disparity in several of his books. In his 2004 book, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, he argues that affirmative action is a misguided practice.

“One of the few policies that can be said to harm virtually every group in a different way," he wrote. "Obviously, whites and Asians lose out when you have preferential admission for black students or Hispanic students — but blacks and Hispanics lose out because what typically happens is the students who have all the credentials to succeed in college are admitted to colleges where the standards are so much higher that they fail.”

Sowell has also opined on the issue of racism in America, explaining in 2012 that “racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”

Sowell’s appearance on Levin’s show comes as prominent black voices across the country, including Carol Swain, Marcellus Wiley, Niger Innis, Jason Whitlock, and Leo Terrell, have criticized the Marxist beliefs of Black Lives Matter, which the co-founder of the organization openly admitted."