Irrational Obsession with Racism Fueled by Fraudulent Claims

Karmelo Anthony was rightfully convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf. The spurious concept of systemic racism in America is a divide and conquer tactic and a huckster racket.

On June 9, 2026, a jury in Collin County, Texas found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. The case and trial were subjects of national attention, with viral social media posts emphasizing the races of the perpetrator, who is Black, and the victim, Austin Metcalf, who was White

The murder occurred on April 2, 2025, during a Frisco Independent School District track meet at Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco, Texas, when 17-year-old Anthony fatally stabbed 17-year-old Metcalf in the chest. Both were high school athletes from rival schools—Anthony from Centennial High School and Metcalf from Memorial High School.

The incident happened in the Memorial High School tent during a break in the track meet due to rain. Anthony claimed he sought shelter in Memorial’s tent because he could find none in his own school’s tent. Witnesses reported that members of Metcalf’s team, including Austin and his twin brother Hunter, asked Anthony to leave multiple times.

According to witness accounts, Anthony was defiant and said something like “Touch me and see what happens” while reaching into his backpack. Metcalf then stood and pushed or grabbed Anthony to force him from the tent. Anthony pulled out a knife and stabbed Metcalf once in the chest, injuring his heart. He fled the scene but was quickly arrested. Metcalf was rushed to the hospital but died from his injury. Anthony later admitted to the stabbing but claimed it was in self-defense.

The incident reminded me of my experience attending a Texas high school in the 1980s, in which brawling at sporting events was a common occurrence. Once, at a basketball game hosted by my high school, some of my friends got into a brawl with boys from the opposing school. I jumped into the fray to defend a friend who was getting beaten. His assailant turned his attention to me and threw a right cross that knocked me unconscious. For a few seconds, some of my friends thought I was dead.

At a subsequent basketball game against the same school, some of my friends spotted the boy who had knocked me out, and proposed that I challenge him to a rematch. I walked over to the opposing team’s bleachers and asked the boy (who happened to be black) if he was indeed the guy who knocked me out. He smiled and answered in the affirmative.

“That was a hell of a punch you threw,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied.

“He’s a golden gloves champion,” one of the boy’s friends said.

“Is that true?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, smiling.

“I guess that explains it,” I said, which caused his friends (who were white) to burst out laughing.

“Be careful who you get into a fight with!” one of them jeered. I didn’t ask for a rematch, but bashfully walked back to my home school bleachers under the watchful gaze of my friends.

None of our high school brawls had anything to do with race. They were adolescent rivalries of the sort portrayed by S.E. Hinton in her 1975 novel Rumble Fish, set in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In my day, the notion of entering a rival high school’s tent at a track meet and refusing to leave was considered suicidal. Only the most thrill-seeking among us would have even considered it. Thus, it seems to me that Karmelo Anthony’s decision to enter a rival team’s tent with a knife in his backpack can only be interpreted as the most extreme form of looking for trouble.

In my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, I examine how fraudulent claims of “systemic racism” became a common and destructive feature of American public life in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The following is an excerpt from the chapter on racism. If you find it interesting, please order a copy the book, which now has a firm and final pub date of July 21. All pre-publication orders will be logged as sales during the week of publication, which gives it a shot at becoming a New York Times bestseller—a tall order for a book that challenges all the pathological nonsense (endorsed by the New York Times) that has afflicted American society for the last twenty-five years.

My apologies for the previous delays. Momentous events of the last six months prompted me to refine my original thesis and expand the book, thereby delaying the publication date.

---

Chapter 10: Racism

Mind Virus: The destructive and debilitating belief—reinforced by constant messaging—that American society and institutions are infused with “systemic racism.”

Proposed Remedy: Donating hundreds of millions of dollars to activists and organizations such as Black Lives Matter. Transferring hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across federal, academic, and corporate sectors.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was initially celebrated as a historic milestone in American racial progress. Throughout the United States and the world, many perceived the first Black president of the United States to be living proof that the nation had moved beyond the racial discrimination of the past. And yet, shortly after Obama was sworn into office—which coincided with Wall Street bank bailouts—media reporting and public discourse became increasingly preoccupied, even obsessed with the proposition that the American people and institutions remained deeply racist.

Between the years 2011 and 2019, the frequency of the terms “racism” and “racist” increased 700 percent in the New York Times and nearly 1,000 percent in the Washington Post.[i] At the same time, many commentators and pundits increasingly spoke about the “systemic” or “structural” racism that is allegedly so woven into the fabric of law, institutions, and culture that most people are unaware of how it operates for maintaining white supremacy. Such “systemic racism” is alleged to be far more insidious than the overt segregation of American life before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

A benign interpretation of America’s irrational obsession with race after 2009 is that it was animated by the same psychology that Alexis de Tocqueville perceived to have animated the French revolutionaries. As he pointed out, hatred for the French Old Regime fanned into revolutionary fanaticism after the Old Regime began giving up its privileges and making concessions to the burgeoning urban middle class. As Tocqueville remarked, the trouble wasn’t lack of favorable change, but that change didn’t happen fast enough to meet growing expectations.[ii]

The shortcoming of this interpretation is that enormous progress had already been made in rectifying racial injustice in the United States since 1938, when the blues musician Lead Belly recorded the song “Scottsboro Boys,” with its exhortation to “stay woke” about the dangers faced by Black Americans in the Jim Crow South.

I was born in Dallas in 1970 and grew up in an affluent White community, and I witnessed a total rejection of the racial sentiments I occasionally heard expressed among people of my grandparents’ generation. By the time I graduated university in 1993, no one in my social circle, which extended to residents of cities all over the country, expressed racist sentiments or treated Black individuals as social inferiors. Most college-educated Americans of my generation therefore believed that we had come a long way to achieving Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of living in a colorblind country.

Even though I studied philosophy at Boston University, I didn’t know about a new school of academic thought called critical race theory (CRT) that was taking shape during my college years. Only later did I learn about a 1991 paper by Neil Gotanda—professor of law at Western State College of Law in Fullerton, California—titled “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind,’” in which he rejected King’s dream of a “colorblind” society.[iii]

Gotanda argued that colorblind racial ideology is a sophisticated mechanism for preserving white supremacy. As he saw it, the insistence that race is irrelevant in law and policy conceals the reality of race, thereby securing for Whites the economic and political advantages that they accumulated in the overtly racist past. At the heart of this theory is Karl Marx’s concept of “false consciousness”—that is, the way in which the exploited working class (the proletariat) internalizes the ideology of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie). This false consciousness renders the proletariat unable to grasp that it is being dominated and exploited.

Marx’s critical theory for interpreting economic and social arrangements is useful for describing the way in which subordinate people in a hierarchical society can be abused. Such abuses should be criticized and corrected. However, the fatal flaw of Marxism and the critical race theory that it spawned (by way of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School) lies in the fact that human society—like the social life of all living creatures—is inescapably hierarchical. This hard reality is evident in the fact that every Marxist-inspired revolution of the 20th century established a new hierarchy that was more abusive than the hierarchy it replaced.

During Obama’s presidency (January 2009—January 2016) tenets of critical race theory were increasingly adopted by mainstream commentators and pundits. However, because it was extremely difficult to find concrete and compelling examples of systemic racism, media reporting focused on dramatic incidents of what was characterized as police brutality directed at Black men.

America’s obsession with race in the post- 2009 era emerged as a full-blown mind virus in 2013 with the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who had been charged for murdering a Black teenager named Travyon Martin.

On February 26, 2012, Zimmerman—a man of half Hispanic ancestry—was serving as a neighborhood watchman in a gated community in Sanford, Florida when he got into a fight with Martin. Their violent struggle culminated with Zimmerman shooting Martin. Zimmerman claimed he shot in self-defense while Martin was on top of hims and punching his face. His broken nose, two black eyes, and two lacerations to the back of his head—injuries that the medical examiner later described as “very significant”—seemed to support his contention. Nevertheless, he was charged with second-degree murder on the grounds that he had profiled, followed, and confronted the unarmed teenager, thereby initiating the violent conflict that culminated in Zimmerman shooting Martin.

The defense argued that Zimmerman’s community had recently experienced multiple burglaries committed by Black males, which justified his decision to confront Martin. Zimmerman’s injuries, plus witness testimony that he was indeed on the ground and being badly beaten by Martin when he drew his pistol and fired, persuaded the jury to acquit him. News of his acquittal sparked protests in Los Angeles and other American cities, and it inspired California residents Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors to found Black Lives Matter.

The passionate reaction to Zimmerman’s acquittal arose from the assumption that racial animus had motivated him to confront Martin. Media reporting cited his initial phone call to the Sanford police—which he made from his cell phone while sitting in his car—to report the “suspicious guy.” However, the call transcript does not support the claim that Zimmerman acted out of racial animus. . . . [chapter continues].

---

[i] Zach Goldberg, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Tablet, August 4, 2020.

[ii] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 1856.

[iii] Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Colorblind,’” Stanford Law Review, Nov. 1991.

From Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, SKYHORSE, July 21, 2026.