Gun grabbers and their enablers in the social sciences are fond of cranking out studies that show high gun ownership correlates to high suicide rates or high murder rates. They collect up some statistics from crime reports and then try to match that up to gun ownership rates or gun laws. Usually there will be some sort of scary heat map showing the bad places in bright red and the good places in a nice color like green or blue. The point of the exercise is to claim that science! is against guns.

One of my favorite gags is to point out to these very serious people posting these claims that their “reasoning” is based on magic. After all, the underlying premise is that the mere presence of a gun causes someone to kill or commit suicide. It’s as if they think people see a gun and are suddenly compelled to shoot themselves or someone else. The shaping of metal and plastic into a gun imbues it with magical powers that seizes the minds of normal men, causing them to go violently crazy.

This sort of magical thinking is so common in the education rackets that no one bothers to notice. The chant, “Diversity is our strength” is just assumed to be true so no one thinks about it. If a school does not have black kids in it, then it is assumed to be an incubator for the Klan. If a school has no white kids in it, the assumption is that the school is a plantation. Only through the right mix of hues can a child magically absorb knowledge.

No one bothers to explain why diversity is good or beneficial. The reason for that is there is no explanation. The “experts” look at numbers on a page and say, “these school have good results while these schools have bad results. The solution is to send the kids from the bad schools to the good schools!” The magic lies in the building as that can be the only explanation, other than racism, of course. Racism is always a good fallback if magic is not a good answer.

Nowhere is magic more obvious than in the topic of race. The other day I did a few riffs on this story about how the sandman is a racist. When considering physical phenomena, the logical place to start is with biology, if it involves living creatures. Otherwise, physics is the place to start. That’s entry level reasoning. Yet, in matters of race, biology is immediately ruled out in favor of mysterious forces that can be quantified with statistics, but only explained with the Ouija Board.

Steve Sailer has been having a lot of fun with the cooing over Raj Chetty’s big project, pointing out the many methodological flaws. In John Derbyshire’s latest transmission from the bunker, he introduces us to a new term that describes what Sailer has been discussing. It is called “Magic Dirt Theory.” The dirt in places like Utah where children do very well possess special qualities that are lacking in the dirt of places where children do poorly.

Magic Dirt Theory is what’s behind the push to export troublesome populations out to the suburbs. Through the use of Section 8 housing vouchers, the oppressed can be sent out into the burbs to live in apartments built on the magic dirt that makes the suburbs so attractive to white people. In no time, those troublesome populations will magically transform into highly productive, self-actualizing citizens, contributing to the wonderfulness of suburban life.

The beauty of Magic Dirt Theory is it reinforces the magic of race. If the whites raise an objection to having their neighbors owning pit bulls or having loud parties on weeknights, it is just proof that the horrible bad whites are trying to deny blacks access to the magic dirt. The only solution is to redouble efforts to transplant more blacks into places like Ferguson Missouri. If the magic dirt does not take, then it just shows how powerful the magic of racism really is and why the good thinkers must never quit trying to beat back the bad thinkers.

Magic Dirt Theory. The cause of and cure for all that ails the Progressive mind.