I’m very skeptical of the great Hebrew Conspiracy to break white America on the wheel of Cultural Marxism. Sure, they are the most ethnocentric people on the planet and they are very smart and clever. They do favor their own and do so without noticing it. These are true things, but that’s a long way from Jews being at the heart of a conspiracy to undermine white society that dats back to the time of Christ. That’s a long time to hole a grudge, even for the Jews, who are world’s greatest grudge keepers.

Still, I’m skeptical. I’m inclined to think Norman Podhoretz is right. For over 100 generations Ashkenazi Jews “boiled off” the non-believers, skeptics and those with a high capacity for affective empathy. The resulting population has a high degree of belief and group identity. As belief in an invisible man in the sky becomes less plausible, these impulses found a home in the various Rousseau-ist cults that have ravaged Western Civilization. To say Jews are over represented in Left-wing politics is to say blacks are over represented in the NBA.

When I see stuff like this, I can see why the Hebrew Conspiracy guys think the things they think.

Just because this is baseball’s golden era doesn’t mean the sport can’t glisten even brighter.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another dissertation about speeding up the game of baseball.

It is about speeding up a different kind of change.

Perhaps a recent panel discussion about baseball’s racial and gender gap — held on the same day Rob Manfred received unanimous approval from the owners to become the next commissioner and just a day after the best slugger in the game, a 25-year-old named Giancarlo Stanton with Irish, African-American and Puerto Rican roots signed off on his historic $325 million contract with the mid-market Marlins — sparked the beginning of real progress on an issue that has vexed baseball for far too long.

With African-Americans representing at least 14 percent of major league rosters for two decades between 1967 and 1998, their representation has been on a steady decline that has flattened out the past few years at around 8 percent but has shown no signs of ascent.

Major League Baseball has tried to reverse the decline. The RBI Program and Urban Youth Academies are two attempts to revive African-American participation and then there’s the sport’s 17-member On-Field Diversity Task Force, assembled in August.

Theo Epstein and his brother Paul started the Foundation To Be Named Later, which has been focused on building and expanding urban baseball. Their panel, held last week at TD Garden, focused on baseball’s demographic problems and the topic of declining African American participation at the major league level hit several nerves.

Clearly, baseball hasn’t figured it out.

Baseball is an international sport. It is very popular in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and East Asia. Every team  has a large compliment of foreign players. The fact that 14% of baseball players are black Americans means they are over-represented in baseball. Blacks are currently 13% of the US population. But, guys with last names Silverman, Manfred and Epstein think that’s not enough. If you’re making the case that the Tribe is at war with Occidentals, looking at the surnames on each side of the divide is a good place to start.

As I wrote above, I’m disinclined to think there’s a conspiracy, but the war on sanity is very real. Fanatics of all stripes are hell bent on pulling the roof down on all of us.

Any gathering of general managers is devoid of African-Americans, and any census of front offices of baseball teams, especially in the baseball operations departments, will reveal fewer than a handful of women.

Tyler Tumminia, senior vice president of the Goldklang Group, which owns five minor league baseball teams, including the Pittsfield Suns, is looking to buy more. She believes the days of the “old boy network” are coming to an end. How quickly is up for debate.

“I don’t think it’s a problem in minor leagues, females, I think the problem is mostly rooted in major league baseball, we talk about it all the time,” said Tumminia, who is married to Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington. “Society in general, we have no apprehension having female captains flying us all over the place nor do we have apprehension to open us up in our hearts or minds as medical surgeons or doctors but we have a hard time generally in society seeing those people putting a roster together, that’s some funny (expletive) to me. No disrespect to general managers.”

We don’t have apprehensions about female surgeons or female pilots. That’s because there are so few female pilots and heart surgeons. About 3% of commercial pilots are female and about 10% of surgeons are female. No one complains about the lack of diversity in the cockpit or operating room because diversity is a luxury good. When failure is an acceptable outcome, diversity is king. When failure can kill people, no one gives a crap about diversity. In other words, most of us not so crazy that we would rather die on the operating table than look up at a bunch of pale faces before the procedure.