Have you ever wondered why in the wake of every Islamist terrorist attack, our media and politicians bend over backwards to make the extraordinary claim that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam? The answer is a mixture of things, but the central reason is easy to understand if you think about it logically.

To avoid offending morons, let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead. As you know, there are red apples, green apples and yellow apples. Let’s imagine for a second that a small percentage of green apples are poisonous and can injure and kill people. It is difficult to distinguish the toxic green apples from the other green apples which are perfectly “peaceful”, “law-abiding” and so forth.

Now imagine that you are the public health authority whose job it is to protect the public. If your concern is solving the problem of the small minority of toxic green apples, you would immediately do a number of things.

You might devote significant resources to identifying the toxic green apples and removing them from the supermarket shelves. You might commission thorough research into how and where the toxic green apples are grown. You might crack down very, very hard on anyone who knowingly participates in growing or distributing such apples. You might even say that while you are dealing with the problem of deaths caused by toxic green apples, bringing more green apples into the country is liable to worsen the public health crisis until suitable measures are identified which allow you to separate the bad green apples from the good ones.

This is how you would act if your primary concern was the safety of the public. But what if you, as the public health authority, had spent the preceding decades claiming that all apples are the same? That to suggest that a small minority of green apples are potentially toxic is fear-mongering and green-o-phobic? What if you had been openly encouraging unfiltered importation of green apples and actively resisted calls to thoroughly check whether such apples are in fact, digestible for your citizens? What if your mantra for the last 20 years has been that anyone who believes there may be significant variations between the toxicity of different types of apples is a bigot who must be suppressed for fear of emboldening the “far right”?

If you were, in fact, responsible for the fact that people were now being killed on the streets of your country by the small minority of toxic green apples, would you not do everything in your power to explain that the diversity of apples is our greatest strength? That the toxicity of green apples is nothing to do with them being green? That any doctor who suggests that the government should carefully regulate the importation of green apples specifically is a racist?

The central premise of our elite consensus is that we must continue to pretend that all apples are the same. No matter how many people pay for this lie with their lives.