Free Republic

In 1993, I wrote an op-ed entitled the coming white underclass.

The New York Times put Charles Murray on the cover of its Sunday Magazine, calling him "The Most Dangerous Conservative." That was after he co-wrote the book, "The Bell Curve," which argued that different ethnic groups have, on average, different IQs. As Murray puts it in my video this week, "Blacks on average have a lower IQ than whites. However, whites are not at the top. East Asians, on average, have a higher IQ than whites. Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs." Other researchers agree. An article in ScienceDirect journal puts it this way, "East Asians and their descendants average an...

The proverbial Martian would find contemporary discourse about race in the West peculiar, even paradoxical. On the one hand, many modern intellectuals insist that race is a pernicious reification of superficial human differences that has been decisively refuted by modern science. On the other hand, many of these same intellectuals obsess about racial disparities and injustices and actively promote policies that treat people of different races differently (e.g., affirmative action). Thus, mainstream discourse simultaneously contends that belief in race is an anachronistic superstition and that racial equality is an ethical imperative that can only be achieved through racially conscious policy...

As you may be aware, Charles Murray is out with a new book, “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America.” I picked up a copy today. It’s not a long book, and I am already much of the way through it. For those curious about how I got the book, I bought it at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Of course, they did not have it in stock. But they took my order, and after a couple of weeks, the book arrived, and I went over and bought it. (This is...

A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas...

Charles A. Murray ’65 spoke to Harvard affiliates at a Friday webinar about his new book, which criticizes the idea that race and gender are social constructs. Faculty in attendance criticized his work, saying it makes unfounded claims and is rooted in flawed methodology. Government preceptor David D. Kane invited Murray — whose work the Southern Poverty Law Center terms “racist pseudoscience” – to speak about his 2020 book “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class” as part of a lecture series entitled “Data Scientists, Data Professionals, Data Dissidents.” Murray said during the talk that many of Harvard’s...

Carter and Keri speak with controversial figure Dr. Charles Murray. Dr. Murray holds the F. A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention with the publication of his book _Losing Ground_, which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. In 1994, _The Bell Curve_, a New York Times bestseller he coauthored with the late Richard Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. In 2012, in another New York Times bestseller, _Coming Apart_, Dr....

This spring, visiting professor Ryszard Legutko was prevented from speaking at Vermont's prestigious Middlebury College due to strident opposition by extremist and intolerant students. This was the second such embarrassment for the college: writer Charles Murray and a Middlebury professor were insulted and assaulted there in 2016. Professor Legutko recently related his perspective on the experience, revealing that the college not only caved to the disruptive and disrespectful students, but legitimized their conduct! Further, the students have set out to proscribe future discourse that might again ignite their sociopathic anarchy. Last year, our nation's children walked out of high schools...

On May 22, 2018, the U. S. House of Representatives Government Reform and Oversight Committee examined the free speech crisis on college campuses. Since few universities do not receive federal funding, their interest is not inconsequential. One of the three academic witnesses they called--Brett Weinstein--identified himself as a "professor in exile" from Evergreen State College. Weinstein--like the other two witnesses the committee called on from academe--could distinctly be described as on the left of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, only one member of the trio—Shaun Harper of the University of Southern California—downplayed the free speech crisis. The other--Allison Stranger of Middlebury...

By bizarrely going after Sam Harris, Majid Nawaaz, and others, the once venerable organization has abandoned its core mission, focusing instead on dirty partisan politics Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, a lot of people I knew wrote biggish checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They weren’t alone: According to tax filings, the group took in $136 million last year alone, bringing its total assets to a whopping half-a-billion dollars.This surge in the organization’s popularity makes sense: The SPLC, after all, is the group that had once, nearly four decades ago, protected Vietnamese shrimpers...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

We've been told conservatives don't believe in science and that there's a "Republican war on science." But John Tierney, who's written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, told me in my latest online video, "The real war on science is the one from the left." Really? Conservatives are more likely to be creationists -- denying evolution. "Right," says Tierney. "But creationism doesn't affect the way science is done." What about President George W. Bush banning government funding of stem cell research? "He didn't stop stem cell research,"...

Is America in a new Gilded Age? That's the contention of Republican political consultant Bruce Mehlman, and in a series of 35 slides, he makes a strong case. In many ways, problems facing America today resemble those facing what we still call "turn-of-the-century" America, the 1890s to the 1910s. Just as employment shifted from farms to factories a century ago, it has been moving from manufacturing to services recently. Financial crashes are another point of resemblance, coming precisely 100 years apart. The panic of 1907 was resolved when J.P. Morgan locked his fellow financiers in his library and required them...

Middlebury College has disciplined 67 students after its investigation into the disruption of a March 2 lecture by controversial author Charles Murray, the school announced Tuesday. The sanctions range "from probation to official college discipline, which places a permanent record in the student’s file," the school said in a statement. Murray attempted to lecture in the McCullough Student Center about his 2012 book, Coming Apart. Murray is better known for his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which sought to correlate social inequality to genetics. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled his work "racist pseudoscience."

Middlebury College in Vermont has again announced that it has disciplined students over their behavior during an event featuring conservative author Charles Murray on March 2.The school announced late last month that it had disciplined more than 30 students for their behavior. Now, as then, the school declined to give details about what that discipline looked like. In the latest announcement, the school said that it had, in April, disciplined a total of 41 students.“This week’s cases were heard in a group hearing Thursday night before the Community Judicial Board (CJB) of Middlebury College. The CJB is empaneled from a...

The phrasing here skirts awfully close to suggesting right-wingers are complicit in the “anti-fascist” violence directed at them. If a provocateur like Coulter “throws herself into a volatile situation,” don’t be surprised if the locals are provoked in a “volatile” way, I guess.Charles Cooke anticipated this idea of “volatility” yesterday in summarizing the campus view of speech this way: “Your opinions are fighting words because I’ll riot if you express them.” [A]cross the country, conservatives like her are eagerly throwing themselves into volatile situations like the one in Berkeley, emboldened by a backlash over what many Americans see as...

MURRAY: I think Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who started the academy was right. He was right. He had an interview a few weeks ago where he said the 'Deplorables' comment by Hillary Clinton changed the history of the world, and he may very well be right. That one comment by itself may have swung enough votes, it certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the New Upper Class looks at mainstream Americans. Full audio and transcript at link...

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Charles Murray about the controversy over his book The Bell Curve, the validity and significance of IQ as a measure of intelligence, the problem of social stratification, the rise of Trump, universal basic income, and other topics...

Charles Murray was not met with riots when he showed up to speak at NYU last Friday, as he had been at Middlebury College a few weeks before. Still, his reception hardly served as a model for campus discourse. Security was beefed up, and his hosts, a student group affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, had to restrict access to the event. A small crowd showed up to protest Murray’s presence — and to hurl insults at attendees and the university itself. In response to what occurred at Middlebury, the speech’s venue was moved to an underground room in...

Two things today: Diversity and Resistance, in reverse order.First, “resistance” (h/t American Digest) No, sorry, you aren’t a resistance, because USA is not a dictatorship. Nobody is persecuting you; none of your rights are being violated; no illegal purges enacted; no tortures and disappearances. You didn’t like the results of an election – and want to pretend it is illegitimate, because you don’t want to do the hard work of rebuilding a constituency alienated, “Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult (…) Because...