Free Republic

There’s nothing like a little violence to focus the mind. I am the Middlebury College professor who ended up with whiplash and a concussion for having the audacity to engage with the ideas of Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Though he is someone with whom I disagree, I welcomed the opportunity to moderate a talk with him on campus on March 2 because several of my students asked me to do so. They know I am a Democrat, but the college courses I teach are nonpartisan. As I wrote on Facebook immediately after the incident, this...

Academia today abounds in ironies, although, more often than not, the irony is lost on the denizens of academe itself. By now, the mobbing of conservative scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont has received widespread attention. I have covered Dr. Murray multiple times: Although he arrives at conclusions that go against prevailing wisdom, he does so painstakingly, always holding out the possibility that missed data may force him to revise his work, something he has always been willing to do. Moreover, he is unfailingly gentlemanly and has never meted out the treatment to those who disagree with him...

On March 2, there was one of those oh-so-revealing events that makes people realize that very bad trends are at work in America, trends that are corroding the essence of civilization. Middlebury College in Vermont is a liberal arts school. The prolific author and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray was asked to speak at Middlebury and answer questions from faculty and audience members. He is used to confrontations, but could not have imagined how vicious things would get up in the Green Mountain State. Inside Higher Ed’s story on the event explains that college officials admonished the students prior...

At Middlebury College last week, Charles Murray needed a safe space — literally. In a significant escalation of the campus speech wars, protesters hooted down the conservative scholar in a lecture hall and then roughed up a Middlebury faculty member who was escorting him to a car. The Middlebury administration commendably tried to do the right thing and stand by Murray’s right to be heard, but was overwhelmed by a yowling mob with all the manners and intellectual openness of a gang of British soccer hooligans. Sometime soon, we may yearn for the days when college students were merely childish...

Says RBpundit, “See what happens when you give people who call everyone Nazis the license to punch Nazis? They wind up hurting non-Nazis.” Right, but I take it the people who twisted the professor’s neck would say that she became a Nazi by association by defending Murray’s right to speak after being invited. A mob will always justify its violence as righteous.We’re getting closer to the inevitable moment when someone is literally murdered on an American campus because a right-winger tried to speak. As [Professor Allison] Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following...

"By the People" by Charles Murray is a book looking at the rise of the unelected bureaucracy that has gained power over the years and ways of fighting back against it.

There's nothing irrational about Donald Trump's appeal to the white working class, writes Charles Murray: they have every reason to be angry If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don't kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America's divestment of its historic national identity. For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing...

...IQ has a substantial direct correlation with measures of success in life, and it is also correlated with a variety of other characteristics that promote success... ...It’s not just that the IQ gap in working-class and upper-middle-class communities has gotten wider. The life penalties associated with low IQ have risen since 1960. If you focus on the economic changes since 1960, those with low IQ have faced a labor market in which the market value of a strong back has dropped while the value of brains has soared... ...If you focus on the reforms and social programs of the 1960s,...

Review of "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission" by Charles Murray.BY THE PEOPLE: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission By Charles Murray Crown Forum. 319 pages. $27. From the tea party to Occupy Wall Street to #BlackLivesMatter, America has spent much of this young century questioning its premises. And as the battles over federal spending, economic inequality and racial injustice continue, Charles Murray comes forward to identify another threat to the nation’s purpose and self-image: the rise of the regulatory state, a rapacious shadow government that has left us “at the end of the American project as the founders intended it.”...

CHARLES MURRAY: If by some miracle that change were made in that Amendment, it would be the biggest unintended consequence in the history of liberalism. You know what's going to happen? Every red state and a whole bunch of blue states, too. The state legislatures will create militias. And guess what? There are going to be a whole lot of people who want to be in those in those militias. There are going to be -- JOHN AVLON: We already have those, it's called the National Guard. BILL MAHER: Yeah, exactly. Thank you, John. MURRAY: No. If you change the...

"American exceptionalism is a fact of America’s past, not something that you can choose whether to “believe in” any more than you can choose whether to ‘believe in’ the battle of Gettysburg. Understanding its meaning is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand what it has meant to be an American." ~ Charles Murray

American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray suggested on Friday that former Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard included evidence that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites, had been railroaded and forced to resign by people without integrity or “balls.” Quote: Jason Richwine, guilty of crimethink, "resigns." The bashing from the right has been as mindless as from the left. Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.DeMuth was the president of AEI from 1986 to 2008. The Bell...

President Obama took an apparent racial swipe at Colin Powell in a 1994 NPR interview in which he implied the four-star general is acceptable to “white America.” In the same interview, Obama advocates that the government should provide jobs for every citizen and prenatal care for all women. Obama in 1994 was a community organizer and lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. WND unearthed an Oct. 28, 1994, interview the future president gave to NPR in response to political scientist Charles Murray’s controversial book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that there are racial differences in intelligence. During the...

The Pew Foundation discovered in a recent poll that tensions over inequality in wealth now outrank tensions over race and immigration. But income inequality isn’t really the problem. A new upper class is the problem. And their wealth isn’t what sets them apart or creates so much animosity toward them. Let’s take a guy — call him Hank — who built a successful auto-repair business and expanded it to 30 locations, and now his stake in the business is worth $100 million. He is not just in the 1%; he’s in the top fraction of the 1% — but he’s...

Although Latinos make up only a seventh of the population, they have "racked up half the employment gains posted since the economy began adding jobs in early 2010", the Los Angeles Times reported this morning. In 2011, the trend accelerated. Of the 2.3 million jobs added in 2011 according to the Household Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.4 million, or 60 percent, were won by Latinos.

I am a 52-year-old mother of three children - a 24-year old grad student, a 21-year old college senior, and a 13- year-old 7th grader. I am a public school teacher of Math to 7th graders. I am concerned about the welfare of our country, our Constitution, and the hope (NOT Obama's) for our nation. PLEASE help me to understand what is happening to our country. I am dismayed by the garbage I am hearing and reading. I have been involved in local politics. I could NOT suffer the bullsh*t, so I resigned from the county Republican Executive Committee, after...

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray (Crown Forum, 416 pp., $27) Charles Murray is back, and the debate about wealth and inequality will never be the same. Readers of the political scientist’s earlier work, especially The Bell Curve and Losing Ground, might assume that with his new book he is returning to the vexed subject of race. He is, but with a twist: Murray’s area of intensive focus (and data mining) is “the state of white America”—and it’s not what you might think. According to Murray, the last 50 years have seen the emergence of...

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been seen as different, even peculiar, to people around the world.1 I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness—not just hard work, but the way that Americans have treated their work and their efforts to get ahead in life as a central expression of who they are. There is American neighborliness. Many cultures have traditions of generous hospitality to guests, but widespread voluntary mutual assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside each other has been rare. In the United States, it has been...

I think of all the couples with advanced degrees who have remarkably successful children, and I wonder how other kids can enjoy such success. Charles Murray has long made this a theme of his. The full account can be found in The New Criterion. "Many [in the new elite] have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished." Here is the excerpt from...

The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward -- cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the...