The Patriot Post® · Charles Murray's Brave New Book

Tuesday of this week marked the four-year anniversary of one of the most shameful episodes in the modern history of the American university. It happened at Middlebury College in Vermont, where political scientist, author, and American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray was, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “shouted down by an angry mob clearly unable to challenge him intellectually.”

Murray was ultimately taken to another location on campus, but not before Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor who escorted him away, was injured and sent to the hospital. (And we’re told students need safe spaces?)

Murray, a libertarian, has been a favorite whipping boy of the Left since the 1994 publication of his book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. As Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, writes, “[The book] has very little to say about race. But it argues that a considerable portion of intelligence — 40 to 80 percent — is heritable; and it also argues that intelligence tests are generally reliable. Those ideas irritate people who have a deep investment in three beliefs: extreme human plasticity; the social origins of inequality; and the possibility of engineering our institutions to create complete social justice.”

No wonder the infantile little Maoists at Middlebury got so riled up. Their target, though, whom Power Line’s John Hinderaker dubbed “the bravest man in America,” has been undeterred.

Murray has a new book coming out on June 15 titled Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In it, he takes on the twin leftist cudgels of “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” and he does so by exploring what he calls “two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt” — namely, that our nation’s major racial and ethnic groups have different rates of violent crime and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

Why would Murray want to explore such a sensitive topic? Perhaps, as George Mallory once replied when asked why he wanted to climb Everest, “Because it’s there.”

“America’s most precious ideal,” says the book’s description on Amazon, “is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.”

The lie that must be repudiated, however, is that the U.S. is a nation irredeemably shot through with racism and white privilege. As Hinderaker points out, “As of 2018 Census Bureau data, whites are 17th among ethnic groups in median income, trailing not only just about every Asian minority, including Iranians and Pakistanis, but also African immigrant groups like Nigerian-Americans and Ghanian-Americans. The case for American ‘white supremacy’ is ludicrously weak, but it may be a capital offense to point that fact out.”

It’ll be interesting to see whether Jeff Bezos and his fellow book-banners at Amazon have the guts to keep Charles Murray’s book listed on their website.