THE CAMPUS GOON SQUADS
Charles Murray is a libertarian, but that affliction hasn’t prevented him from becoming one of the most influential social scientists of his generation.
He has now also become one of the latest victims of leftist thuggery on our college campuses.
As many know by now, Murray was invited to speak March 2 at Middlebury College in Vermont, but was shouted down by a mob and then he and the moderator were violently attacked while trying to leave the premises. The speech moderator, a Middlebury professor, had to be taken to the emergency room and fitted with a neck brace.
Details involving disgraceful behavior always seem a bit sketchy, but it appears that the shouting down was the consequence of protests encouraged by Middlebury faculty and staff who should be ashamed of themselves. As with other recent campus violence (see University of California at Berkeley), “outside agitators” and “anarchists” were cited, but one suspects that the distinction between the goons off campus and those on it, including among the faculty, is minor because the overlap is so extensive.
Subsequent news stories suggested that Murray was the focus of the protests that turned violent because he was accused of being a “white nationalist.”
Not that it should matter, but Murray of course isn’t. I’ve read just about everything he has written, from his “Losing Ground” (1984), which led directly to welfare reform under Bill Clinton the following decade, to “Coming Apart” (2012), which better explains the outcome of the 2016 election, including the defection of working-class whites from the Democratic Party, than anything published before or since, and I’ve never caught the slightest whiff of racism or “white nationalism” (whatever that means, exactly).
Indeed, in “Coming Apart” Murray deliberately focused on whites and left out other racial groups so that his analysis of American social disintegration based on class (rather than race) wouldn’t be misunderstood (as was his earlier, much distorted discussion of the linkage between IQ tests and race in “The Bell Curve”).
Interestingly, reports afterward suggested that virtually none of the faculty or students at Middlebury who had organized the protests and been part of the shouting down had ever read anything Murray had written. But they were still, perhaps through clairvoyance, sure of what he was going to say and determined to prevent him from saying it.
Thus, viciousness is neatly married to a belligerent ignorance, and we get to the crucial, most revealing part — that people who had never read Murray and knew virtually nothing about his ideas had no interest in listening to him speak or allowing others to do so; that in place of what should have been innate intellectual curiosity was instead a violent self-righteousness provoked by the possibility of encountering opinions different than their own.
How ironic — that the social justice warriors who see fascism lurking everywhere are so dumb that they not only don’t know what fascism is but also the extent to which their own behavior and beliefs come pretty close to a textbook definition of it; they fight against imaginary jackboots while marching in real ones.
How depressing to realize that there are people among us, on the faculties and among the student bodies of our elite colleges no less, who simply don’t want to hear a different side of things, or let anyone else hear it either, out of fear that they might be called upon to do what evidence suggests they can’t — defend their own positions with facts, data and logic in civil discourse.
One might be forgiven for thinking that knowledge and learning might logically come before protests and endless activism, but ignorance is now apparently a virtue if one strikes the right political poses.
Built into the left’s desire for “safe spaces” (Middlebury apparently wasn’t one on the evening of March 2, at least for non-leftists like Murray) and zeal for suppressing any speech it disagrees with is thus a formula for both the perpetuation of ignorance and the corrosion of the critical thinking skills necessary to overcome it.
A general rule applies here — those most interested in shutting down debate are the least capable of participating in it, and the more they shut down debate with intimidation and violence, the less capable they become. They are making a left that is already dreadfully stupid even more stupid.
So a test, which the mob at Middlebury and so many other college campuses these days has already failed: Read Murray’s account of what happened at Middlebury on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a resident scholar. Then pull up on the internet some videos of his speeches and interviews, perhaps on “Coming Apart” (which he was set to discuss at Middlebury). Perhaps even read that book and some of his others (including his most controversial, for all the wrong reasons, “The Bell Curve”). Not the reviews, mind you, the actual works.
And then do what the goons at Middlebury want to prevent you from doing: Decide for yourselves.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.