Monthly Archives: March 2017

Students at Middlebury College in Vermont protested an author who has been called a white nationalist, causing the college to move a planned lecture to another room on campus. (YouTube/Will DiGravio)

As the co-author of one of the 1990s most controversial works of scholarship, Charles Murray is no stranger to angry protesters.

Over the years, at university lectures across the country, the influential conservative scholar and author of The Bell Curve says hes come face-to-face with demonstrators dozens of times.

But none of those interactions prepared him for the chaotic confrontation he encountered Thursday night at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.

When The Bell Curve came out, Id have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak, Murray told The Washington Post. But Ive never experienced anything like this.

The demonstrations began conventionally enough, with several hundred organized protesters packed into a lecture hall Thursday, chanting and holding signs. They ended with Murray being forced to cancel his lecture and later being surrounded by an unruly mob made up of students and outside agitators as he tried to leave campus, according to witnesses and school administrators.

After swarming Murray and two school officials, the protesters shouted profanities, shoved members of the group and then blocked them from getting to a vehicle in a nearby parking lot. Witnesses said the confrontation was aggressive, intimidating and unpredictable and felt like it was edging frighteningly close to outright violence.

[Trump lashes back at Berkeley after violent protests block speech by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos]

In a message to the campus community Friday, Middlebury PresidentLaurie L. Patton said her administration plans to respond to the clear violations of Middlebury College policy that occurred the night before without providing more specific information. Patton who was on hand Thursday night said she was deeply disappointed by the events she witnessed and called the night painful for many at Middlebury, a top-tier liberal arts college with about 2,450 undergraduate students.

Today our community begins the process of addressing the deep and troubling divisions that were on display last night, her message said. I am grateful to those who share this goal and have offered to help.

We must find a path to establishing a climate of open discourse as a core Middlebury value, while also recognizing critical matters of race, inclusion, class, sexual and gender identity, and the other factors that too often divide us, the statement added. That work will take time, and I will have more to say about that in the days ahead.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Murray a white supremacist and a eugenicist who uses racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.

Murray, a statistically minded sociologist by training, has spent decades working to rehabilitate long-discredited theories of IQ and heredity, turning them into a foundation on which to build a conservative theory of society that rejects equality and egalitarianism, the SPLC states.

Murray bristled at the SPLCs characterization of him and blamed it for provoking protests among college students who have failed to scrutinize his work.

White supremacist? he said Friday. Lets see: if you have a guy who was married for 13 years to an Asian woman and who has two lovely Asian daughters, wouldnt that disqualify him from membership in the white supremacist club?

Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was not invited to Middlebury to discuss The Bell Curve, but instead to talk about his latest book: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

His lecture was co-sponsored by Middleburys Political Science Department. The other sponsor was the AEI Executive Council at the college, an outreach program by the Washington-based group that operates on dozens of campuses.

Our goal was not to create a controversy, but to start a discussion and a dialogue, said Alexander Khan, a member of the AEI Executive Council. Many members of our own club here dont agree with everything Dr. Murray has to say, but we still believe in the importance of robust discussion and the free exchange of opinions.

That is a cornerstone of what it means to receive a liberal arts education, he added.

The Associated Press reported that more than 450 alumni signed a letter calling Murrays visit unacceptable.

In this case, theres not really any other side, only deceptive statistics masking unfounded bigotry, the letter said.

Both students and other community members came out to show that we are not accepting these kind of racist, misogynistic, eugenist opinions being expressed at our college, Elizabeth Dunn, a student protest organizer, told the AP. We dont think that they deserve a platform because they are literally hate speech.

Video from the lecture in Wilson Hall showed hundreds of students turning their backs to Murray once he took the stage and began speaking.

Chants including Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go and Racist, sexist anti-gay, Charles Murray go away followed as Murray remained at the lectern for close to 20 minutes. The students held signs that said No Eugenics and Scientific racism = Racism.

Anticipating that the lecture might be interrupted, administrators attempted to relocate the event and a Q&A with Middlebury professor Allison Stanger to a location where the exchange could be live-streamed. Some of their discussion was recorded, but the dialogue was cut short by loud protesters who slammed chairs, chanted and periodically pulled fire alarms, which shut down the buildings power, according to Middlebury spokesman Bill Burger.

It became very difficult to hear in there where they were recording, Burger said. Nonetheless, there was a principle at work in that we were determined to continue the event. Both sides felt like they were standing for principle.

Murray said he felt like students were protesting a perceived persona more than a person, one theyd labeled a racist, sexist pseudo scientist. Asked why he thinks he continues to arouse such passion 23 years after The Bell Curve was published, Murray said he could only speculate.

I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump I can sympathize with that.

But if you have someone that they can say, This is one of those people who is the problem, then they latch on to that person, he added. Thats who I was to them.

The University of California at Berkeley canceled a talk by inflammatory Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos and put the campus on lockdown after intense protests broke out on Feb. 1. (Video: The Washington Post / Photo: AP)

Burger said Stangers hair was pulled before she reached the car, twisting and injuring the professors neck. Burger said she later went to a hospital and was fitted with a neck brace. (Stanger could not be reached for comment.)

By the time Murray, Stanger and Burger made it to their car with a campus security escort, the vehicle was mobbed by masked demonstrators who climbed on the hood, pounded the windows and blocked the cars exit while security struggled to clear a path, witnesses said.

At one point, a stop sign was pulled from the ground and laid in front of the vehicle to block its path. After close to 10 minutes, the car managed to separate from the mob, witnesses said. Minutes later, the group was forced to leave a nearby restaurant when security informed Murray and the others that more protesters were on their way.

Murray said he harbored no ill will toward Middlebury and praised campus administrators for not backing down from protesters as the night intensified.

He said he didnt want to dramatize the events or present his final interaction with protesters as a life-or-death situation, but noted that the crowd was out of control.

Had there not been those security guards, I would certainly have been pushed down on the ground, he said. Maybe nothing more wouldve happened after that, but certainly that wouldve happened.

I was glad to get the hell out of there, he added.

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A conservative author tried to speak at a liberal arts college. He left fleeing an angry mob. - Washington Post

Delstudio/Dreamstime.comAmerica needs a new political party, one opposed to isolationism, protectionism, nativism, authoritarianism, and ecologism but which also supports free enterprise, constitutional government, human equality, liberty, dignity, and the defensive alliance of all nations committed to such ideals.

Some might call such a party "conservative," and indeed, many of those who call themselves conservatives today would find themselves in agreement with its tenets. But these are the ideas of classical liberalism; they are the ideas that made the free world free, in as much as it is free. They have been misbranded by their "progressive" opponents as "conservative" a word associated with "servility" and the service of privilege in order to make them seem reactionary. It's time for the true defenders of real liberalism to take their proud title back.

America needs a new Liberal Party because both major parties have abandoned liberalism. Neither adequately supports international free trade or the defense of the West the two pillars of the liberal world order since 1945. Both lack commitment to constitutionally limited government, separation of powers, free enterprise, human equality, and liberty under the law. Each supports its own Malthusian antihuman collectivist ideology: for Democrats, it is ecologism, for Republicans, it is nativism.

Ecologism the advocacy of state-administered collective sacrifice for the putative benefit of nature is so obviously anti-liberal, reactionary, and indeed, anti-human, that I will leave it to the would-be liberals of the left to figure out how they ever got roped into adopting it as part of their core ideology. As a result, the party that once proudly proclaimed itself the defender of the poor now centers its program on ultra-regressive sales taxes of fuel and electricity, while boasting of its ability to throw entire industries and their workers on the scrap heap. Furthermore, ecologism serves as a justification for the expansion of the powers of the state to intrude into every aspect of public, commercial, and private life reinforcing monopolies, impairing initiative, and destroying opportunities at every turn.

Nativism, on the other hand, is the ideology that brought the Trumpist Trojan horse into the conservative citadel. A mirror image of the Democrats' environmental Malthusianism, it asserts that rather than natural resources, it is human opportunities that are in limited supply. It is not a conservative ideology, because it is anti-free enterprise and anti-Judeo Christian. Our nation's founding creed is that of inalienable rights granted to men created equal by God. How can a movement which explicitly denies that faith be considered conservative, or even American? In fact it isn't conservative at all. It is alt-right. But what is the alt-right really?

In his classic 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, then living in exile in England, shocked readers with his diagnosis of Nazism. National Socialism, he argued, was not the opposite of social democracy many of whose adherents could be found fighting in the ranks of the Allies but its evolutionary extension. All Hitler had done, said Hayek, was to grasp that racism is required for socialism, because to mobilize the passion necessary to achieve the full collectivist agenda, it is necessary to invoke the tribal instinct. Thus, contrary to Marx, the ultimate development of socialism is not stateless international brotherhood, but various forms of rabid tribal nationalism. Similarly, tribalism leads to socialism.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, tribalism or "identarianism," if you will is not a conservative ideology; it is collectivist ideology. It is the oldest, most powerful, lethal, and most degrading collectivist ideology, because it is based on primeval animal instinct. By using xenophobic agitation to mobilize mob support for a program of socialistic policy, unlimited government, and strongman rule, the international alt-right has embraced a political methodology clearly identified seven decades ago in The Road to Serfdom.

Running up taxes on fuel, electricity, and fuel for the putative purpose of stopping climate change is an alternative version of human sacrifice for weather control. Excluding immigrants for the putative purpose of making jobs available is merely an alternative version of the counterfactual case for population control to wit that we supposedly would all be better off if there were fewer people (in fact, we weren't). Neither is a liberal, moral, rational, or practical position. On the contrary, increasing human numbers, freedoms, and living standards accelerates the rate of invention, and thus humanity's ability to deal with any problem. That's the liberal, moral, rational, and practical program for advancing the human condition. It's also the winning political answer to both the brown and green anti-humanists. Immigrants and free enterprise, together, are what made America great and they both need each other.

To see clearly what the Liberal Party needs to oppose, it is useful to examine what freedom's most dedicated enemies are for. Aleksandr Dugin is one of the principal philosophical theoreticians of totalitarianism internationally, and his publications are regularly featured in such American identitarian outlets as Radix (Dugin's English language translator is the wife of American alt-right leader and Radix publisher Richard Spencer). While he greatly admires Nazism, Dugin's "Fourth Political Theory" seeks to transcend traditional Nordic racism's self-limited market appeal by proposing multi-centered tribal fascism, and allying it with other anti-liberal ideologies including communism but also ecologism in a new synthesis to counter the liberal ideas of individualism, intrinsic rights, and universal human dignity. It is the raising of "blood and soil" over "all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;" of animal instinct over human reason; of the id over the superego; of greed and lust over justice and love. This is the metaphysics of tyranny.

James Madison said, "If men were angels, government would be unnecessary." The corollary to this is that if men were beasts, freedom would be unacceptable. Dugin understands this. So like Circe, he seeks to use the sorceries of tribal and ecologic anti-humanism not merely to weaken and break up the Western alliance, but to turn men into unreasoning beasts, the better to end the specter of liberty everywhere.

This is the enemy we now face. Encouraged, supported, and in some cases directed by the Kremlin, the green, red, and brown rainbow alliance of tyranny is on the march across much of the globe. In Europe, the socialists and environmentalists mismanaging the European Union are discrediting the dream of a united Europe, providing the opening for Moscow-backed tribalist parties to break up and take over the continent. This effort is being further helped by a concerted campaign of economic sabotage by the green and red parties whose anti-fracking initiatives are making sure that Europe remains dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, and by the armed forces of Russia and its Iranian and Syrian allies, whose ethnic cleansing campaigns are stampeding millions of refugees into Europe to rapidly accelerate the rise to power of the Kremlin's brown fifth column.

America should be opposing this offensive against the free world with might and main, but under the mis-leadership of the partisan careerists who dominate both major parties it is not doing so. On the contrary, with the near unanimous support of the Democrats in Congress, the Obama administration helped to fund Iran's brutal offensive in Syria to the tune of 100 billion dollars released in accord with the terms of its nuclear deal, and failed to effectively assist Syrian rebel forces fighting the Iran-Assad-Russia alliance on the ground. Not only that, the Obama administration opened the door to overt aggression by failing to honor America's treaty commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and by reducing U.S. Army troop strength in Europe to 30,000 men, an amount less than one-tenth that of its late Cold War strength and smaller than the New York City Police Department.

Until recently the Republicans chose to criticize the Democrats for their foreign policy weakness, but the new Trump administration promises to be even worse. While the Obama administration offered only feeble help for the Syrian rebels, Trump has said he supports the Assad-Iran-Russia war effort. While Obama limited the U.S response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to ineffective economic sanctions, Trump has offered justification for Putin's attack. Furthermore, notwithstanding his U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley's Samantha Power-like grand verbal denunciations of Putin's aggression, Trump has dismissed criticisms of the Russian strongman's murderous regime across the board. While Obama cut American military power in Europe to mere tripwire levels, Trump has offered to render even that symbolic level of support to Europe's defense moot, by stating that he sees no reason to be bound by the NATO treaty's requirement to come to member states' aid should any come under attack.

Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Kremlin chose to interfere in the American election with both covert and overt actions to assist the rise of Donald Trump. What is disheartening, however, is the degree to which the Republican Party has rallied to deny or dismiss this intervention in America's internal affairs, an outrage which verges on an act of war against the U.S. homeland itself. And while the Democrats are currently making much of Trump's Putinophilia, an honest recollection of their own behavior prior to the Trump candidacy makes it difficult to take their newfound ardor in the defense of the West seriously. That said, we now have a president whose self-interest apparently requires him to suppress or silence the nation's intelligence agencies that have brought to light the enemy conspiracy on his behalf, and a majority party in as much as it remains a party bound to support him in this endeavor.

This is a five-alarm fire. America needs a new party, one that will in the present emergency bravely rise to the defense of the republic and the grand alliance of the free nations which it leads. It needs a party of economic sanity, which will not destroy the basis of our livelihood through either a combination of trade war and immigration restriction, or top-down suppression of business. It needs a party of humanity, which rejects tribalism, not only for the harm it inflicts upon its targets but for the moral and intellectual degradation it infests within the minds and hearts of its converts. It needs a party of liberty, one which will defend not only the borders of freedom, but the ideas and institutions that make freedom possible.

In short, America needs a Liberal Party. Scattered, the forces of liberalism are weak. Together, we may yet prevail.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, Colo., and the author of The Case for Mars. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.

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America Needs a Liberal Party - Reason.com - Reason (blog)