Two years ago, the atheist Sam Harris told Ezra Klein that Charles Murray was cancel culture’s patient zero. The co-author of 1994’s controversial The Bell Curve, which contained a chapter arguing that genetics caused blacks to have lower IQs than whites, was really a victim of political correctness, Harris said. “When I did read [The Bell Curve] and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly maligned person in my lifetime,” Harris said. “IQ is not one of my concerns and racial differences in IQ is absolutely not one of my concerns, but a person having his reputation destroyed for honestly discussing data—that deeply concerns me.”

It was a clever rhetorical trick, one frequently employed by those defending the allegedly canceled. The substance of Murray’s work was immaterial—what really mattered is that he was being silenced for pursuing “scientific” inquiry. Never mind that Murray isn’t a geneticist or biologist. Or, for that matter, that Murray’s findings have been thoroughly debunked. Or that they repeatedly cited Mankind Quarterly, which Charles Lane, writing in The New York Review of Books, described as “a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.” The real problem was that people were pointing out that Murray’s work was based on shoddy evidence and racist journals and thus should not be taken seriously.



Furthermore, the idea that Murray’s reputation has been “destroyed” is questionable. He has been a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for years and in 2016 won its prestigious Bradley Prize. He is a contributor to a number of respectable outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg View. In 2017, when Middlebury College students shouted down a speech he was giving, he was defended by many prominent people and institutions, including The New York Times and PEN America. (Murray recently accepted an invitation to return to the college.) And today, Hachette’s Twelve Books will publish his latest volume on the relationship between genetics and public policy, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.



Murray hasn’t been canceled. If anything, his prominence points to the mainstream media’s continued acceptance of race science and right-wing “experts,” many of whom have benefited from publishers’ confused notion of what constitutes a diversity of viewpoints.

Murray made his reputation with 1984’s enormously influential Losing Ground, which argued that government welfare programs end up perpetuating the problems they were created to solve. The Bell Curve, co-written with psychologist Richard Herrnstein (and infamously excerpted by this magazine in 1994), made the case that helping people in need is particularly harmful when those people are genetically inferior. It encourages them to reproduce, leading more people to inevitably rely on costly government programs. “The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve,” Matt Yglesias wrote for Vox in 2018, “is that America should stop trying to improve poor kids’ material living standards because doing so encourages poor, low-IQ women to have more children.”

