Not since The Beatles played Shea Stadium, perhaps, have mindless mobs of hysterical youth made news by going wild the way Middlebury College kids did last week. It’s not a pounding backbeat or lovable moptops singing four-part harmony that’s driving them crazy these days, however. No, it’s a 74-year-old policy analyst named Charles Murray:

When Murray is introduced before an audience of some 400, a patter of boos and catcalls disrupt the introduction. When he rises to speak, most of the audience rises en masse and turns its back on Murray. For the next 20 minutes, as Murray stands calmly at the podium, the mob cycles through a sequence of obviously rehearsed chants: “Who is the enemy? White Supremacy,” “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has to go,” “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away,” “Your message is hatred we will not tolerate it,” “Charles Murray go away Middlebury says no way,” etc. . . .

College officials, apparently anticipating a disruption, announce, to renewed boos, that Middlebury Professor Allison Stanger will conduct an interview with Murray from another location and stream the proceedings back to Wilson Hall. . . .

Once the interview began in the second room, protesters swarmed into the hallway, chanting and pulling fire alarms. Still, the interview was completed and officials, including Ms. Stanger, escorted Mr. Murray out the back of the building.

There, several masked protesters, who were believed to be outside agitators, began pushing and shoving Mr. Murray and Ms. Stanger, Mr. Burger [a spokesman for the college] said. “Someone grabbed Allison’s hair and twisted her neck…”

After the two got into a car, Mr. Burger said, protesters pounded on it, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood. Ms. Stanger later went to a hospital, where she was put in a neck brace.

Note that the violence occurred as Murray and Stanger attempted to leave. As Andrew Stuttaford of National Review observes, “The ‘justification’ for disrupting his speech was that opinions such as Murray’s should not be given a hearing on campus, but this was something else. Murray was not about to speak, he was about to depart, and yet he and Ms. Stanger were attacked.” . . .

Yes, the crowd went wild at Middlebury — like Beatlemania, but not in a fun way — and Murray explains the mob’s rationalization:

A few months ago, AEI’s student group at Middlebury College invited me to speak on the themes in Coming Apart and how they relate to the recent presidential election. Professor Allison Stanger of the Political Science Department agreed to serve as moderator of the Q&A and to ask the first three questions herself.

About a week before the event, plans for protests began to emerge, encouraged by several faculty members. Their logic was that since I am a racist, a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a pseudoscientist whose work has been discredited, a sexist, a eugenicist, and (this is a new one) anti-gay, I did not deserve a platform for my hate speech, and hence it was appropriate to keep me from speaking. . . .

The Bell Curve was published more than 20 years ago. It does not advocate eugenics, it is not racist in any meaningful sense of that word, and the facts examined in the book have not been “discredited” — a fact is always a fact. What the ignorant Middlebury mob has done is to recycle a controversy from two decades ago, basing their false claims on what critics wrote about Murray, rather than what Murray wrote himself.

Such idiots claim to know what Murray “believes” (i.e., that he is a “white nationalist” or whatever), as if they were clairvoyant mind-readers, capable of knowing Murray’s hidden intentions despite everything he has done to contradict this decades-old “white supremacist” smear. This nonsensical way of approaching The Bell Curve is the result of the Left’s propaganda tactics, which involve labeling a critic or opponent as an Enemy of the People, demonizing them in such a way as to prevent anyone from seriously examining their arguments. While I do not wholly agree with every interpretation Murray (and his late co-author, Richard Herrnstein) made of the various data they examined in The Bell Curve, it is nevertheless important to look at the actual data — the facts as they exist — rather than to base our arguments on myths or prejudice. Effective public policy cannot be based on the mere emotional appeal of some sentimental slogan we learned in grade school. Clearly, facts and logic are not being taught in America’s schools today:

The goons who attacked Charles Murray at Middlebury College probably think of themselves as rebels, defending “diversity” against a fascist enemy, but the truth is the complete opposite. Murray is the real rebel, and the mob who attacked him are the real enemies of diversity. Being a left-winger on an elite campus like Middlebury is the most conformist thing imaginable. The anti-Murray protesters were defending a failed status quo against a genuinely radical critic of the system. Murray is a man who creates controversy because he asks tough questions and follows wherever the facts lead. Does this sound familiar?

“I always asked why people did things and why society was like it was,” John Lennon told an interviewer from Playboy magazine. “I didn’t just accept it for what it was apparently doing. I always looked below the surface.” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. The Middlebury madness is symptomatic of serious problems. If young people don’t wake up to this danger, America could collapse quite suddenly, and soon.







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