murray, chs bell curve

rww term not yet tag sci racism

NO MERRI

IDW?

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tucker mainstreams racism

// juneteenth

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/fox-nation-tucker-carlson-and-charles-murray-discuss-race-science-and-speculate-race-war

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nyt

no lnx

The Far Right’s Love-Hate Relationship With Globalization

A new book by the historian Quinn Slobodian examines right-wing figures who have positioned themselves as populist critics of neoliberalism while weaponizing some of its founders’ ideas.

:{:{Elon Musk brandishes a chain saw given to him by President Javier Milei of Argentina, to his right, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February.}:

By Jennifer Szalai

Published April 9, 2025

Updated May 12, 2025

HAYEK’S BASTARDS: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian

Argentina’s mutton-chopped president, Javier Milei, doesn’t exactly come across as a placid figure. A self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” he rails against “sick wokeism” and gleefully brandishes a chain saw to mimic his evisceration of government spending. (At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, he gave a shiny red one to Elon Musk.) But standing before the world’s elite at Davos last year, Milei offered some soothing reassurance to the businesspeople in his audience. “You are social benefactors, you’re heroes,” he said. “Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.”

:{:{The combination of emollient platitudes, economic shock therapy and strongman authoritarianism is why Milei features prominently in the concluding chapter of Quinn Slobodian’s bracingly original new book, “Hayek’s Bastards.” Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, traces how right-wing figures across the world have positioned themselves as populist critics of “neoliberal policies” even while they pay frequent homage to Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who laid the foundations for the neoliberal tradition, with its gospel of free markets.}:

This so-called New Right has adopted the furious nostalgia of a backlash to what Milei has called a “global hegemony” while embracing radical deregulation. At Davos, Slobodian writes, “Milei spoke less as a defector from the global capitalist order than its latest photogenic cheerleader.”}:

:{:{Slobodian locates a hinge moment in the end of the Cold War. For hardcore believers in the primacy of free markets, the collapse of communism was a surprisingly scary time. Instead of the end-of-history triumphalism emanating from more mainstream quarters, thinkers on the far right warned about the persistence of big states and public spending. Socialism hadn’t been left for dead, they insisted; it had “simply mutated,” as one writer put it.}:

“The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had injected the poison of civil rights, feminism, affirmative action and ecological consciousness into the veins of the body politic,” Slobodian writes, paraphrasing the reactionary strain of neoliberal thinking at the time. According to this besieged worldview, egalitarian demands led inexorably to “victimology” and bloated states. “Neoliberals needed an antidote.”}:

Image

The cover of “Hayek’s Bastards,” by Quinn Slobodian

:{:{Against centrists’ soft-focus visions of incremental reforms and an expanding pie, a number of thinkers on the right turned to severe, zero-sum assertions of what Slobodian calls the three “hards”: hard borders, hard-wired human difference and hard money. (President Trump’s antagonistic trade war is the reductio ad absurdum of this brutal worldview.)}:

They argued by making appeals to nature (though not the idea that nature that imposes limits on economic growth). Slobodian vividly shows how far-right intellectuals took to promoting racial homogeneity, an obsession with I.Q. and gold as the ultimate currency. They presented themselves as faithful followers of Hayek and Mises, who traded their early calls for the free movement of labor for an acceptance of closed borders, especially to keep out nonwhite migrants.}:

The title of Slobodian’s book is an explicit echo of “Voltaire’s Bastards” (1992), John Ralston Saul’s bravura work of intellectual history. Saul posited that technocratic elites had fetishized the Enlightenment ideal of rationality to the point of extremism. Slobodian sees a similar dynamic at play with the ideas of Hayek and Mises, and the “intellectual free-for-all” among their epigones on the far right. Hayek, for instance, claimed that in his critiques of immigration he was assuming not innate differences in people’s genes but, rather, cultural differences — a notion that his “bastards” would stretch, warp and deform. “The point is not to salvage the honor of the Austrian school sages,” Slobodian writes, “but to show how ideas are instrumentalized, adapted and weaponized.”

“Hayek’s Bastards” demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them. The cast of hard-right thinkers in this book include the economist Murray Rothbard; the financial writer Peter Brimelow, who founded the anti-immigration website VDARE; the political scientist Charles Murray and the psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who together wrote “The Bell Curve” (1994), the notorious treatise on race and I.Q. that described affirmative action as “leaking a poison into the American soul.”

Rothbard was adamant that “biology stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies.” Like the other figures in this book, he presumed that hierarchy and inequality were entirely natural. As Herrnstein put it in a letter to another like-minded psychologist, “It continually amazes me that even biologists deny having eugenic sentiments, as if they were shameful.”

The economic ideas that are predicated on such a worldview are inevitably ruthless and cutthroat. In a universe based on hierarchy and inequality, cruelty can never be eliminated, only ameliorated. The same year that “The Bell Curve” was published, Rothbard pointed to the wars in the former Yugoslavia as proof that “national heterogeneity simply does not work.” The year after that, he lauded Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential campaign as “a revolution of white Euro-males.” According to Rothbard, segregation was good. He said that South Africa needed not less apartheid but more.

But for the hard right, even such preferred forms of government could never be trusted. Slobodian lays out how, for right-wingers fearful of a spendthrift government “debauching” the currency, gold became the objective standard of value. Some “goldbugs” actually welcomed the prospect of a currency collapse, anticipating the “twin pleasures” of vindication and financial enrichment. Before the internet, they stoked fear and excitement in what Slobodian calls the “profane space” of the newsletter and advice manual. The key was to portray a collapse as imminent and inevitable: “An essential part of the goldbug formula was instilling a basic mistrust in the utterances of public authorities.”

It’s a formula that has been turbocharged in the digital age. A similar mix of gullibility and paranoia fuels today’s rush for the “new gold” of cryptocurrency, in which suspicions of central banks meet credulous frenzies for memecoins. Slobodian’s book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there’s nothing left to stand on.

HAYEK’S BASTARDS: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right | By Quinn Slobodian | Zone Books | 279 pp. | $29.95

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2025, Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Entangled in a Love-Hate Relationship With Globalization.

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no lnx see blum

https://www.levernews.com/the-paid-pundits-defending-clarence-thomas-and-his-billionaire-benefactor/

lever

after ProPublica reported that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose two decades worth of luxury trips provided by billionaire conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, right-wing pundits and think-tank staffers raced to defend Thomas and his benefactor — without mentioning what they all had in common: their own financial ties to Crow.

The episode is a reminder of how many conservative pundits and scholars owe their sinecures to the same billionaires who fund Republican election campaigns and efforts to influence the judiciary.

Hours after ProPublica dropped its report on Thomas, Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute, tweeted, “Unless Harlan Crow has some business before the Court, the @propublica report about Justice Thomas is a big breathless nothingburger.”

Unmentioned: The Manhattan Institute, where Shapiro leads an amicus brief filing program lobbying the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on issues like student debt cancellation and corporate taxation, boasts Crows’ wife Kathy on its board of trustees and has been called “wonderful” by Crow himself.

Many of these pundits came forward to vouch for Crow’s honor and moral character after ProPublica’s story prompted renewed scrutiny of Crow over his collection of Nazi memorabilia, which includes two paintings by Adolf Hitler himself and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

In 2016, Supreme Court justices — including Thomas — unanimously voted to condone the practice of giving lavish gifts to public officials in exchange for access.

“There’s Not Even An Appearance Of Impropriety”

Crow, heir to a Dallas real estate empire, is the CEO of Crow Holdings, a sprawling real estate investment and private equity firm that manages retirement savings for public employees. A relatively private man, Crow has long been a major donor to Republican political campaigns and outside groups.

He’s also been a donor to tax-exempt dark money groups and charitable organizations that do not have to report their donors. In 2011, Crow told the New York Times, “I disclose what I’m required by law to disclose, and I don’t disclose what I’m not required to disclose.”

While those donations are not for the most part traceable, it’s clear that Crow has been generous to conservative think tanks, legal groups, and media outlets.

ProPublica reported last week that Crow has for years offered Thomas, the conservative Supreme Court justice, free trips on his private jet and superyacht. Those trips should have been disclosed under federal ethics rules, according to seven experts consulted by the nonprofit news outlet.

Shapiro, who joined the Manhattan Institute last summer, took time away from a trip to Legoland last week to record an audio clip defending Crow’s gifts to Thomas, in addition to tweeting his support for the justice.

“It is not against the rules to receive all sorts of gifts — even lavish gifts, even yachts, and rides on private jets, and stays at luxury resorts,” he said. “Nor do the Supreme Court ethics rules even require reporting such gifts if they’re personal hospitality — gifts from friends, things like that.”

While Shapiro suggested that maybe the rules should be changed, he asserted that “there’s not even an appearance of impropriety, unless Harlan Crow has some business before the court, which no one has alleged — not even in ProPublica’s big, breathless, nothingburger report.”

It’s an interesting argument, given that Shapiro effectively lobbies the Supreme Court for the Manhattan Institute. Last summer, Kathy Crow was added to the board of trustees listed on the Manhattan Institute’s website. Harlan Crow, for his part, lavished praise on the organization during a debate at his Dallas business compound in 2021.

in his role at the Manhattan Institute, Shapiro regularly files amicus briefs attempting to persuade justices to rule certain ways on cases. Shapiro recently submitted a brief calling on the Supreme Court to issue a decision blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation plan.

Last month, Shapiro filed a brief calling on the Supreme Court to review a case upholding the constitutionality of a one-time repatriation tax imposed on foreign earnings accumulated by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies, which was passed as part of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law.

On Tuesday, Shapiro tweeted that he didn’t know Kathy Crow sits on the Manhattan Institute’s board,while downplaying the significance.

“Alas no private-jet travel here,” he wrote, “but what you’re saying is that conservative donors support conservative organizations? Amazing.”

“Deeply Honorable, Decent, And Patriotic”

As controversy mounted over Harlan Crow’s undisclosed gifts to Thomas, public attention extended to the Texas businessman’s extensive collection of Nazi artifacts — which includes oil paintings by Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, a teapot engraved with Hitler’s initials, and linen napkins embroidered with swastikas.

Those items have drawn scrutiny before. In 2015, Democrats called on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to cancel a presidential campaign fundraiser scheduled at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur.

In 2019, after scholars who dined at Crow’s mansion were disturbed by his collection of Nazi artifacts, Crow offered a half-hearted apology to their host organization, according to a letter obtained by Mother Jones.

“I am sorry that anyone would be offended,” wrote Crow, adding: “I would very much hope it would be completely obvious that having anything that related to Nazis or slavery could not possibly be interpreted as support or glorification for those evils.”

Over the weekend, several conservative pundits came forward to defend Crow and his collectors items, without mentioning that they have benefited from his family’s financial support for their think tanks and media outlets.

Jonah Goldberg, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the conservative news site The Dispatch, tweeted, “Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person.” He characterized Crow’s separate garden of dictator statutes — featuring Russia’s Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin — as “an attempt [to] commemorate the horrors of the 20th century in the spirit of ‘never again.’”

Goldberg later tweeted, “My conscience is clear. Harlan Crow is a good man and the farthest thing from a Nazi.”

As The Dispatch separately noted in a news article covering Crow’s gifts to Thomas, “Harlan Crow is a minority investor in The Dispatch and a friend of the founders.”

Goldberg is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank where Crow serves on the board of trustees.

Previously, Goldberg was a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, the nonprofit affiliated with the conservative National Review magazine. The National Review Institute has regularly hosted its debate series at Crow’s Old Parkland campus.

Crow was additionally a co-chair of a 2021 National Review Institute dinner honoring Leonard Leoand Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network. (Leo, also a friend of Thomas, was a key architect of conservatives’ 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court.)

David French, a former National Review Institute senior fellow and former senior editor at The Dispatch, defended Crow, too.

“I know Harlan also,” French tweeted. “I’ve participated in several debates at Old Parkland. The idea that he’s a Nazi sympathizer is utterly ludicrous. He abhors tyranny, from fascism to communism to everywhere in between.”

Crow’s character was also defended by Charles Murray, a longtime American Enterprise Institute scholar who’s best known for mainstreaming racist pseudoscience via his book, The Bell Curve.

“Harlan Crow surely has enemies but, as far as I can tell, they consist exclusively of people who don’t know him,” Murray tweeted. “Everyone who does know him may disagree with him on some issue, but they universally recognize his decency, integrity, and kindness. Including people of the left.”

Murray dedicated his most recent book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, “to Harlan Crow.”

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ANDREW KLAVAN (HOST): I also want to say something about Memphis. And if you live in Memphis and you love it there, forgive me. I was there for one day. I'm sure there were many lovely parts of it. All I know is it was one of the ugliest American cities I have ever seen - not in terms of structure, but in terms of the people on the ground.

I wanted to see the jazz clubs and I was told in my hotel, you can't go there at night. And I said, well, who's going to a jazz club during the day? I took a walk to see the area where the jazz clubs were, and I was afraid. I was afraid for my safety. A lot of, like, lurking, you know, sullen, baleful, thuggish people, all of whom were Black. And I think all of us know that there are many, many neighborhoods in urban cities, in urban areas with -- that are Black neighborhoods that are bad. They are bad neighborhoods, and many of these neighborhoods are dangerous. And there -- there's a whole subculture, you know, because a lot of Black people, thank heavens, have moved out of that subculture. But there's a subculture of places that where you don't want to be, because they're Black.

And why is that happening? We don't know why. There are different theories. Different people have different theories. So the left says it's history. It's a history of slavery. It's the history of racism. There are other people, Charles Murray says there's a genetic element involved. I myself don't really buy into either of those theories. I believe that it's policy, because Blacks were rising until the Great Society, the Lyndon Johnson Great Society programs, which I believe unintentionally destroyed the Black family, which made everybody more prone to crime and also taught people to be dependent on government largesse unless they were smart and disciplined and driven, then they got out and they left behind the people who are hurt by those programs.

...

You know, when I was talking about Memphis, those people, all of whom were Black and that who were threatening looking, if one of them moved in next to me I would sell my house and move away. Why? Because of the color of skin? Obviously not. I live in a neighborhood where there are plenty of people of color, that that's not the thing. It's because of the behavior, right? It's because of the way that people -- that guy acts and probably the things he does. I mean, I could tell these were not good people.

So, you know, and then they call it white flight. But is it -- are you fleeing because you're white and they're Black, or are you fleeing because of actions and principles? These are things that should be discussed in this country, but they are not being discussed because too many people have a stake in making sure this is purely a racial issue with one explanation, which doesn't make sense.

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https://www.vox.com**/2018**/4/10/17182692/bell-curve-charles-murray-policy-wrong

matt y

grafs]

chls Murray and his decades-old work on IQ and race, published in his 1994 book The Bell Curve, is back in the news because of a mini feud between “new atheist” author and podcasterSam Harris and Vox’s own Ezra Klein. Andrew Sullivan, the punditocracy’s original champion of Murray’s thinking on genetics, decided to jump in as well.

Harris and Klein and Sullivan have, at this point, spilled plenty of words limning their disagreements. And Harris, for his part, sees himself as exclusively defending The Bell Curve’s empirical claims about IQ, which is fine, but it’s important to consider Murray’s work with a view toward actual American public policy, which has been deeply influenced by Murray over the years, and which Donald Trump is looking to take in an even more Murray-esque direction.

The Bell Curve — co-authored with Richard Herrnstein — is, after all, not a work of scientific research but rather a political book written by one of the most prominent conservative policy entrepreneurs in America as part of a larger ideological project. Like several of Murray’s other books, including Losing Ground, In Our Hands, and Coming Apart,the basic subject of The Bell Curve is what should be done to help the disadvantaged in America. And the four books all reach the conclusion that, roughly speaking, we should do as little as is politically possible.

What’s more, despite the mythmaking around Murray, nobody has silenced or stymied him. He is one of the most successful authors of policy-relevant nonfiction working in America today. He’s ensconced at the center of the conservative policy establishment as an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2016, he won the Bradley Prize, a prestigious conservative award that carries a $250,000 stipend. He regularly publishes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times reviewed Coming Aparttwice. Tom Edsall featured it in a column (he says it raises “issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy”), and David Brooks recommended it twice, lauding the “incredible data,” along with the analysis. PBS built an interactive around it.

To debate whether his ideas deserve to be part of the national debate is pointless, since the fact is that they are already central to it. After a long slog through the book, Murray and Herrnstein arrive at their central point. They write:

The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.

Murray’s ideas are plain wrong. Diversity is demonstrably good for society and the economy, not the reverse. Social programs can and do improve lives. Murray’s influence has damaged the interests of millions of people. Murrayism does harm on an ongoing basis, and, far from having been shut out of the discourse, it as at the heart of the ideological agenda that currently governs the United States.

WhatThe Bell Curve says about policy

The Bell Curve is a long book that says a lot of things, many of which, as Murray’s partisans like to point out, are not especially controversial in academic psychology.

By the same token, Karl Marx’s work is full of observations that are well within the consensus of the economics profession — that high levels of unemployment reduce wages for the employed, that firms seek to maximize profits, that market economies are prone to sporadic crises, etc. What makes a controversial book controversial is that some of its content and its major conclusions are controversial, and that is true — and then some — for Murray.

The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve 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 — you read that correctly. It also concludes that the United States should substantially curtail immigration from Latin America and Africa. These are controversial policy recommendations, not banal observations about psychometrics.

Murray’s critics are frequently accused of mischaracterizing him, so I want to quote, at length, what he says the upshot of this is (emphasis in the original):

We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.

The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe.

The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves. There is no reason to assume that the hazards associated with low cognitive ability in America are somehow circumvented by having been born abroad or having parents or grandparents who were. An immigrant population with low cognitive ability will — again, on the average — have trouble not only in finding good work but have trouble in school, at home, and with the law.

These claims about the baleful impact of social assistance spending are not uncontroversial claims about science. Indeed, they are not claims about science at all. And since they constitute what Murray himself views as the upshot of his book, and because Murray is a policy writer rather than a scientist, it is correct and proper for fair-minded people to read the book for what it actually is: a tract proposing the comprehensive revision of the American welfare state along eugenicist lines.

The Bell Curve set the stage for Trumpist immigration policy

Unlike on social welfare policy, Murray does not outline a specific immigration policy agenda. But in chapter 15, he writes that “the rules that currently govern immigration provide the other major source of dysgenic pressure” and remarks enigmatically that while earlier waves of immigrants may have been beneficial, “the self-selection process that used to attract the classic American immigrant — brave, hard working, imaginative, self-starting, and often of high IQ — has been changing and with it the nature of some of the immigrant population.”

He complains that “the nation’s political ground rules have yet to accept that the intelligence of immigrants is a legitimate topic for policymakers to think about” and eventually concludes “the kernel of evidence that must also be acknowledged is that Latin and black immigrants are, at least in the short run, putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence.”

Murray’s intellectual influence on the current trajectory of American immigration policy is obvious. His warning about the dysgenic impact of Latin American and African immigration is echoed by President Trump, who recently remarked that there are too many arrivals from “shithole” countries, and in the Republican Party’s ongoing conversion to the cause of sharp cuts in legal immigration. Trump’s immigration proposals do not specifically reference IQ, but his drive for a switch to what he terms a “merit-based” immigration system is clearly animated by a Murray-esque concern that the wrong kind of people are moving to the US.

Murray wrote The Bell Curveto advance an agenda

The proposal to block immigration from Latin America and end social assistance to poor children is, to be clear, not an incidental aside in a book whose main purpose is to familiarize people with some psychometric research. The authors themselves, on page 549, do an admirable job of squarely posing the question “what good can come from writing this book?”

They offer a fourfold answer that consists entirely of hopes to change public policy for what they believe will be the better.

First: Social engineering should be “highly targeted” at the “small segment of the population” that “accounts for such a large proportion” of social problems, while “the vast majority of Americans run their own lives just fine, and policy should above all be constructed so that it permits them to do so.”
Second: Policymakers to need to design policies that work well for people who may not be as smart as the kind of people who are likely to be in a position to design policies. “There are hundreds of ways to frame bits and pieces of public policy so that they are based on a realistic appraisal of the responses they will get not from people who think like Rhodes scholars but people who think in simpler ways.”
Third: “Much of public policy toward the disadvantaged starts from the premise that interventions can make up for genetic or environmental disadvantages, and that premise is overly optimistic.”
Fourth: We should care less about gaps in life outcomes between different racial groups because “group differences in cognitive ability, so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled — can only be handled — by a return to individualism. A person should not be judged as a member of a group but as an individual. With that cornerstone of the American doctrine once again in place, group differences can take their appropriately insignificant place in affecting American life. But until that cornerstone is once again in place, the anger, the hurt, and the animosities will continue to grow.”

The book concludes with the thought that since individuals differ in ability, a fair society in a procedural sense is very unlikely to be an egalitarian society in the sense of outcomes.

Professional tennis tournaments, for example, are not a rigged game. Nonetheless, a tiny number of players amass the vast majority of the prize money. Not because anyone is cheating, but because some people are better than others at tennis. That’s not an unfamiliar point to political theorists; Michael Young’s 1958 classic The Rise of the Meritocracy is a book-length critique of what he saw as an emerging elite of skill, and John Rawls’s landmark work of political philosophy,A Theory of Justice, argues at length that a just society must offer a good dose of substantive equality and not just formal equality of opportunity for roughly the kinds of reasons Murray offers.

That said, it must be noted that while Murray calls on elites to be a bit more humble about themselves, his work is very much not a call for substantive equality.

Much is sometimes made of Murray’s support for the creation of a universal basic income program, but one must be clear that his thinking on this differs from that of most UBI proponents in three ways:

One, he does not actually think that providing people with a UBI is a good idea. As he writes in his 2006 book, In Our Hands: “Imagine for a moment that the $2 trillion that the US government spends on transfer payments were left instead in the hands of the people who started with it. If I could wave a magic wand, that would be my solution.” The UBI is a compromise with the realities of public opinion, not something he backs on the merits.
Two, his goal in promoting UBI is to make the welfare state less generous, not more generous. In exchange for creating a UBI, he wants to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid and all other federal health programs, all means-tested social assistance (SNAP, Section 8 housing vouchers, TANF, and the earned income tax credit), and all federal assistance to students including veterans programs, Title I, and Pell Grants.
Three, his UBI enacts a massive cut to total state spending on assistance — according to Murray, “as of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.” To give a sense of scale here, all of Obamacare cost about $2 trillion over 10 years. Murray’s UBI would cut $1 trillion from social spending in one year. This is a plan to slash redistribution to the poor, not make it more generous.

Importantly, Murray’s idea is that once we eliminate the entire welfare state, we will replace it with a UBI program that provides a flat level of financial assistance per adult. A single mom raising two kids would receive no more than a childless man, and a married couple with one child would receive more than the single mom. That somewhat defies common sense, but The Bell Curve’s preoccupation with the problem of “encouraging the wrong women” to have children clarifies that the goal is to avert the alleged dysgenic impact of improving the material living conditions of low-income children.

Actually, helping people in need is good

Much of the rhetorical purpose of The Bell Curve seems to be devoted to muddying the waters between the claim that there are limits to how much reasonable policy interventions can do to equalize everyone’s abilities and social outcomes, and the claim that there is virtually nothing useful we can do with activist policy to help people. But while the former idea is well-grounded (so well-grounded that I’m not sure anyone denies it, including people who misguidedly, root and branch, reject the whole idea of general intelligence), the latter idea is completely wrong.

This skepticism about helping pervades Murray’s entire body of work, from Losing Ground, a book-length argument that the war on poverty was a counterproductive failure, which proclaims that “when reforms finally do occur, they happen not because stingy people have won, but because generous people have stopped kidding themselves,” to Coming Apart’sconclusion that a European-style welfare state is useless because “people need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned — it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned — and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.”

Even when tasked with making the case for a UBI in a public debate, Murray was clear that his argument for it isn’t that the cash would help those who receive it but that its existence would encourage other people to be meaner to those in need:

Let’s think of the guy who is your complete screw-up. He drinks too much, he can’t hold on to a job, and he runs out of money 10 days before the end of the month. Well, under the UBI, he can no longer plead helplessness. His friends and his relatives can say to him, as they cannot say now, “Okay, we aren’t going to let you starve, but you’ve got to get your act together, and don’t tell us there’s nothing you can do, because we know you’ve got a thousand bucks hitting your bank account next month. You’ve got to start dealing with your problems.” That’s good. That kind of interaction, multiplied millions of times around the country, is having friends and relatives deal with human needs in ways that bureaucracies inherently are unable to deal with them.

Murray’s arguments about the spiritual inadequacies of social welfare provision are baffling to me, but the IQ-based argument mooted in The Bell Curve at least makes sense. Because people’s underlying capacities vary considerably, you’re not going to design a social policy that overcomes that intrinsic inequity.

That’s almost certainly true. Given everything we know about athletic ability, for example, it’s clear that no matter what we do, some people will always be more adept skiers than others. On the other hand, there’s also an obvious reality that most Americans (myself included) don’t get taught to ski as kids, and consequently, the whole average level of skiing competency in the United States is much lower than it could be if we set about trying to raise it.

Now, of course, a massive national campaign to make us all better skiers would be a stupid waste of time and resources.

But the following ideas are not stupid:

Mercury emissions (mostly from coal plants) end up in the water, where they end up in fish, from whence they end up in the bloodstreams of children and pregnant women, poisoning their brains and lowering IQ. This problem was tackled in a limited way by the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency, but the transmission of coal emissions into fish and thus into food is a highly globalized process that, like the better-known issue of climate change, really requires an international solution.
As a bonus inconvenience, if you skip past the toxic heavy metals contained in most fish, eating fish is really good for kids’ neurological development, so to the extent that parents respond to environmental degradation by reducing the quantity and variety of fish that kids eat, kids’ brains suffer on the other side.
Relatedly, neurologically damaging levels of lead are present in the soil of essentially every American city. There is also a lot of toxic lead lurking in the paint on old houses.
Beyond heavy metal toxicity, there’s considerable evidence that good old-fashioned welfare works well. Research on the Mothers’ Pension programs from the early 20th century showed that kids whose mothers received a very modest welfare check ended up with early-adult incomes that were 20 percent higher than those of mothers who didn’t receive checks, and were also 35 percent less likely to be underweight as adults and received additional schooling.
More modern welfare programs work too. A January 2015 paper by David Brown, Amanda Kowalski, and Ithai Lurie studied Medicaid expansions in the 1980s and ’90s and concluded that kids who benefited from expansion ended up paying more in cumulative taxes and receiving less in EITC disbursements than those who did not.
Speaking of the EITC, in 2013, a paper by Michelle Maxfield found that kids whose parents benefited from increased EITC generosity had higher math scores, were more likely to graduate high school, and were more likely to complete one or more years of college.
Indeed, it is in some ways likely that standard methods are undercounting the benefits of social assistance programs. Chloe East, Sarah Miller, Marianne Page, and Laura Wherry found in September 2017 that the grandchildren of low-income pregnant women who benefited from Medicaid expansion in the 1980s were less likely to suffer from low birth weight (which itself seems to correlate with low IQ, among other health problems).

As a society, we can, and should, take decisive action to reduce environmental contamination and improve the material living conditions of poor children and their parents. The evidence that doing this will have broad secondary benefits for cognitive development is overwhelming.

Meanwhile, though creating a school that is consistently better than an average school is (for understandable reasons) quite difficult, it appears to be possible and it does work — and not just for a narrow cognitive elite. Certain charter school networks produce consistently superior results — especially for low-income and minority kids — compared to mainstream public school systems. And Roland Fryer has shown that traditional unionized public schools that adopt some of these charters’ main pedagogical innovations produce similar results.

Individual schoolteachers vary in quality (like practitioners of other professions), with students taught by average teachers earning significantly more as adults than those taught by teachers in the bottom 5 percent of the distribution. A year’s worth of instruction by a great teacher induces $400,000 in additional earnings from a 20-student classroom. Something as simple as judicial decisions mandating that states equalize their school funding formulas seems to produce positive educational results for poor kids.

All of which is to say that the fatalism Murray promotes about social betterment is entirely misguided, and attempting to implement his reform of the welfare state would lead to not only massive short-term suffering but a massive erosion of our long-term prospects as a society. Yet unfortunately, Murray-style thinking is already very influential in American politics.

Murrayism is very influential in American politics

Despite the popular claim among Murray supporters that he’s been silenced and unfairly maligned, his views have shaped — and still shape — American policy outcomes.

Though the United States is generally quite a bit richer than Western Europe, the material living standards of American children are generally worse, with about 11.8 percent of US children living in absolute poverty (as indicated by the US poverty line), compared to only 6.2 percent of German or 3.6 percent of Swedish children. This is in large part because the US is already an outlier in terms of its refusal to provide cash support to parents.

![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dcNWWVbUpudW-f2sjSpV6DCMm2g=/0x0:1200x630/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1200x630):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10562383/Child_benefit_comparison.0.png)

Instead, the United States essentially eliminated substantial cash assistance to poor mothers in the mid-1990s. Murray’s biography page at All-American Speakers boasts that Murray provided “the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996,” and the fee for a Murray speech is in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. Altering the old, and genuinely very flawed, welfare system in Murray’s preferred direction rather than moving toward a universal child allowance meant that not only did the United States maintain its abnormally high level of child poverty, but it witnessed a substantial increase in deep poverty.

This relates in important ways to intelligence. A growing body of academic research — which includes DNA testing to control for potential genetic factors — indicates that the stress of growing up in poverty does concrete neurological damage to children’s brains over and above the issues with exposure to toxic chemicals. Murrayism traps poor children in a cycle where they have worse opportunities for intellectual development and then that underdevelopment is used as evidence that little can or should be done to improve their economic status.

And Republican politicians are seeking to proceed piecemeal with the Murray approach to social policy. Congressional Republicans made several runs at rolling back Medicaid expansion, and now the Department of Health and Human Services is working with GOP-run states to try to tighten eligibility requirements and reduce enrollment. State-level action to make SNAP benefits harder to access has become routine, and the GOP only dropped its plans for a big 2018 push to apply “welfare reform” principles to in-kind benefits programs because Democrat Doug Jones’s Senate special election win ensured the votes wouldn’t be there.

Murray’s views on immigration policy have emerged as the dominant school of thought coming out of the White House and are supported by the Republican Party as a whole, despite evidence that the restrictionism has no society-wide upside.

Even small aspects of this agenda that are already being implemented, like the rollback of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, are economically harmful to most native-born Americans and the overwhelming preponderance of economic evidence suggests that the larger restrictions now on the table would have an even bigger negative impact on the economy.

Concern about the dysgenic impact of immigrants and assistance to low-income families, in short, has in fact become an impediment to both overall national prosperity and specifically to poor kids’ brain development and life prospects. And racial demagoguery is a key reason why.

What does race have to do with any of this?

One thing Murray’s defenders tend to get more right than his critics is that the racial portions of The Bell Curve are relatively marginal to the overall project (as Nathan Robinson writes at Current Affairs,Murray’s bizarre non-policy book Human Accomplishment makes far more provocative claims on race), which, despite its prurient interest in racial gaps, is fundamentally about economic class. Race is, however, central to the political project of maintaining a stingy welfare state.

Indeed, cross-sectional evidence marshaled by Alberto Alesina and Ed Glaeser for their 2004 book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (you can read their main findings here) concludes that racial animosity is the main explanation for America’s relative stinginess to poor families while experimental evidence shows that increasing the salience of racial conflict promotes reactionary politics and specifically confirms that associating means-tested social assistance with black people leads many whites to become more skeptical.

African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately poor in the United States, but most recipients of social assistance are, in fact, white. Despite the complaint that critics are throwing around charges of racism to silence Murray, the reality is that promoting a heavily racialized view of the overall question of whether we should try to help poor families or punish them serves as a useful marketing gimmick for both books and legislation.

[2 rew rep covers]

Murray does have a side agenda that is race-specific, however. Near the very end of The Bell Curve, he writes, somewhat euphemistically, “that group differences in cognitive ability, so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled — can only be handled — by a return to individualism” rather than with policies that seek to specifically address or remedy racism or racial disadvantage.

Talking to Harris on his podcast last year, Murray denounced an idea he calls “the equality premise,” arguing that the idea “that all groups of people only have differences in outcomes because of racism or sexism or inappropriate institutions, that assumption has created huge harm.” Affirmative action policies in college admissions, he argues, actually hurt black and Latino students by creating a “mismatch” between their abilities and those of their white and Asian peers, which leads to elevated dropout rates. (Matthew Chingos, who has researched the determinants of college completion in detail, says this isn’t true, and in fact, “students were most likely to graduate by attending the most selective institution that would admit them.”)

But Murray’s critique of affirmative action admissions, though incorrect, is a politically influential viewpoint in the United States rather than one in desperate need of signal-boosting. The Justice Department is backing away from consent decrees that aim to address racial inequities in policing, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is gutting fair housing enforcement, and a ProPublica report last year revealed a broad administration-wide push for all agencies to scale back civil rights enforcement generally. Instead of waging war on racial discrimination, the Trump administration is, in line with Murray’s recommendations, waging war on affirmative action policies.

The reality, however, is that the evidence that race-specific disadvantages exist and that race-specific remedies can help is overwhelming.

Recognizing how race works in America is important for policymaking

That women earn less than men and black people earn less than white people in America is well-known. But a landmark new study published last month by the Equality of Opportunity Project found a striking pattern in the interaction of these issues. While black women earn less than white women, that earnings gap essentially vanishes when you account for the fact that white women on average have richer parents than black women. But the earnings gap between black men and white men persists even with this control.

![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Tx79nHe6099LzwaQzUfNRzA6QZM=/0x0:3200x1154/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3200x1154):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10562433/chetty_combined.png)

There is no plausible genetic explanation for this. Instead, it seems that black men suffer from a race-specific disadvantage that impairs their earnings. This, in turn, reduces the material living conditions of black girls, which impairs their earnings too. The exact mechanism at work is unclear, though the gender specificity suggests that perhaps the criminal justice system is playing a key role.

It’s also important to understand that while Murray’s specific remarks about race science tend to be hedged and a bit vague, and at times to profess a fair degree of agnosticism about the actual magnitudes, his discussion of why this is worth bringing up at all is very clear and sweeping — he believes, despite vast evidence to the contrary, that America needs to stop thinking about racial discrimination and race-conscious solutions.

It seems almost ridiculous to need to argue this, but racial discrimination is a quite real and salient feature of American society. Employers, for example, discriminate against job applications that feature stereotypically “black” names, and so do public officials when deciding what correspondence to answer.

But conversely, attentiveness to race can be useful in crafting policy solutions. Early studies of racial matching (or lack thereof) between teachers and students showed that black teachers have higher academic expectations for black students than non-black ones have. More recent inquiry shows that this has concrete effects, with black students seeming to learn more from black teachers. Promoting the message that African Americans suffer from irremediable intellectual incapacity would be actively harmful in this context, while trying to take affirmative measures to ensure fairer treatment of black students and adequate representation of African Americans as classroom leaders would make it better.

Similarly, an earlier study from the Equality of Opportunity Project showed that black and Latino kids with exceptional math skills are less likely to grow up to be inventors than similarly skilled white and Asian kids, and the research offered some suggestive evidence that a lack of role models may be an issue here.

And understanding the existence of discrimination in the labor market is critical to understanding the impact of different micro and macro policies. That includes everything from the finding that employer drug testing helps black job applicants because it lets them overcome negative stereotypes to the fact that African Americans benefit disproportionately from aggressively pro-employment monetary policy because a tight labor market makes discrimination more costly for employers and thus more surmountable.

Race, in short, continues to be a real and underrated factor in how American social and economic institutions function. And while raising the salience of racial issues can be counterproductive in some contexts by undermining political support for anti-poverty measures, it can be critical in other areas to improving the way schools, labor markets, and the criminal justice system work.

To put it bluntly, insisting that we pay more attention to ambiguous evidence about the role of IQ heritability in driving group differences is not a disinterested gesture of scientific inquiry, but a political move initiated by political polemicists who aim to heighten racial salience where it’s counterproductive and diminish it where it could be constructive.

People of goodwill who really do simply believe in open inquiry ought to take a good, hard look at the overall context in which this topic arises and think carefully about what exactly it is that they are trying to say.

Why is this discussion important?

Though he tends to back away from it under pressure, Murray is admirably clear in the conclusion to The Bell Curve and elsewhere about why he thinks it’s important to discuss IQ and heredity — he believes that focusing on this issue will build political support for restricting immigration from poor countries and reducing economic assistance to poor families. As a bonus, he hopes that throwing in specific hypotheses about group differences will build political support for eliminating race-conscious policymaking and curbing efforts to address race-specific disadvantage. The truth, however, is that these are not underrated policy ideas that are in need of amplification in the public arena.

They are, rather, terrible policy ideas that currently exert more influence over policymaking than they deserve and ought to be rebutted.

Scientific exploration of human genetics, of course, ought to continue, and we ought to be open-minded about what it may discover. From what we know so far, it really is clear that smart parents tend to have smart kids, but it is also very clear that a wide range of policy interventions, ranging from environmental cleanup to social welfare provision to improving schools, raise kids’ cognitive abilities and improve their labor market outcomes. It is also very clear that race is significant as a social phenomenon in the United States in ways that create meaningful disadvantages for members of minority groups and that attention to racial issues can lead to better outcomes.

Genetic research can tell us things about the harmful implications of racial inequities. Biomedical research on the development of pharmaceuticals and other health care technology, for example, often does not reflect the ethnic diversity of the American population, which means that we are often developing health interventions that don’t serve minority groups effectively.

Sam Oh, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco Center for Genes, Environment, and Health, offered as an example to NPR that “African-Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t respond as well to some of the most common asthma controller medications,” even though these groups would benefit enormously from more effective treatment, since they are disproportionately likely to live in high-contaminant environments where asthma is common.

But to say that actual scientists should continue doing scientific research into the genetic bases of human cognition is a far cry from saying that lay journalists and policy analysts ought to go out of our way to promote the hypothesis that America’s class system reflects irremediable aspects of human biology. This is an idea that exerts too much rather than too little influence over American politics and public policy, and the racialized version of the hypothesis that Murray is known for is particularly damaging.

The notion that poor families deserve less help than they get because they are a cognitively disadvantaged group who will respond to assistance via overbreeding that undermines the quality of the national stock is not an unexplored suggestion in American history. But it is a uniformly pernicious one that continues to exert a powerful negative influence on the lives of millions of people — reenforcing traditional status hierarchies while immiserating the country as a whole by preventing vast swaths of the population from reaching their full potential to prosper and contribute.

The New Republic

Charles Murray,Richard J. Herrnstein/October 31, 1994

Race, Genes and I.Q. — An Apologia

The case for conservative multiculturalism

This article was originally published in the October 31, 1994, issue of The New Republic. Since many staffers at the time objected to its publication, this excerpt of The Bell Curve was published alongside a raft of articles condemning it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence.

The book was and remains highly controversial, especially where the authors discussed purported connections between race and intelligence and suggested policy implications based on these purported connections. Shortly after its publication, many people rallied both in criticism and in defense of the book. A number of critical texts were written in response to it.

Synopsis

The Bell Curve, published in 1994, was written by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray to explain the variations in intelligence in American society, warn of some consequences of that variation, and propose social policies for mitigating the worst of the consequences. The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in a population.

Introduction

The book starts with an introduction that appraises the history of the concept of intelligence from Francis Galton to modern times. Spearman's introduction of the general factor of intelligence and other early advances in research on intelligence are discussed along with a consideration of links between intelligence testing and racial politics. The 1960s are identified as the period in American history when social problems were increasingly attributed to forces outside the individual. This egalitarian ethos, Herrnstein and Murray argue, cannot accommodate biologically based individual differences.^[1]

The introduction states six of the authors' assumptions, which they claim to be "beyond significant technical dispute":^[2]

There is such a difference as a general factor of cognitive ability on which human beings differ.
All standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this general factor to some degree, but IQ tests expressly designed for that purpose measure it most accurately.
IQ scores match, to a first degree, whatever it is that people mean when they use the word intelligent, or smart in ordinary language.
IQ scores are stable, although not perfectly so, over much of a person's life.
Properly administered IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups.
Cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40 percent and no more than 80 percent.

At the close of the introduction, the authors warn the reader against committing the ecological fallacy of inferring things about individuals based on the aggregate data presented in the book. They also assert that intelligence is just one of many valuable human attributes and one whose importance among human virtues is overrated.^[1]

Part I. The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite

In the first part of the book Herrnstein and Murray chart how American society was transformed in the 20th century. They argue that America evolved from a society where social origin largely determined one's social status to one where cognitive ability is the leading determinant of status. The growth in college attendance, a more efficient recruitment of cognitive ability, and the sorting of cognitive abilityby selective colleges are identified as important drivers of this evolution. Increased occupational sorting by cognitive ability is discussed. The argument is made, based on published meta-analyses, that cognitive ability is the best predictor of worker productivity.^[1]

Herrnstein and Murray argue that due to increasing returns to cognitive ability, a cognitive elite is being formed in America. This elite is getting richer and progressively more segregated from the rest of society.^[1]

Part II. Cognitive Classes and Social Behavior

The second part describes how cognitive ability is related to social behaviors: high ability predicts socially desirable behavior, low ability undesirable behavior. The argument is made that group differences in social outcomes are better explained by intelligence differences rather than socioeconomic status, a perspective, the authors argue, that has been neglected in research.^[1]

The analyses reported in this part of the book were done using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience of Youth (NLSY), a study conducted by the United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics tracking thousands of Americans starting in the 1980s. Only non-Hispanic whites are included in the analyses so as to demonstrate that the relationships between cognitive ability and social behavior are not driven by race or ethnicity.^[1]

Herrnstein and Murray argue that intelligence is a better predictor of individuals' outcomes than parental socioeconomic status. This argument is based on analyses where individuals' IQ scores are shown to better predict their outcomes as adults than the socioeconomic status of their parents. Such results are reported for many outcomes, including poverty, dropping out of school, unemployment, marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, criminal offending, and the probability of voting in elections.^[1]

All participants in the NLSY took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a battery of ten tests taken by all who apply for entry into the armed services. (Some had taken an IQ test in high school, and the median correlation of the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) scores and those IQ test scores was .81). Participants were later evaluated for social and economic outcomes. In general, IQ/AFQT scores were a better predictor of life outcomes than social class background. Similarly, after statistically controlling for differences in IQ, many outcome differences between racial-ethnic groups disappeared.^[citation ^needed]

^[table]

^...^

Herrnstein and Murray argued the average genetic IQ of the United States is declining, owing to the tendency of the more intelligent having fewer children than the less intelligent, the generation length to be shorter for the less intelligent, and the large-scale immigration to the United States of those with low intelligence. Discussing a possible future political outcome of an intellectually stratified society, the authors stated that they "fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent—not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but 'conservatism' along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below."^[5] Moreover, they fear that increasing welfare will create a "custodial state" in "a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population." They also predict increasing totalitarianism: "It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states."^[6]

The authors recommended the elimination of welfare policies which they claim encourage poor women to have babies.^[7]

Media reception

The Bell Curve received a great deal of media attention. The book was not distributed in advance to the media, except for a few select reviewers picked by Murray and the publisher, which delayed more detailed critiques for months and years after the book's release.^[8] Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, said that the book "contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism" and said that the "authors omit facts, misuse statistical methods, and seem unwilling to admit the consequence of their own words."^[9]

A 1995 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writer Jim Naureckas criticized the media response, saying that "While many of these discussions included sharp criticisms of the book, media accounts showed a disturbing tendency to accept Murray and Herrnstein's premises and evidence even while debating their conclusions".^[10]

After reviewers had more time to review the book's research and conclusions, more significant criticisms begin to appear.^[8] Nicholas Lemann, writing in *Slate*, said that later reviews showed the book was "full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors."^[8] Lemann said that "Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the authors' thesis."^[8]

Peer review

Herrnstein and Murray were criticized for not submitting their work to peer review before publication, an omission many have seen as incompatible with their presentation of it as a scholarly text.^[8][11] Nicholas Lemann noted that the book was not circulated in galley proofs, a common practice to allow potential reviewers and media professionals an opportunity to prepare for the book's arrival.^[8]

"Mainstream Science on Intelligence" statement

Fifty-two professors, most of them researchers in intelligence and related fields, signed "Mainstream Science on Intelligence",^[12] an opinion statement endorsing a number of the views presented in The Bell Curve. The statement was written by psychologist Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal in 1994 and subsequently reprinted in Intelligence, an academic journal. Of the 131 who were invited by mail to sign the document, 100 responded, with 52 agreeing to sign and 48 declining. Eleven of the 48 who declined to sign claimed that the statement or some part thereof did not represent the mainstream view of intelligence.^[12][13]

APA task force report

Regarding explanations for racial differences, the APA task force stated:

In response to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association's Board of Scientific Affairs established a special task force to publish an investigative report focusing solely on the research presented in the book, not necessarily the policy recommendations that were made.^[14][15]

The cause of that differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves. The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally based explanations of the Black/White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available.

The APA journal that published the statement, American Psychologist, subsequently published eleven critical responses in January 1997.^[citation ^needed]

Criticisms

Many criticisms were collected in the book The Bell Curve Debate.

Criticism of assumptions

Criticism by Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the "entire argument" of the authors of The Bell Curve rests on four unsupported, and mostly false, assumptions about intelligence:^[9][16]

Intelligence must be reducible to a single number.
Intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people in a linear order.
Intelligence must be primarily genetically based.
Intelligence must be essentially immutable.

In a 1995 interview with Frank Miele of Skeptic, Murray denied making each of these four assumptions.^[17]

Criticism by James Heckman

The Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist James Heckman considers two assumptions made in the book to be questionable: that g accounts for correlation across test scores and performance in society, and that g cannot be manipulated. Heckman's reanalysis of the evidence used in The Bell Curve found contradictions:

The factors that explain wages receive different weights than the factors that explain test scores. More than g is required to explain either.
Other factors besides g contribute to social performance, and they can be manipulated.^[18]

In response, Murray argued that this was a straw man and that the book does not argue that g or IQ are totally immutable or the only factors affecting outcomes.^[19]

In a 2005 interview, Heckman praised The Bell Curve for breaking "a taboo by showing that differences in ability existed and predicted a variety of socioeconomic outcomes" and for playing "a very important role in raising the issue of differences in ability and their importance" and stated that he was "a bigger fan of [The Bell Curve] than you might think." However, he also maintained that Herrnstein and Murray overestimated the role of heredity in determining intelligence differences.^[20]

Criticism by Noam Chomsky

In 1995, Noam Chomsky, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, directly criticized the book and its assumptions on IQ. He takes issue with the idea that IQ is 60% heritable saying, the "statement is meaningless" since heritability doesn't have to be genetic. He gives the example of women wearing earrings:

To borrow an example from Ned Block, "some years ago when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring was due to a chromosomal difference, XX vs. XY." No one has yet suggested that wearing earrings, or ties, is "in our genes," an inescapable fate that environment cannot influence, "dooming the liberal notion."^[21]

He goes on to say there is almost no evidence of a genetic link, and greater evidence that environmental issues are what determine IQ differences.

Criticism of statistical methods

Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss in the book Inequality by Design recalculated the effect of socioeconomic status, using the same variables as The Bell Curve, but weighting them differently. They found that if IQ scores are adjusted, as Herrnstein and Murray did, to eliminate the effect of education, the ability of IQ to predict poverty can become dramatically larger, by as much as 61 percent for whites and 74 percent for blacks. According to the authors, Herrnstein and Murray's finding that IQ predicts poverty much better than socioeconomic status is substantially a result of the way they handled the statistics.^[22]

In August 1995, National Bureau of Economic Research economist Sanders Korenman and Harvard University sociologist Christopher Winship argued that measurement error was not properly handled by Herrnstein and Murray. Korenman and Winship concluded: "... there is evidence of substantial bias due to measurement error in their estimates of the effects of parents' socioeconomic status. In addition, Herrnstein and Murray's measure of parental socioeconomic status (SES) fails to capture the effects of important elements of family background (such as single-parent family structure at age 14). As a result, their analysis gives an exaggerated impression of the importance of IQ relative to parents' SES, and relative to family background more generally. Estimates based on a variety of methods, including analyses of siblings, suggest that parental family background is at least as important, and may be more important than IQ in determining socioeconomic success in adulthood."^[23]

In the book Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve, a group of social scientists and statisticians analyzes the genetics-intelligence link, the concept of intelligence, the malleability of intelligence and the effects of education, the relationship between cognitive ability, wages and meritocracy, pathways to racial and ethnic inequalities in health, and the question of public policy. This work argues that much of the public response was polemic, and failed to analyze the details of the science and validity of the statistical arguments underlying the book's conclusions.^[1]

Criticism of use of AFQT

William J. Matthews writes that part of The Bell Curve's analysis is based on the AFQT "which is not an IQ test but designed to predict performance of certain criterion variables".^[24] The AFQT covers subjects such as trigonometry.^[8]

Heckman observed that the AFQT was designed only to predict success in military training schools and that most of these tests appear to be achievement tests rather than ability tests, measuring factual knowledge and not pure ability. He continues:^[18][25]

Ironically, the authors delete from their composite AFQT score a timed test of numerical operations because it is not highly correlated with the other tests. Yet it is well known that in the data they use, this subtest is the single best predictor of earnings of all the AFQT test components. The fact that many of the subtests are only weakly correlated with each other, and that the best predictor of earnings is only weakly correlated with their "g-loaded" score, only heightens doubts that a single-ability model is a satisfactory description of human intelligence. It also drives home the point that the "g-loading" so strongly emphasized by Murray and Herrnstein measures only agreement among tests—not predictive power for socioeconomic outcomes. By the same token, one could also argue that the authors have biased their empirical analysis against the conclusions they obtain by disregarding the test with the greatest predictive power.

Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas presented evidence suggesting AFQT scores are likely better markers for family background than "intelligence" in a 1999 study:

Herrnstein and Murray report that conditional on maternal "intelligence" (AFQT scores), child test scores are little affected by variations in socio-economic status. Using the same data, we demonstrate their finding is very fragile.^[26]

Cognitive sorting

Charles R. Tittle and Thomas Rotolo found that the more the written, IQ-like, examinations are used as screening devices for occupational access, the stronger the relationship between IQ and income. Thus, rather than higher IQ leading to status attainment because it indicates skills needed in a modern society, IQ may reflect the same test-taking abilities used in artificial screening devices by which status groups protect their domains.^[27]

Min-Hsiung Huang and Robert M. Hauser write that Herrnstein and Murray provide scant evidence of growth in cognitive sorting. Using data from the General Social Survey, they tested each of these hypotheses using a short verbal ability test which was administered to about 12,500 American adults between 1974 and 1994; the results provided no support for any of the trend hypotheses advanced by Herrnstein and Murray. One chart in The Bell Curve purports to show that people with IQs above 120 have become "rapidly more concentrated" in high-IQ occupations since 1940. But Robert Hauser and his colleague Min-Hsiung Huang retested the data and came up with estimates that fell "well below those of Herrnstein and Murray." They add that the data, properly used, "do not tell us anything except that selected, highly educated occupation groups have grown rapidly since 1940."^[28]

In 1972, Noam Chomsky questioned Herrnstein's idea that society was developing towards a meritocracy. Chomsky criticized the assumptions that people only seek occupations based on material gain. He argued that Herrnstein would not want to become a baker or lumberjack even if he could earn more money that way. He also criticized the assumption that such a society would be fair with pay based on value of contributions. He argued that because there are already unjust great inequalities, people will often be paid not commensurately with contributions to society, but at levels that preserve such inequalities.^[29]

Race and intelligence

One part of the controversy concerned the parts of the book which dealt with racial group differences on IQ and the consequences of this. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are strictly genetic, when in fact they attributed IQ differences to both genes and the environment in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences." The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."

When several prominent critics turned this into an "assumption" that the authors had attributed most or all of the racial differences in IQ to genes, co-author Charles Murray responded by quoting two passages from the book:

"If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not justify an estimate." (p. 311)^[30]
"If tomorrow you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the cognitive differences between races were 100 percent genetic in origin, nothing of any significance should change. The knowledge would give you no reason to treat individuals differently than if ethnic differences were 100 percent environmental".^[30]

In an article praising the book, economist Thomas Sowell criticized some of its aspects, including some of its arguments about race and the malleability of IQ:

When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s ... Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to "folklore" that "Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence." It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results—during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.^[31]

Rushton (1997) as well as Cochran et al. (2005) have argued that the early testing does in fact support a high average Jewish IQ.^[32][33]

Columnist Bob Herbert, writing for The New York Times, described the book as "a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship". "Mr. Murray can protest all he wants", wrote Herbert; "his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger."^[34]

In 1996, Stephen Jay Gould released a revised and expanded edition of his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, intended to more directly refute many of The Bell Curve's claims regarding race and intelligence, and arguing that the evidence for heritability of IQ did not indicate a genetic origin to group differences in intelligence. This book has in turn been criticized.^[35][36]

Psychologist David Marks has suggested that the ASVAB test used in the analyses of The Bell Curve correlates highly with measures of literacy, and argues that the ASVAB test in fact is not a measure of general intelligence but of literacy.^[37][38]

Melvin Konner, professor of anthropology and associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory University, called Bell Curve a "deliberate assault on efforts to improve the school performance of African-Americans":

This book presented strong evidence that genes play a role in intelligence but linked it to the unsupported claim that genes explain the small but consistent black-white difference in IQ. The juxtaposition of good argument with a bad one seemed politically motivated, and persuasive refutations soon appeared. Actually, African-Americans have excelled in virtually every enriched environment they have been placed in, most of which they were previously barred from, and this in only the first decade or two of improved but still not equal opportunity. It is likely that the real curves for the two races will one day be superimposable on each other, but this may require decades of change and different environments for different people. Claims about genetic potential are meaningless except in light of this requirement.^[39]

The 2014 textbook Evolutionary Analysis by Herron and Freeman^[40] devoted an entire chapter to debunking what they termed the "Bell Curve fallacy", saying that "Murray and Herrnstein's argument amounts to little more than an appeal to personal incredulity" and that it is a mistake to think that heritability can tell us something about the causes of differences between population means. In reference to the comparison of African-American with European-American IQ scores, the text states that only a common garden experiment, in which the two groups are raised in an environment typically experienced by European-Americans, would allow one to see if the difference is genetic. This kind of experiment, routine with plants and animals, cannot be conducted with humans. Nor is it possible to approximate this design with adoptions into families of the different groups, because the children would be recognizable and possibly be treated differently. The text concludes: "There is no way to assess whether genetics has anything to do with the difference in IQ score between ethnic groups."

In 1995, Noam Chomsky criticized the book's conclusions about race and the notion that blacks and people with lower IQs having more children is even a problem.^[21]

Rutledge M. Dennis suggests that through soundbites of works like Jensen's famous study on the achievement gap, and Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve, the media "paints a picture of Blacks and other people of color as collective biological illiterates—as not only intellectually unfit but evil and criminal as well", thus providing, he says "the logic and justification for those who would further disenfranchise and exclude racial and ethnic minorities".^[41]

Charles Lane pointed out that 17 of the researchers whose work is referenced by the book have also contributed to Mankind Quarterly, a journal of anthropology founded in 1960 in Edinburgh, which has been viewed as supporting the theory of the genetic superiority of white people.^[42] David Bartholomew reports Murray's response as part of the controversy over the Bell Curve.^[43] In his afterword to the 1996 Free Press edition of The Bell Curve, Murray responded that the book "draws its evidence from more than a thousand scholars" and among the researchers mentioned in Lane's list "are some of the most respected psychologists of our time and that almost all of the sources referred to as tainted are articles published in leading refereed journals".^[44]

The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America is a collection of articles published in reaction to the book. Edited by Steven Fraser, the writers of these essays do not have a specific viewpoint concerning the content of The Bell Curve, but express their own critiques of various aspects of the book, including the research methods used, the alleged hidden biases in the research and the policies suggested as a result of the conclusions drawn by the authors.^[45] Fraser writes that "by scrutinizing the footnotes and bibliography in The Bell Curve, readers can more easily recognize the project for what it is: a chilly synthesis of the work of disreputable race theorists and eccentric eugenicists".^[46]

Allegations of racism

Since the book provided statistical data making the assertion that blacks were, on average, less intelligent than whites, some people have feared that The Bell Curve could be used by extremists to justify genocide and hate crimes.^[47] Much of the work referenced by The Bell Curve was funded by the Pioneer Fund, which aims to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences, and has been accused of promoting scientific racism.^[48][49][50] Murray criticized the characterization of the Pioneer Fund as a racist organization, arguing that it has as much relationship to its founder as "Henry Ford and today's Ford Foundation".^[51]

Evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves described The Bell Curve as an example of racist science, containing all the types of errors in the application of scientific method that have characterized the history of scientific racism:

Claims that are not supported by the data given
Errors in calculation that invariably support the hypothesis
No mention of data that contradict the hypothesis
No mention of theories and data that conflict with core assumptions
Bold policy recommendations that are consistent with those advocated by racists.^[52]

Eric Siegel wrote on the Scientific American blog that the book "endorses prejudice by virtue of what it does not say. Nowhere does the book address why it investigates racial differences in IQ. By never spelling out a reason for reporting on these differences in the first place, the authors transmit an unspoken yet unequivocal conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator as to whether a person is likely to hold certain capabilities. Even if we assume the presented data trends are sound, the book leaves the reader on his or her own to deduce how to best put these insights to use. The net effect is to tacitly condone the prejudgment of individuals based on race."^[53] Similarly, Howard Gardner accused the authors of engaging in "scholarly brinkmanship", arguing that "Whether concerning an issue of science, policy, or rhetoric, the authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so ... Scholarly brinkmanship encourages the reader to draw the strongest conclusions, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention."^[54]

Notes

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-steven-pinker-sam-harris-and-the-epidemic-of-annoying-white-male-intellectuals

no lnx

The problem with Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the epidemic of annoying white male intellectuals

Written by Phil Torres / Salon October 20, 2019

In a recent article for Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson describes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker as “the most annoying man in the world” because Pinker is the type of person who constantly insists he’s “Just Being Reasonable” while he is actually “being extremely goddamn unreasonable.” Although Robinson’s article was a bit harsh in tone, it gestures at something very real: we’re in the midst of an epidemic of “intellectuals,” almost entirely white men, who claim to embody Reason and Rationality while flagrantly and habitually succumbing to the same tribalistic tendencies that they identify as the Ultimate Enemy.

My own experience with Pinker and his ilk exemplifies the problem. Last January, I published an article here at Salon that summarized some extremely detailed criticisms that I wrote of Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now!” More specifically, I examined a few pages in the book’s “Existential Threats” chapter, one line or passage at a time, since my own research focuses onexistential threats (that is, threats to civilization and humanity) and thus I have some knowledge of the topic.

Although Pinker is widely known, or at least was at one point, as a clear-headed, objective intellectual of the highest caliber, his chapter on “existential threats” was overflowing with quotes taken out of context, misrepresented ideas, false dichotomies, blatantly inaccurate claims, poor reasoning, dubious citations, condescending straw-man attacks and cockamamie ad hominems. If the chapter had been a first-year undergraduate term paper, and if the professor were an exceptionally easy grader who habitually dished out A’s for poorly researched papers, Pinker’s chapter might have received a C.

(The popularity of poor scholarship seems to be on the rise, incidentally. Just consider the egregious mistakes made by Jared Diamond in his most recent book, “Upheaval.”)

What was most telling, though, was the response to my article. For example, the founding editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, tweeted this in response to my critique:

Where @RichardDawkins had his fleas (The Dawkins Delusion etc.), @sapinker has his cockroaches (theoleaginous Phil Torres desperate for attention), artfully squashed here:

Shermer then linked to a blog post by Jerry Coyne, which contained a response from Pinker. Before getting to that, though, Shermer’s tweet is notable for a couple of reasons. First, not only does it contain a personal attack, but the personal attack is overtly uncivil. That’s a bit humorous given that Shermer, as well as Pinker, are famous for accusing progressives, especially those who care about women and people of color, of “incivility.” For example, in May of this year, Pinker tweeted:

Are you concerned about the growing illiberalism, incivility, intellectual conformity, and repression of debate in today’s universities? Join us at the meeting of the society set up to encourage viewpoint diversity and constructive debate on campuses. I’ll be giving the keynote.

But Pinker did nothing to call out Shermer for his patently crude, puerile behavior, which has also included calling people he disagrees with (seriously) “namby-pamby bedwetters” and (seriously) “losers.” This is perhaps unsurprising when one realizes the Pinker has unwaveringly supported Shermer despite multiple women accusing Shermer of sexual harassment, assault and even rape. To my knowledge, Pinker has made no effort to contact any of Shermer’s purported victims. And why would he? What does truth have to do with standing by your comrades? Instead, Pinker has repeatedly de-emphasized the issue of rape in society and college campuses by tendentiously pointing to opinions that support his preferred views rather than by honestly examining the totality of evidence, which gives a quite different perspective. All of this is very worrisome, tribalistic behavior. But it gets worse.

Back to the blog that Shermer references. The particular post was published by Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Chicago who has become something of Pinker’s bulldog, defending him against any and all criticisms no matter what, with (almost) no questions asked. One of the most recent examples is Coyne coming to Pinker’s defense after a picture emerged of Pinker with Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex-trafficker who recently killed himself in a New York jail cell.

Coyne quickly dismissed criticisms of Pinker hanging out with Epstein as mere slander and character assassination, writing that suggestions that Pinker should have known better “disturbed me so much — since Pinker is a friend whose character I respect.” The problem is that Pinker appears in the photo with Epstein and he tweeted out an affidavit defending Epstein after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes, which happened in 2008. That is inexcusable and gross — but not to Coyne, whose allegiance is rooted not in evidence but loyalty.

So it should be no surprise that Coyne tore into my critique of the “existential threats” chapter, inaccurately calling it a “hit piece.” Indeed, by any reasonable account, the article was a substantive critique of shoddy scholarship. In fact, I was in touch with four scholars or writers whose work Pinker misrepresents within just a few pages of the chapter. All of them were unhappy with the quality of Pinker’s work, so it’s not like this was just me being a grump.

For example, the political economist Eric Zency, whom Pinker incorrectly describes as an engineer, was livid that Pinker had used a line from one of his papers to mean the exact opposite of what Zency had intended. In an email to me about Pinker’s misuse of his quote, Zency remarked, “How this guy managed to become a public intellectual in fields so far removed from his expertise is something to wonder at.” I agree.

Pinker also wrote a response to my critique, but it only further justifies the view that Pinker is — or has become, sadly — an ideologue who can’t acknowledge when he’s wrong. Just consider that the second sentence of his response makes an ad hominem claim that I’m “trying to make a career out of warning people about the existential threat that AI [i.e., artificial intelligence] poses to humanity. Since [‘Enlightenment Now’] evaluates and dismisses that threat, it poses an existential threat to Phil Torres’s career.”

This is obvious nonsense. First of all, the same thing could be said about Pinker: Since his career these days is based on claiming that things have been going quite well for humanity, convincing people that AI poses an existential threat itself could be seen as an existential threat to Pinker’s reputation. How Pinker and Coyne both missed this obvious flaw suggests that they weren’t wearing their critical-thinking hats. The aim of Pinker’s comment was to discredit a critique without having to engage with its substance.

Once again, I contacted four scholars or writers who affirmed errors in a small handful of pages in Pinker’s chapter. I have no doubt that if someone were to find the same problems in a chapter written by, say, Reza Aslan or Linda Sarsour, both of whom are loathed by the Pinker-Coyne crew, they’d be hailing the critique as proof that Aslan and Sarsour are intellectual frauds.

Pinker then defended one of his most flagrant mistakes: classifying a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, Stuart Russell, as someone who isn’t worried about AI.The exact opposite is true! Pinker then doubled down, insisting that his description of Russell was accurate, even though Russell himself told me in an email, which I quote in my article, that he’d “seen this [mention in Pinker’s book] and I agree it’s an incorrect characterization.” So, you have Pinker on one side refusing to acknowledge that he incorrectly characterized a person who says he has been incorrectly characterized. This led Julia Galef, a notable “effective altruist” who hosts the Rationally Speaking podcast and has knowledge of the relevant issues, to tweet:

I’m frustrated Steven Pinker won’t admit an error in Enlightenment Now.

Summary:

– Pinker names Stuart Russell as an expert who’s skeptical of AI risk

– Someone points out that’s exactly backwards; Russell is one of the main experts warning about AI risk

– Pinker doubles down

She concludes that the “point is it’s bad that Pinker got this fact wrong and won’t admit it.” This encapsulates the central problem: Pinker and his ilk don’t acknowledge errors when they make them; they are ideologues rather than truth-seekers, willing to bend the facts, launch personal attacks and censor critics to “win” debates. At exactly the moment in history when we need true intellectual leadership, people who exemplify intellectual honesty and integrity, the most, we get stubborn tribespeople.

But the problem is hardly confined to those mentioned above: Shermer, Coyne and Pinker. Consider another “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) luminary, Sam Harris, one of the most famous atheists in the world because of his book “The End of Faith.” Previously, I never had any reason to believe that Harris was racist — but I do now. He has spent a massive amount of time and energy defending Charles Murray, author of “The Bell Curve,” which argues that black people are inherently inferior to white people.

Over and over again, ad nauseam, Harris has used his large platform to suggest that Murray isn’t a junk scientist peddling cowardly racist memes, but someone who’s been victimized by those anti-truth progressives. Even more, Harris apparently believes Murray’s claim that blacks are genetically dumber than whites. In a podcast with Josh Zepps, Harris opines the following with a wholly unjustified degree of epistemic confidence:

"As bad luck would have it, but as you’d absolutely predict on the basis of just sheer biology, different populations of people, different racial groups, different ethnicities, different groups of people who have been historically isolated from one another geographically, test differently in terms of their average on this measure of cognitive function. So if you’re gonna give the Japanese and the Ashkenazi Jews, and African Americans, and Hawaiians … you’re gonna take populations who differ genetically — and we know they differed genetically, that’s not debatable — and you give them IQ tests, it would be a miracle if every single population had the same mean IQ. And African Americans come out about a standard deviation lower than white Americans. A standard deviation for IQ is about 15 points. So, if it’s normed to the general population, predominantly white population for an average of 100, the average in the African American community has been around 85."

In other words: black people are dumber than white people. Why? Because of genetic evolution, meaning that IQ is in the genes and the genes of white people are, well, just plain better. What a bold stance, especially amid the ongoing rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and Europe!

In all seriousness, the irresponsibility of being a public intellectual with a large following and spouting unsupported claims with the sort of certainty you might expect from someone reciting the second law of thermodynamics is shocking. If Pinker is annoying, as Robinson claims, then Harris is intolerably obnoxious, constantly demeaning people for not being Rational and Reasonable while simultaneously making an intellectual fool of himself with claims like those above.

Other examples could be adduced, but I don’t have an extra 20,000 words to spare. The point is that the entireIDW movement is annoying.It’s really, really annoying — its champions misrepresent positions without their (mostly white male) audience knowing, and then proceed to “embarrass” the opposition. They embrace unsupported claims when it suits their narrative. They facilely dismiss good critiques as “hit jobs” and level ad hominem attacks to undercut criticism. And they refuse — they will always refuse, it’s what overconfident white men do — to admit making mistakes when they’re obviously wrong. I am annoyed, like Robinson, mostly because I expected so much better from the most popular “intellectuals” of our time.

rww

818

an apparent response to a report by Right Wing Watch, Jim Hoft, founder of the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit, publicly announced this weekend that the site’s former White House reporter, Lucian Wintrich, had quietly left the site “several weeks ago.”

Last week, Right Wing Watch reported that Wintrich told us he was on paid leave from Gateway Pundit when we noted him engaging in a conversation promoting scientific racism with white nationalist podcast host Nicholas Fuentes. Although Hoft claims that Wintrich had left the site weeks ago, during the podcast, which first aired on August 7, Wintrich still claimed he was employed at the site and was introduced as “New York City bureau chief from the Gateway Pundit.” Hoft never responded to our emails.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gateway-pundits-lucian-wintrich-says-hes-on-sabbatical-appears-on-white-nationalists-podcast/

Lucian Wintrich was, at least at one point, the Gateway Pundit’s man in the White House press room, but lately, his byline has been noticeably absent from the site. He tells us he is “on sabbatical” from Gatway Pundit while he is “attempting a book and a few other things.”

Among those “few other things” was an by Wintrich on a podcast hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, who was documented making anti-Semitic remarks and who said “it might be descriptive”to call him a white nationalist. Naturally, we had some questions for the outlet about that media booking and the fact Fuentes introduced Wintrich as the “New York City bureau chief from the Gateway Pundit.”

Wintrich’s paid time off appears to have begun on May 30, as he has not been seen on Gateway Pundit since then, with the exception of a video interview he did with Fox News channel host Jeanine Pirro and a clickbait video of eccentric liberal “reporter” Louise Mensch. Despite this, Wintrich’s profile on Twitter still boasts the Gateway Pundit name.

“I think on both sides, we’re going to take a little heat for this show,” Fuentes said at the start of the podcast.

Fuentes and Wintrich have been chummy for some time now, which Fuentes alluded to himself, calling Wintrich “pretty famous and a good friend of mine.” Their relationship was made clear earlier this year when we spotted their interactions at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Although Wintrich rejects Fuentes’ calls to cease immigration from non-white countries, he did join Fuentes in entertaining the premise of scientific racism, which is the age-old practice of misapplying scientific research to justify white supremacist ideology, one pillar of which relies on a supposed difference in intelligence quotient (IQ) among the races. On the podcast, Fuentes argued that the migration of people from places like Mexico and the Middle East was tainting his vision of a “high IQ” America with no immigration, while Wintrich argued instead that some immigration of “low IQ” people is good because it provides “shitty people” to work low-skill labor that “high IQ” people don’t want to do.

Wintrich also started to discuss what he believes to be a genetic difference between races and when he mentioned that “IQ exists,” Fuentes grinned and excitedly nodded his head, before Wintrich walked back his argument somewhat by supposing that a Pakistani child raised in a Chinese household might achieve more than peers raised in Pakistani homes.

Later in the show, Wintrich said that “the very last thing we should be doing” in America “is allowing hordes of new immigrants to come in. Not only hordes of new immigrants, but specifically saying we want the shittiest immigrants in the entire world to flood our country.” Wintrich later told Fuentes that current immigration policies reminded him of his life experience.

Wintrich said that after a life of attending private schools that were mostly white, that going to public schools that had buses that service low-income minority neighborhoods provided his first encounters with people he described as “real shit human beings” that have “no sense of social interaction” and who would call white people “honky.” Wintrich compared that moment in his life to the current immigration policies in America, which seemed to resonate with Fuentes, who added, “All immigrants are not equal—because they’re not the same.”

Wintrich and Fuentes also complained about “anti-white” racism being allowed on Twitter and contrasted it with social media companies who have decided to boot Infowars and Alex Jones from their platforms.

Wintrich told Right Wing Watch that Gateway Pundit does not approve his media appearances and that the site’s owner Jim Hoft does not ban him from engaging with controversial outlets.

“Not sure why you’re under the impression Jim bans us from debating people,” Wintrich said. “I’ve historically always said ‘yes’ to any show invite that isn’t before 10 a.m.”

Wintrich, it should be noted, was not really “debating” Fuentes on this program, as the two seemed to be largely in agreement on the issues they discussed.

Hoft did not respond to our request for comment.

Tags: Jim Hoft Lucian Wintrich Nick Fuentes Racism white nationalism Gateway Pundit

http://www.alternet.org/education/evidence-mounts-school-choice-isnt-delivering-promised-results-not-k-12-privateers-are

Another week, another round of evidence that providing parents with more “school choice,” especially the kind that lets them opt out of public schools, is not a very effective vehicle for ensuring students improve academically or that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely.

The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DCthat allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense. The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.

This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.

Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice for choice’s sake.

Results Don’t Matter?

That seems to be what US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos argues in her reaction to the news about the apparent failure of the DC voucher program. As the Washington Post reports, the report prompted her to say, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

That reaction struck education historian Diane Ravitch as an implication that “results don’t matter.” She writes on her personal blog, “If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.”

Ravitch points to an op-ed in a local DC paper that argues the “whole point” of choice is for parents to pick schools they believe to be “best” for their children, regardless of the nature of the school or the results of its program.

The writer compares education to breakfast cereal, arguing that some parents may prefer Cheerios while some prefer other brands. What’s the big deal?

This line of reasoning aligns with DeVos’s recent comments comparing schools to all sorts of consumer goods. As the Associated Press reports, in a recent address she made at an education technology conference, DeVos compared school choice to switching phone carriers. “If you can’t get cell phone service in your living room,” she says, “you should have the option to find a network that does work.”

In another of her pronouncements about school choice, she compared education options to ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft.

For anyone who’s been paying attention, DeVos’s remarks aren’t surprising.

Seven years ago, when a study of the school voucher program in Milwaukee came to a disappointing conclusion similar to the more recent studies mentioned above, it prompted **Charles Murray** –co-author of the eugenics-inspired treatise The Bell Curve – to respond, basically, “So what!”

Writing in the New York Times, he argued that results from the study of the Milwaukee program didn’t much matter. “Our children’s education is extremely important to us,” he wrote, “and the greater good doesn’t much enter into it.” (Point of irony: Murray argues against using test scores as meaningful measures of school performance, yet the title of his infamous book is a direct reference to how test scores are distributed on a graph.)

More recently, editors of The Economist ruminated over the DC voucher study and concluded the negative results meant, “A parent with a voucher may increasingly think twice about using it. That is a good choice to have.”

The Ultimate Choice

draws on bogus malthus

fred block //Polyani

ronmey 47% takers, any gov't aid hurts poor ppl

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-2502

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-august-30-2016/

Townsend poor laws apocryphal goat sheep story?

http://www.economist.com/node/173090

IN THE 200 years since Thomas Malthus forecast that population growth would result in mass starvation, dire predictions based on demographic trends have come to be taken with a pinch of salt. Yet it is hard to argue with forecasts that greying baby-boomers will wreak havoc on the rich world's social-insurance systems unless something is done fast. And in many countries there is no need to wait: the welfare state is in trouble already.

Public spending on social insurance is heavy across the OECD, though there may be arguments about the precise numbers (see article). This spending has taken its toll on economic competitiveness, particularly in Europe. Yet spending money on social insurance is not necessarily a bad idea. A minimal level of protection is likely to have economic benefits, encouraging entrepreneurs by limiting their risks and maintaining social harmony in hard economic times. Little has been heard of late from the commentators who not long ago attributed the rapid growth of Asia's tiger economies to the absence of a welfare state.

Moreover, health care, pensions and, arguably, redistribution of wealth are all examples of what economists call “luxury goods”: as people, or countries, get richer, they spend a growing share of their income on them. The trick is to ensure that the cost of providing such social insurance does not exceed its economic benefits. In that respect, many countries have been failing, to varying degrees.

Clearly the availability of social insurance, whether delivered through spending or regulation, changes people's behaviour. If in many countries people are retiring ever earlier, they may simply be responding rationally to the financial incentives built into their particular state pension scheme. By contrast, Japan, which imposes relatively low taxes on older workers' earnings, has one of the world's highest employment rates among the over-60s.Social insurance need not even involve spending: it can also be delivered through laws and regulations. Many economists argue that government regulations that cause rigidities in the labour market, particularly by making it hard to fire workers or vary their hours, raise a country's unemployment rate above what it would be with greater labour-market flexibility. This helps explain why America has a much lower unemployment rate than France.

Protection can also breed dependency. Some benefits, notably for the unemployed, have changed character, from temporary safety net to permanent support, thus discouraging self-help. In America, Charles Murray, a sociologist, leads a group of right-wingers who argue that assistance to the poor, by cushioning the short-term consequences of irresponsible behaviour, masks the long-term effects. It therefore encourages people to act against their own best long-term interests.

But similar criticisms have also come from the left. In Britain, Frank Field, a Labour MP, has slammed means-tested welfare payments, claiming they cause people to lie about their income and encourage idleness. Although Mr Field quit his ministerial job in July, some of his ideas have been taken up by the prime minister, Tony Blair....

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/rightwing-billionaires-are-intentionally-funding-hate-speech-college-campuses

On March 2, eugenicist Charles Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont, with little success. Protesters shouted him down and he was sequestered in another room to answer questions over a livestream. Afterwards, Murray left the campus, but not before protesters blocked his car and injured a professor.

Labeled a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Murray is the author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, in which he argues that inequalities of race, gender and income exist because white men are smarter and genetically superior to black people, Latinos, women and the poor. Numerous academics have panned the book for its faulty reasoning and unprovable points.

So why is someone with such fringe ideas invited to speak on college campuses, and who pays for it? It’s unlikely that many university departments would invite such an obviously racist and discredited figure. While co-presenting the Murray talk, the political science department did not invite Murray, nor did it contribute any funding for the event. The Middlebury student chapter of a far-right libertarian think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, asked him to speak, and AEI picked up the tab.

Murray is not the only controversial guest making the college circuit on a think tank’s dime. Another conservative nonprofit, Young America’s Foundation, also establishes student chapters at numerous universities and sends bigoted scholars and lecturers including Ann Coulter, David Horowitz and Ted Nugent to speak at their campus events free of charge. Bankrolling these nonprofits are conservative mega-donors including Charles and David Koch and the DeVos family, who by funding the organizations enable hate speech at institutions of higher education.

In addition, a production company connected to the right-wing billionaire Mercer family facilitated at least one college speaking gig of Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart News editor known for his racist, sexist, Islamophobic and anti-transgender vitriol.

Sending Murray to colleges

Murray has been a scholar at AEI since 1990, four years before The Bell Curve was published. In 2013, AEI founded its college chapter program, and now there are “executive councils” at more than 80 colleges and universities. At a leadership training program available to executive council members this summer, Murray is teaching a course called “The Building Blocks of Human Flourishing.”

Murray is a frequent invitee of AEI campus groups. He’s now touring the country to talk about his 2012 book on the "state of white America” and gave talks at Duke University, Columbia, NYU, the University of Notre Dame and Villanova University in late March.

Regarding the recent Murray talk at Middlebury, AEI Executive Council member Alexander Khan told the Washington Post, “Our goal was not to create a controversy, but to start a discussion and a dialogue.” Khan did not return requests for comment.

Dissenters see things differently. Nearly 500 Middlebury alumni wrote a letter to the college preceding Murray’s attempted talk, saying that traditional free speech arguments fall flat in justifying his appearance. Murray’s shoddy theories are “the same thinking that motivates eugenics and the genocidal white supremacist ideologies which are enjoying a popular resurgence under the new presidential administration.”

AEI declined to comment for this story, but other reports claim that in sponsoring Murray’s talk, the nonprofit is paying Murray’s speaker fee directly.

AEI gets most of its funding from the foundations of wealthy conservativesand a pass-through group meant to shield the identity of these very donors. Donors Capital Fund, to which conservative mega-donors such as the Koch, DeVos and Bradley families donate, is AEI’s biggest funder at nearly $23 million through 2014, according to ConservativeTransparency.org. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of many conservative groups, is close behind, and foundations run by Charles Koch and Richard and Helen DeVos, the parents of Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, have given more than $1 million each to AEI.

Piling on the hate speech: Young America’s Foundation

A similarly funded and probably even more conservative nonprofit, Young America’s Foundation, works to direct “public education on the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise [and] traditional values and leadership,” according to its most recent publicly available tax form. YAF spent roughly half of its 2015 budget of $17.7 million on conference and lecture programs including “lectures on college campuses” and student chapters.

Just like AEI, YAF has student chapters at colleges and universities around the nation. These “Young Americans for Freedom” chapters, which now exist at numerous institutions of higher learning as well as at high schools, can seek “logistical and financial assistance [from YAF] to host a big-name conservative speaker.”

“Radical feminists, big government bureaucrats, fringe environmentalists, race-baiters, Islamo-fascists, and run of the mill leftists are distraught that [YAF chapters] would even think about promoting conservative ideas,” the website states.

YAF’s roster of more than 90 speakers features several notable bigots including Coulter, Horowitz and Nugent. YAF farms out its speakers at a quick pace, with roughly one event per day during the final three weeks of April.

Some campuses are having quite the year. For example, after a Yiannopoulos event that was canceled because a protest got out of hand, UCBerkeley had noted Islamophobe Horowitz speak on April 12 and will host Coulter on April 27.

“We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” wrote Coulter in the National Review shortly after the 9/11 attacks, referring to allies of the 9/11 terrorists. An alumna of the YAF National Journalism Center’s internship program, she often makes headlines for her outrageous racist and anti-Muslim statements and regularly writes for the white nationalist website VDARE.

YAF is providing “a large portion of the funding to bring Coulter to Berkeley”as well as “logistical support before the event as well as on-the-ground support from experienced staff.”

Horowitz is a former leftist who took a hard-right turn decades ago and has now earned the titles of “anti-immigrant” and “anti-Muslim extremist” from the Southern Poverty Law Center. He runs the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which the SPLC calls “the premier financier of anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies.”

“Somewhere between 150 million and 750 million Muslims support a holy war against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims who don’t happen to believe in the Quran according to Bin Laden,” Horowitz erroneously claimed in 2007.

Among the particularly bigoted YAF speakers is anti-Muslim extremist Robert Spencer, who runs the hate site Jihad Watch, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He has said, “[T]raditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”

YAF speaker Matt Walsh, an anti-LGBTQ “Christian columnist and political incendiary” for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, has called transgender people mentally ill and perverted and written that “‘transgender’ propaganda is wrong…demented…evil...dangerous [and] abusive.”

Also on the YAF roster is musician and activist Ted Nugent, whose racist comments know no bounds. In 2014, he called the 44th president “a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel [and] ACORN community organizer gangster.”

It’s not just the YAF speakers who have racist and white nationalist leanings. Current YAF president Ron Robinson and board member James B. Taylor ran a now-inactive political action committee called America’s PAC, which donated to the white nationalist Martel Society and consistently contributed to the campaigns of Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, a white nationalist who has recently cheered far-right European nationalists. Taylor is also former president of the National Policy Institute, which is now run by noted neo-Nazi and “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer.

YAF founded the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major right-wing event that occurs every year. CPAC rescinded its invitation to 2017 keynote speaker Yiannopoulos after videos in which he defends pedophilia surfaced, although his long record of racist, sexist and xenophobic rants was apparently not a problem.

The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation is by far the biggest donor to YAF, and the Donors Capital Fund and its affiliate, Donors Trust, are also big contributors. The Bradley Foundation, three Koch family foundations and a foundation of the wealthy Mercer family have also given large donations.

YAF did not return a request for comment.

An ‘alt-right’ provocateur on campus

When Yiannopoulos, known for his wide-ranging hate speech, spoke at the University of Washington, the College Republicans group that had invited him had to raise money to cover increased security, as Yiannopoulos’ events often attract large protests. The student group raised over $12,000 from a GoFundMe campaign organized by its president, and the event got the green light.

Yiannopoulos charged no speaking fee. A performance agreement obtained by MuckRock shows that Glittering Steel, the production company owned by white nationalist Trump adviser Steve Bannon and connected to the conservative Mercer family, wrote the contract. Yiannopoulos told AlterNet his speaking fee was $0 “on every stop of the Dangerous Faggot Tour.” He did not directly answer questions about whether a private citizen or company paid his speaking fees behind the scenes and how exactly Glittering Steel was involved.

“Make America Number 1,” the super PAC of billionaire investor Robert Mercer, paid Glittering Steel nearly $1 million last year. Mercer is a part owner of Breitbart News, which Bannon ran for four years before joining the Trump campaign last August. The hedge fund magnate was a big part of Trump’s victory, and his daughter Rebekah was on the Trump transition team.

Yiannopoulos’ Berkeley event was sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, according to Horowitz’s online magazine, and was set to launch a joint campaign against sanctuary campuses. The Berkeley College Republicans had to provide more than $6,000 for increased security. An “anonymous donor” took care of part of that fee “with two conditions: that he remain anonymous and that the event occur.”

The Freedom Center did not respond to a request for comment.

Free speech or license to discriminate?

In response to fringe, far-right speakers often facing student protests, conservative legislators in many states are pushing "campus free speech" legislation. Two think tanks funded in part by the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer created a model bill, on which many of the state bills are based, that calls for harsh penalties, including expulsion, for students who disrupt guest speaking events.

While enabling hate speech at colleges and universities, billionaire mega-donors are cracking down on students who publicly object to such speech. Meanwhile, the same wealthy conservatives’ family foundations fund ideological higher ed programs that serve their business interests. The Charles Koch Foundation, for example, gave $142 million to hundreds of colleges and universities from 2005 to 2015, largely toward free-market centers, professorships and courses. From these programs, Koch-funded think tanks and political groups recruit their favorite students to join the Kochs’ mass libertarian sociopolitical movement.

Guests speakers on the left

While harder to find, there are liberal organizations with campus affiliates that sponsor guest speakers and other events. The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., works to “rethink and reshape everything from local policy to federal legislation, orienting toward a new economic and political system: one built by many for the good of all.” The nonprofit has 130 college and university chapters, which often meet regularly to develop campus, local and sometimes state-level policy proposals.

The institute provides grants and advice to student chapters. Senior program associate Aman Banerji told AlterNet that “95 percent of the time, students come to us with a thought for an event and then ask for recommendations.” But Banerji couldn’t recall the last time the institute funded a campus speaker, and he wasn’t aware of a chapter inviting anyone particularly controversial to speak.

As the Trump administration advances discriminatory policy, bigoted authors and activists are giving speeches along the college circuit, facilitated by right-wing nonprofits. It’s important for members of the university community to know which organizations are making this possible, and who funds them. It may prove effective for student dissenters to address AEI, YAF and Glittering Steel in their campaigns against racist speakers.

Alex Kotch is an independent investigative journalist based in Brooklyn, NY.

http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges

As s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs, conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. Asuncovered by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family.

The intent of these bills isn’t to protect student speech; it’s actually to suppress it in favor of guest speakers who, at times, support white nationalism, LGBTQ discrimination and other hateful worldviews. By funding the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, wealthy conservatives are enabling the promotion of hate speech while stifling student dissent. Whether or not Koch, for example, agrees with the hate speech he indirectly sponsors, he certainly benefits from a more friendly academic environment for far-right ideologues who often deny climate change and praise his extreme brand of tax- and regulation-free capitalism.

The Goldwater Institute’s model bill allegedly ensures “the fullest degree of…free expression,” but it explicitly states that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.”

It goes on to say, “Any student who has twice been found responsible for infringing the expressive rights of others will be suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled.”

Under this code, imagine that a student protests a climate change denier and gets a brief suspension. Then the College Republicans group brings in a full-on white nationalist. Will this student do what she thinks is right and protest a racist who’s given a platform at a respected university, or stay home because she's risking expulsion? This campus "free speech” legislation is essentially an attack on student speech and an elevation of ultra-conservative ideas that many people in university communities think have no place in American society.

“These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe,” Wilson, UnKoch’s senior researcher, told AlterNet. The group has been conducting research into Charles Koch’s considerable ideological donations to higher education, most of which goes toward free-market programs.

Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently said to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”

What the Kochs and their allies really want, by amplifying the voices of far-right professors and guest speakers, is to steer society towards a tax- and regulation-free plutocracy. Charles and David Koch, who together are worth nearly $97 billion, have been working toward this goal for over 40 years.

In 2014, Virginia passed the nation’s first law banning so-called “free speech zones,” which restrict protected speech to designated areas often far away from events that students want to protest. The following year, Missouri enacted a Campus Free Expression Act forbidding “free speech zones” without imposing punitive measures.

But while more recent legislation bans free speech zones as well, it also restricts student free speech in scenarios where, lawmakers claim, free speech is protected.

The protest crackdown

Legislators in some states including Illinois and Tennessee have introduced bills in 2017 that explicitly mention sanctions on student protesters. Illinois’ bill, proposed by two Republicans, lifts this language, and additional passages, nearly verbatim from the Goldwater model. Also sponsored by Republicans, the bill in Tennessee—nicknamed the “Milo Bill” after an event at the University of California at Berkeley featuring the racist “alt-right” icon Milo Yiannopolous was canceled due to protests—directs universities to enact free speech policies that include “sanctions for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who interferes with the free expression of others,” and it gives faculty “the right to regulate class speech.”

In North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest intends to work with legislators on a Restore Campus Free Speech Act, which would create “a discipline policy that would punish students who shout down visiting speakers or deprive others of their right to free expression, a tactic commonly known as the ‘hecklers’ veto.'"

Last year, Forest floated a measure calling on the University of North Carolina’s board of governors to create a system-wide policy that would impose harsh penalties, including expulsion, on students, staff and faculty members who disrupt classes, public meetings or events. The Koch-funded Generation Opportunity lauded the effort at the time. Forest has said that yelling at a guest speaker “has never been free speech,” and he’s calledcampus protest methods “terrorist tactics.” No one introduced a free speech bill that year.

Other proposed laws, like North Dakota’s, which was introduced by six Republicans, omit sanctions provisions but state that a university may restrict student speech if it blocks entrances to buildings, obstructs traffic or interferes with events. Much of the North Dakota bill comes directly from the text of the Goldwater model legislation. A large group of most Republican legislators in Virginia has a new bill in play that includes much of the Goldwater language but stays away from restrictions on students.

Additional campus free speech bills have been introduced this year in Colorado (sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat) and Utah (sponsored by 14 Republican state representatives). Florida could be next. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has a "free speech" provision in his proposed budget.

Big money driving campus 'free speech’ efforts

One of the model bill’s authors, Stanley Kurtz, is a longtime fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies “the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” according to its website. The center has received millions of dollars in donations from the foundations of the conservative Bradley, Scaife, Olin and Earhart families, as well as hundreds of thousands from two vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are responsible for more than $9 million in contributions to the two groups from 2006 to 2015, according to the website Conservative Transparency and additional research by this author. Much of the $6.3 million that went to Donors Trust came in 2015. A now-defunct Koch nonprofit, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, donated $190,000 to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given over $9,000.

The Goldwater Institute’s James Manley, senior attorney, and Jonathan Butcher, education director, also co-authored the “campus free speech” model legislation. The institute took in nearly $2.5 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund from 2002-2015, according Conservative Transparency and additional research. The Charles Koch Foundation has pitched in $75,000. Manley formerly worked at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the two Donors funds. Butcher was a research assistant at the heavily Koch-funded Heritage Foundation from 2002 to 2006.

Says Wilson, “These bills take Koch's academic presence to the next level, creating protected space to reveal the white supremacist roots of Koch's free market crusade, like Koch's close friend and white nationalist Charles Murray who has taken to campuses to espouse the genetic superiority of white males.”

Another Koch-funded think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has student groups at nearly 80 colleges and universities. These groups bring in AEI fellows like theeugenicist Murrayto speak on their campuses. Recently, Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont but was stymied by vociferous protests. He had to end his speech early, and he and a liberal professor were attacked on their way out.

Students at UC Berkeley and area residents protested Yiannopoulos, whom the College Republicans had invited to speak. The protests led to fires, vandalism, and reportedly, fights. Until recently, Yiannopoulos was an editor at Breitbart News, known as the online “platform of the alt-right,” which happens to be funded by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the far-right mega-donors who are major Donald Trump backers and whose family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Goldwater Institute. The younger Mercer was even a member of Trump’s transition team. Violence against a speaker, a professor or an onlooker is certainly unacceptable. So is inviting a white supremacist to speak at an institution of higher learning, and so is preventing students and faculty from protesting such a speaker. Plenty of right-wing billionaires likely don’t agree with white nationalist ideas, and by funding these so-called campus free speech bills they’re trying to advance free-market principles. But regardless of motivation, this campus "free speech" movement is spreading the hate of white nationalism, the racist “alt-right,” Islamophobia and homophobia—not to mention climate change denial and economic policies that benefit only the very wealthy—on campuses filled with young students. Conservative, corporate millionaires and billionaires are at fault.