"Where are our youth learning such full-on hatred?" Bob Larimer
CONSERVATIVE ANGLE
CONSERVATIVE ANGLE
"At Middlebury College last week, Charles Murray needed a safe space — literally.
"In a significant escalation of the campus speech wars, protesters hooted down the conservative scholar in a lecture hall and then roughed up a Middlebury faculty member escorting him to a car.
"The Middlebury administration commendably tried to do the right thing and stand by Murray’s right to be heard, but was overwhelmed by a yowling mob with all the manners and intellectual openness of a gang of British soccer hooligans.
"Sometime soon, we may yearn for the days when college students were merely childish and closed-minded. If campus protests of speech begin to more routinely slide into violence, Middlebury will be remembered as a watershed.
"First, there was the target. Charles Murray is controversial — mainly for his book, “The Bell Curve,” about IQ — but he is one of the most significant social scientists of our age.
"He is employed by the prestigious conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and his books are highly influential and widely reviewed.
"His latest, which was to be the topic of his Middlebury talk, is “Coming Apart,” a bestselling account of the struggles of the white working class that illuminated some of the social forces behind the rise of Donald Trump.
"Second, there was the venue. No one has ever mistaken Middlebury, a small Vermont liberal-arts college founded by Congregationalists, for Berkeley. It doesn’t have a reputation as a hotbed and training ground for rabble-rousers, and yet has given us one of the most appalling episodes of anti-speech thuggery in recent memory." . . .
