Charles Murray - Super Racist: Of the American Enterprise Institute - Counter Insurgency Soldier Turned Right-Wing 'Scholar' Has Long History of Racism

Many of America's Bigots Are Welcome Everywhere
Charles Murray: Author of The Bell Curve, 'Scholar' at the American Enterprise Institute
(Photo by Gage Skidmore)

By Megan McArdle, Radley Balko
Charles Murray is one of the most influential right-wing ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. His career began in a secret Pentagon counterinsurgency operation in rural Thailand during the Vietnam War, a program whose stated purpose included applying counter-insurgency strategies tested in rural Thailand to America's own restive inner cities and minority populations. By the late 1970s, Charles Murray was drawing up plans for the US Justice Department that called for massively increasing incarceration rates. In the 1980s, backed by an unprecedented marketing campaign, Murray suddenly emerged as the nation's most powerful advocate for abolishing welfare programs for single mothers. Since then, Murray revived discredited racist eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, and today argues that the lower classes are inferior to the upper classes due to breeding differences.

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