Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170945

Points: 10

# Comments: 13

Anyone who ignores structural racism and espouses the policy positions that Murray does is either ignorant or racist. Murray, being a public figure whose ideas have had real impact on the material conditions of marginalized people, does not have the excuse of ignorance.

I'm speaking from personal experience here. I used to be on the right-libertarian train myself before I realized that oppression was primarily structural and that a laissez-faire approach always perpetuates it. I genuinely do not believe one can be non-racist and espouse Murray's policy positions once one understands this basic fact.

If you want to learn more about how welfare reform in the 1990s—something Murray influenced a great deal—affected millions of lives, I'd recommend the first season of a podcast called The Uncertain Hour.

"The libertarian solution is to prevent the government from redistributing money in the first place. 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. It is a case I have made elsewhere."

His eugenicist UBI is an alternative to his ideal proposal.

As a public figure with extensive writings, his internal state of mind does not matter.

---

edit to respond because I'm "posting too fast":

> So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?

What? A logical statement does not imply it's converse. I'm talking about public figures like Murray here, not average private individuals. Besides, structural racism of the sort Murray advocates for has a much greater impact on material conditions than what some rando believes in their heart.

edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: UBI isn't inherently bad but Murray's version is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207

I evaluate him like I do any other public figure: based on his writing and the impact he's had on public policy debates. His internal state of mind does not matter at all.

I, too, support modernizing our governmental assistance programs, but not in a way that's white supremacist and eugenicist. There are welfare reform ideas I disagree with that I don't think are white supremacist either. Murray's ideas and policies, however, are beyond the pale.

Oh no, I'm being cancelled. I should go write about it on Quillette. /s

Your response doesn't engage with the rest of my post either, which I think is the primary evidence that he's a white supremacist. I'm not going to rehash race-IQ arguments because I find them tiring and not very consequential.

This does not mean that UBI is inherently eugenicist or white supremacist. A UBI which did not replace literally all government assistance, which took into account the fact that some people will always need and should get more assistance than others, and which started from birth rather than adulthood, would not be eugenicist.

* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.

* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.

All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.

Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.

---

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.

From https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-t...:

> Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man

This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).

U2F desperately needs a layer of indirection that doesn't currently exist.