Charles Murray at the Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club

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Murray told how the new upper class gets married later, has children later and are even generally thinner than their new lower class contemporaries. They work out and practice yoga. They watch television less than the new lower class, but they are also more ignorant of the rest of America because they simply have no contact with it. Educational homogeneity has increased amongst the new upper middle class, he went on to say, and so talent as well as money gets passed on from one generation to another, further increasing the gulf between the new lower class (most of whom have not attended college). Murray made the point that if you have never had a job where, by the end of the day, one or more body parts is not hurting or if you have never lived in an area where most of the residents do not have a degree, then you are out of touch with a large segment of your fellow Americans.

Murray asserted that a successful society needs a “confident elite” of the kind that existed in America and Great Britain during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The ruling forces in America now push an agenda that is not in the country’s best interests in order to demonstrate a lack of stuffiness and the ability to be non-judgmental, while burnishing secular credentials and casting aside the moral authority that made America a great and powerful country. With codes of behavior destroyed, it is just easier to pay our taxes and let the government do the work than it is to become involved, let alone to be committed to American exceptionalism or the virtues on which it is based.

On the brighter side, Murray noted that the impending collapse of failed European socialist states may be a sharp warning for America, a country he believes is still capable of re-inventing itself, as demonstrated by the enormous political reawakening that has taken place via the Tea Party. His book is not one filled with solutions, but it is more of a call for the reestablishment of our American national values. In part, it illustrates what happens when “Starbucks socialism” leaves the faculty lounge and collides with reality. However, Murray was optimistic and believes that not only the American spirit, but also the human spirit, will prevail.

Towards the end of Murray’s talk, I was reminded of a joke I recently read  in which an Oxford professor meets an American former graduate student and asks him what he’s working on these days. “My thesis is on the survival of the class system in America,” he answered. “Oh really,” said his old professor, “I didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.” “Nobody does,” replied the former student, “that’s how it survives!” With the publication of Charles Murray’s new book and the startling revelations it conveys, one can only hope that the survival of this covert — and hence, even more dangerous — system is not long for this world.

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  • harrylies

    Ted Nuggent said for the most part, people are poor because of bad decisions they make. They have nobody to blame but themselves. It is the poor who serve in the armed forces. Where would David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Ted Nuggent, the list goes on have been if they served? May be living in a homeless shelter. If they were still alive.

    Mr. Murray may write a book on how the rich couldn't care less about America. They do business with China. All they see is the money. Look at |Romney and Obama.

    • Western Spirit

      that's true, except sometimes its the the bad choice of others, not ourselves, that impoverish us.

  • aspacia

    Not so. Mom's neighbor, a husband district attorney, and wife high school principal's son joined the marines as an officer. Billy Kristol's son is presently serving, and so are many Republican Congressmen's sons.

  • Schlomotion

    When the Israel Lobby falters (sorry Mr. Schnee, not the "so-called Israel Lobby"), it punts. The Israel lobby always punts with the race issue. The reason the Israel lobby is punting now is because support for Israel is at an all time low, Americans have turned their backs on an Israeli war on Iran, and because there is a black President in office who doesn't seem to be bending over as far backwards for ZOA, AIPAC and JINSA as they would like. White people are just not as interested in the second decade of the century in wiping out brown Muslims as they were in the last decade. So the American part of the Israel lobby is digging deeply into its origins (the rift with the Civil Black Rights Movement) and trying to generate good old fashioned White-Black animosity to boost the backdrop for White-Brown animosity. It's White Pride Week at FPM as the Freedom Center puts forth its best and Breivik minds to restore the Norse Templar, the British Soccer Hooligan, the Suburban WASP, the Catholic Traditionalist and the Beatle Record Burner to their former glory. A syncretistic secular religion that combines World Church of the Creator with Kosher eating is in the making.

    To paraphrase Paul Schnee, who is the Executive Director, Western Region of the Zionist Organization of America:

    "It takes some chutzpah for Mr. Schnee to imagine we have all been waiting for him or Charles Murray to put White America "in context". Chutzpah, as Mr. Schnee knows, is an old Yiddish word but then so, of course, is schmuck!."
    http://primerct.blogspot.com/2010/07/paul-schnee-

    • Western Spirit

      Arabs may be brown but they are racially white just as Jews are white because they are a Semitic people.

      Racially the people of India are also white making white people the majority people on earth. White people range from the blond blue eyed people of Sweden to the brown people of India because race is determined by things like hair follicles, bone structure, and language roots, not skin color.

    • Boston

      I don't recall Israel being mentioned at all in this article, but I suppose it's all anti-Israel all the time for Schmuckemotion.

      • Schlomotion

        Israel is doing the mentioning.

        • Ghostwriter

          Boston,I couldn't have summed up,Schlockmotion any better.

          • Schlomotion

            Especially since you fail the Turing Test.

          • SCREW SOCIALISM

            Schlock, We know how self-enamored you are so I present a Pat Condell video to feed your obsession.

            Useful Idiots for palestine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeGYAfh9A1k&li

  • clarespark

    I was at the talk, and remember Murray starting with his belief that white people had lost a common civic culture, but he used the word secular only once. We have a different understanding of what that word means, if this article is accurate. I wrote about the differing uses of the word "secular" here: http://clarespark.com/2012/04/01/secularism-and-t….

  • Red Baker

    I just finished "Coming Apart" and it is great. Basically, government has replaced much of what made America exceptional. What makes people genuinely happy and satisfied with life are four pillars of America: happy family including marriage, community participation, satisfying work, and participation in religion. Government charity in the form of welfare have replaced the huge civic involvement and community service of volunteers which created the backbone of our communities. Massive welfare systems have almost entirely destroyed the father-mother family among minorities and poor whites. Religion has been declining among the working class and poor. Murray wants the upper class to resume participation in a renewal of and return to traditional American culture. Four stars.

  • clarespark

    http://clarespark.com/2012/05/04/3957/. I attended the Charles Murray talk and wrote this blog about it (entitled Charles Murray Dreaming). I answered a question that left Murray silent, perhaps because it required a longer answer than there was time for. I wrote about why the Hollywood left is so "liberal". Also, that I doubted that there ever existed a white civic culture of the sort that Murray wants to reinstate.
    He was a pleasant and approachable person, who really does want unity, and I would gather among all Americans.

  • Schlomotion

    I have never spoken to you in another forum, unless you mean another discussion thread here, otherwise I had forgotten the jibe. Israel need not be mentioned by yourself or Mr. Murray. It is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. Why would I bring it up? Is it not significant that the executive director of ZOA is adding his voice to the preaching to the choir at DHFC by doing a book report on a speaker of the DHFC to combine with a slew of center column articles whose purpose is to refashion White Supremacy into a Jewish bulwark against black Americans? Is it not significant that where all the laments about "White Civilization's Decline" were once handled by White Nationalists such as D.W. Griffith, Tom Metzger, and William Pierce now they are all written or favorably reviewed by Jewish Nationalists such as yourself?

    Is it not significant that since the creation in 1947 of the first PAC, an Israeli one called The Political Action Committee for Palestine, Inc., the CIA's prediction (in http://cryptome.org/2012/04/cia-palestine-1947.pd… has come to pass that Zionists have become increasingly dissatisfied with Israel's borders and the "injustice" of the boundaries, and they exaggerate every rock and bottle attack on their illegal settlements and dramatically wage a propaganda war in the United States, insinuating themselves unfavorably into our politics? Is it not significant that you are part of that foreign propaganda campaign in the United States and you review said material, issue said material, and are showcased doing so? No one is supposed to mention that? One is only supposed to deal with the minutiae of your book report, whether you were right about page 32 or wrong about page 33? The big picture is that you endorse racist literature and are trying to fan up this Judaic Eurocentricity that Mary Lefkowitz was trying push in 1996, and Anders Breivik is bombing in the name of now. I am calling you out for glowing about a White Man's Burden book.

    I am using a nom de plume because several members of this Hasbara cannot handle criticism. I am the only person here who criticizes them resoundingly. Anyone who has done it has always been me, Robert Goodwin, the rapper Flipside, from Boston, Massachusetts.
    http://www.contextflexed.com

  • Ghostwriter

    New name,same idiocy.

  • SCREW SOCIALISM

    Schlock, Bantustans for Jews are OK with you.

    Sclock, Please try to control your innate racism and national Socialist facism.