By Tom Klingenstein
Charles Murray's most recent book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America has dropped from sight. In Facing Reality, Murray discusses at great length group differences in violence (I leave this to the side) and intelligence. Murray believes that group differences in intelligence explain differences in group outcomes. I am neither knowledgeable enough nor inclined to comment. This topic is at the top of the modern-day list of taboos, and for good reason. It ought to remain at the top. (In fairness to Murray, he is a scientist, and as such has an obligation not to yield to taboos.) But Murray did not write Facing Reality because he wants to talk about differences in group intelligence; indeed, he wrote it in spite of himself. He is on the shady side of life and would have preferred to sit under his own vines and fig tree. He knew perfectly well that even touching the subject would cause spears of hate and discontent to rain down upon him. But he believes his fellow citizens are exposed to an existential threat of which they are only dimly aware. And so, the patriot he is, he donned his rusty armor and returned to battle. The spears came.
I use Murray's controversial book as a jumping-off point because I believe Murray's warning is prescient and unique, and because he has a long record of being right on important social issues. There is an old advertisement for a long-ago swallowed-up Wall Street firm, E.F. Hutton: "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen." I am not at all certain Hutton's clients ought to have listened, but I am quite certain people ought to listen to Charles Murray.
The threat of which Murray is warning? The charge by woke radicals that America is "systemically racist." Murray believes — rightly I think — that if we allow ourselves to be suckered by this charge, we shall be led down the road to group outcome quotas and from there to totalitarianism. | 
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