Bell Curve author Charles Murray speaks out after speech cut short by protests

Author of widely discredited study of intelligence says opponents of his lecture looked like they had come from ‘casting for a film of brownshirt rallies’

The controversial author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, has attacked violent protests that left one injured and shut down his speech at an elite US college as “straight out of casting for a film of brownshirt rallies”, after a protest by students descended into aggressive confrontation.

In the two decades since Murray and his co-author Richard J Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve, its linking of black and Latino genetics with intellectual inferiority has attracted vociferous condemnation. Writing for the New York Times when it came out in 1994, columnist Bob Herbert described the book as “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship”, while the Southern Poverty Law Center accused Murray of being a “white nationalist” who used “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor”.

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