Live from KKK Cross-Burning Central: Alex Parent politely addresses Jonathan Chait with respect to Charles Murray:
Alex Pareene: The Marketplace of Ideas Could Use a Few Product Recalls: "It has been a bit less than a quarter-century since the publication of Murray’s The Bell Curve... http://fusion.net/the-marketplace-of-ideas-could-use-a-few-product-recall-1794665496
...Murray has spent that all of that time as a well-remunerated participant in the marketplace of ideas. He has never renounced his work, and he would surely reject the notion that it has been “demolished by scholars.” He is currently a fellow at a major conservative think tank, and, as we can see, he is still regularly invited to campuses to discuss his ideas and theories.
Liberals and scholars have politely explained why and how Murray is wrong for decades; he remains a prominent public intellectual because his ideas are useful to a white nationalist political movement underwritten by plutocrats. This movement currently holds power at nearly every level of American government, and Murray’s ideas are as influential now as they’ve ever been.
Free speech absolutism is an eminently defensible position, but if your case for it depends on assuming the efficiency of the “marketplace of ideas,” perhaps you shouldn’t make an example of someone whom the market has rewarded handsomely for being wrong in a politically useful way...
