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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Now, Charles Murray — an acquaintance of mine, a brilliant man — is a sociologist at heart, an education expert extraordinaire. He has a book, a fairly new book called Coming Apart. In the book, Charles Murray argues that a large swath of America, poor and working class whites, is turning away from traditional values and losing ground. And let me give you a quote. I’ve got a review of the book here by Brad Wilcox at the Wall Street Journal. This is an interesting pull-quote. “Focusing on whites…” This is about Murray and his book. “Focusing on whites,” in the book, “to avoid conflating race with class…” Let me explain. Murray focuses on whites in this book so that nobody can accuse him of being racist as a motive and thus discount what his research has found.

So he focuses exclusively on whites. “Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends that a large swath of white America — poor and working class whites who make up approximately 30% of the white population — are turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the sixties and seventies. Thus, argues Charles Murray in his book, the greatest source of inequality in America is now not economic. It’s cultural.”

He’s talking about the cultural depravity that is occurring in lower-middle class and poor people, and he focuses on whites to make his point so that he cannot be accused of racism and have his research and conclusions tossed out. The dirty little secret is that it doesn’t matter: White, black, Indian, Muslim, whatever. If you’re talking about that socioeconomic group, the results are what they are. His contention is that the great inequality — the 99 verse 1 — is not economic. It’s not rich versus poor. It’s those who have cultural-moral roots and those who are losing them, losing their moorings, losing their ground. It’s a fabulous book. This story about it prints out to two-and-a-half pages. I can give you some pull-quotes from it if you’re interested.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Charles Murray, by the way, whose book I was recently talking about, is the author of a book called The Bell Curve. It was a book on test scores and education and how people were doing, and it was colorblind. It was colorblind, but it had some unfortunately factual results about educational performance of minorities, and it was essentially Fahrenheit 451. They eventually burned that book out of existence. Charles Murray has as impeccable a reputation as last week was being attached to Elliott Abrams. Charles Murray has not one racial molecule flowing in his bloodstream. Nowhere. None had ever been alleged.

He is a soft-spoken, brilliant social scientist and he’s done tremendous work. The Bell Curve came out, and he was just tied up against a wall and pelted with tomatoes. He was tarred and feathered as a racist. So in this book, he said (paraphrased): “I’m not even going there. I’m just gonna focus on the 30%, what’s happening to whites in terms of losing their cultural moorings.” By the way, the same thing is happening in Great Britain with the lower class and poor white population there. You look at Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street is white, and Occupy Wall Street is the embodiment of an entitlement mentality. So when Gingrich or Romney or whoever talks about the fact that we don’t like and we disapprove of it and we want to end the entitlement mentality?

It’s every bit as much about Occupy Wall Street as it is about anybody on welfare or anybody on 200 weeks of unemployment. We know in our hearts that’s not greatness, that doesn’t lead to a great country, that’s not what made this country. Those people are not pursuing happiness. It’s just simple. It is the pursuit of happiness. The acknowledgement that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. These people aren’t pursuing happiness. There’s not one liberal who is, when you get right down to it, at the end of the day. It’s the pursuit of happiness that leads to creativity, entrepreneurism, who knows whatever else. So this notion of “code words,” entitlements? Chris Matthews accused Gingrich of being racist because of the way he pronounced Juan Williams’ name in that debate, in case you have forgotten.

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