The Right-Wing Propagandist Charles Murray Exposes the Truth About Conservatives -- They Hate Poor People, White and Black. As usual, Charles Murray twists and invents economic arguments to demonize poor people. But this time, his targets are white. 
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Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.
Murray published summaries of
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010 in the
Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing
New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the "Founding virtues" of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses "Fishtown" as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with "no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation."
Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of "successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation's economy, media, intellectual life, and politics." Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.
He says that the real Fishtown went from "a tightly knit, family oriented, hard-drinking, hard-working, hard-fighting blue-collar neighborhood" in the 1950s to a "a neighborhood that had experienced the decline of industriousness among males, the drop in marriage, rise in nonmarital births, rise in crime, and falling away from religion" today.
