ON APRIL 15, 1974, A DEBATE failed to take place at Yale University, even though the speakers were present and the auditorium was full. William Shockley, the Nobel laureate physicist turned eugenicist crank, faced William A. Rusher, the publisher of the leading conservative magazine, National Review. Shockley came to argue that, since black people were intellectually deficient for genetic reasons, the government should support their sterilization. Rusher did not have a problem with Shockley’s racism: “I have no objection to Shockley’s premise,” he wrote. He intended to criticize Shockley only for his misplaced (“liberal”) faith in government’s ability to cure the problem of racial IQ inferiority.
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