Santorum To Announce Presidential Decision, Says White Nationalist’s Work Influences His Positions

Promising to integrate his obsession with marriage into his speech about whether or not he will run for president, Rick Santorum says he’ll tell America later this month. He said the work a known white nationalist influences his positions.

As the Republican field of presidential candidates literally doubled this week, 2016 hopefuls are feeling under pressure to enter the race to raise unlimited super PAC cash. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Carly Fiorina this week joined Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul, bringing the GOP declared field to six. 

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Rick Santorum Wednesday night hinted that number on May 27 will be at least seven.

The failed former Pennsylvania Republican Senator and failed former Republican presidential candidate will more than likely take another swing at a White House run, and at whomever is the GOP frontrunner.

Santorum told Fox News host Greta Van Susteren that he and his family will assemble in his Pennsylvania hometown to talk about how he grew up and what that should mean for America.

Asked if he will continue to make his obsession with religion and its impact on social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion a campaign focus, the 56-year old Roman Catholic and married father of eight gave a more moderated answer.

Santorum said he is “going to talk about the importance of family.”

Pointing to the work of Charles Murray, the author of the highly controversial book The Bell Curve, Santorum linked economic issues to the breakdown of the family.

“When you have books like Robert Putnam’s that just came out a few weeks ago and Charles Murray who wrote his a couple years ago, about one of the principle reasons for the lack of economic opportunity is in fact the breakdown of the family,” he said. “Talking about what we can do to help strengthen that family structure is going to be certainly a part of the campaign,” should he decide to run.

Santorum did not specify which Charles Murray book is influencing his policies, although The Bell Curve, which argues that Blacks are genetically inferior to whites, is the one for which he is best-known. 

Murray is a social scientist the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a “white nationalist.” He currently is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing think tank funded by the Koch Brothers.

In 1994, then-New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, labeled Murray’s Bell Curve “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship,” and added, “his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger.”

Ironically, or perhaps, knowingly, in 2000 Murray himself wrote this at the National Review:

“Try to imagine a … presidential candidate saying in front of the cameras, ‘One reason that we still have poverty in the United States is that a lot of poor people are born lazy.’ You cannot imagine it because that kind of thing cannot be said. And yet this unimaginable statement merely implies that when we know the complete genetic story, it will turn out that the population below the poverty line in the United States has a configuration of the relevant genetic makeup that is significantly different from the configuration of the population above the poverty line. This is not unimaginable. It is almost certainly true.”

Jeb Bush last week also mentioned he is a fan of Charles Murray’s work.

 

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