Dr. Stanley Ridgley, professor of management at Drexel University and former military intelligence officer, has just published a new book that provides insight into why so many people blindly fall into supporting the divisive Marxist-rooted CRT/DEI ideology/agenda: Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.
This will only get worse as DEI officers (aka Political Commissars) are infiltrated throughout the military and the government according to the Biden Administration’s Executive Order.
Excerpt from the author’s bio: A former Military Intelligence Officer, Dr. Ridgley served five years in West Berlin and near the Czech-German border. Dr. Ridgley’s intelligence activities versus the Soviet Union included signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, operations security, as well as Russian translation and analysis. He graduated from the U.S. Army’s Airborne School at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and served as a tactical intelligence officer on the German frontier with a combat arms unit and as a liaison officer during Soviet military inspections.
Brutal Minds and Brainwashing: A Close Look at Leftist Mind Control (Book Review from Mind the Campus)
I only attended Vanderbilt University’s 2022 Jumpstart Virtual Conference to see the presentations on “anti-racism” in STEMM education and research, but I decided to stay for the lunch-hour keynote presentation on “White Emotionalities,” anticipating that its absurdity would be entertaining. I was wrong.
The speaker, Cheryl Matias—professor and director of secondary teacher education at the University of Kentucky—spoke with glee as she reminisced about her classes, how she had made her white students cry in front of their peers after accusing them of oppression and racism at every turn, stirring some to understandable anger at her baseless charges.
The (mostly black) audience, meanwhile, took to Zoom’s chat box to exclaim their joy at Matias’s stories, expressing how those college kids—who just wanted to be teachers—deserved even greater emotional agony at the hands of their “educators.”
The spectacle only lasted about 15 minutes, but it remains one of the most unnerving incidents that I have witnessed while working for the National Association of Scholars. The Mephistophelian spirit was on full display.
It was unsurprising, therefore, to see Matias featured so prominently in Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities, a new book by Dr. Stanley Ridgley, professor of management at Drexel University.
Ridgley, who studied Matias’s process closely, notes that
she “uses language eerily similar to the narratives of thought-reform interrogators, whose task is to elicit the proper confession from political prisoners or from intellectuals enduring a rectification campaign.”
This certainly seems true, and Matias appears to be quite good at it. . . . .
. . . . How exactly does this process of indoctrination work, and what might we do to stop it? In nine accessible chapters, Ridgley answers these questions.
He begins with the fact vs. fiction of “brainwashing,” and its origins in the theories of Kurt Lewin’s “re-education” programs, which were later utilized, if not perfected, by Mao Zedong’s cultural revolutionaries and placed into mainstream education by people such as Cheryl Matias and the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire.
Walking through the actual process of thought reform, Ridgley then explores how such techniques are employed on college and university campuses—both inside and outside the classroom—and how any student resistance is broken. . . . . (read more)
Lifting the Mask of the Antiracist Cult (Book Review on American Greatness)
. . . . The evidence in Brutal Minds is drawn from the horse’s mouth: the journals, training manuals, and conference speeches of “antiracist educators,” and the forced confessions of their victims, demonstrating the methodical process by which they are broken down and reconstructed.
The valuable material Ridgley has gathered together puts meat on the bones of abstractions like “indoctrination,” which have been vitiated in a culture war driven largely by cable news soundbites.
At its core, “antiracist education” is shown to be a dehumanizing, and strangely casual, form of psychological torture.
Ridgely draws a straight line from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the contemporary American university, where deranged, underqualified careerists in “student affairs” harangue white students in creepy games and “discussion groups.”
We are treated to a detailed investigation of the deceitful, unscrupulous techniques that are deployed to target, disarm, and re-educate students. Recruits are groomed with false “empathy” and encouraged to surrender sensitive information about their personal lives.
We are reminded that “brainwashing” is more about subtraction than addition: not so much filling minds with ideas, but removing personality and deforming the soul.
While the details of anti-white “thought reform” are worth reviewing, the author’s chief concern is in exposing the anonymous bureaucracy that is turning academia into a gravy train for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” consultants.
At its core, Brutal Minds is about the corruption of the university by busybodies who inhabit an incestuous, constantly growing administrative behemoth. . . . (read more)
New Discourses Podcast: Intersectionality is a Woke standard, but what is it? Where does it come from? The history of the concept isn’t that hard to trace, and where it leads us is back to some of the worst regimes in history. Kim Crenshaw tends to be credited with Intersectionality, but she got it from the radicals in the Combahee River Collective. They put the idea together, in their turn, from the advocacy and activism of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was copying Mao, who was completing ideas laid down by Stalin for completing the perfect Soviet Union.
In this provocative episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads and expands upon his recent essay (below) summarizing his remarks given at Northwestern University at the start of May 2023 explaining the Maoist nature of Woke intersectionality. He also delivers a powerful warning to the Woke youth who have taken up with the movement.
Intersectionality Is American Maoism (New Discourses)
. . . . Mao advocated ruthless treatment and taught open, vicious hate of the “enemies” of the people but always held out the opportunity (often through brutal struggle, brainwashing, and labor) to become one of “the people” by adopting “socialist discipline” under his system of “democratic centralism” that would administer an economy that redistributed shares so that “the people” were made equal.
More specifically, Mao originally created ten identities for people: five “black” (bad) and five “red” (good, Communist). People and their children, grandchildren, and further descendants were classified and handled according to this system. The idea was primarily to pressure youth given black identities to want to renounce and destroy the “Four Olds” of society and become Maoist revolutionaries.
A variety of identity campaigns, involving both carrots and sticks, were employed in the process. Denounce your old way of life and thinking publicly and repeatedly, undergo criticism, self-criticism, and struggle, denounce your father and family if they had the wrong kind of identity, pledge loyalty to Mao, help his revolutionary cadres and forces—those kinds of things could get you a ticket out of a “black” identity into a “red” one.
The goal Mao had was to enact the formula he claims he created in 1942, though it is probably a Soviet import. That program he called “unity – criticism – unity.” Create the desire for unity (just like Biden’s Democrats).
When people desire to have unity, show them how they are failing to live up to the standard unity demands through criticism.
Get them to self-criticize. Put them through humiliating struggle.
Teach them that they’re racist and must become anti-racist and would except they lack racial humility and exhibit white fragility because they covet their own white privilege and the benefits it provides, for example.
Exact confessions and apologies and promises to “do better.”
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) May 22, 2023
Always hold out radical identities as a possible escape from some or all of the pressure, which never quite goes away (white and queer is still white—do better).
Only when they die to their old selves and are reborn on the side of the oppressed (in Freire’s language, anyway) can they adopt unity “on a new basis,” which Mao called “socialist discipline.”
Today, of course, under Intersectionality, the program is the same. Straight, white, male, cis, blah, blah, blah: black identities. Ally, radical activist, change agent, queer, and all that: red identities. The goal isn’t “unity”; it’s “inclusion” and “belonging.” Those sound nicer.
The program is the same. Create a desire to belong; initiate a period of struggle, criticism, and self-criticism as a cult initiation and hazing ritual; and achieve unity under a new “inclusive” standard. . . . . (read more)
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