Brutal Minds, review by M.D. Allen

 Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities, Stanley K. Ridgley, Humanix Books, 2023, xiii + 275 pp., $27.99 hardcover, review by M.D. Allen (posted May 23, 2023 by Mary Grabar, Image used under license from Freestock.com).

Many (most? all?) conservatives will have seen the face of a dinner-party hostess freeze in contempt and anger as an inadvertent utterance suggests the possibility that she has invited into her house someone who does not subscribe to leftist pieties, indeed someone who may well have voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Many (see previous parenthesis) conservatives will have realised that a long-standing friend has clicked in the necessary box to avoid seeing their Facebook posts, although at least we have not, in this case, been peremptorily unfriended. And a good number, alas, will have been told by the college-educated offspring they could previously talk to without stress and strain, quite the contrary, and been told, moreover, with precious little humility, that sex is medically assigned at birth and the Navajo (God save the mark!) have “many gender identities.” What is the reason for this contempt and anger? Wherefore the pain, whence the derision?

Stanley K. Ridgley suggests, with vigour, with full and careful documentation, and with a refreshing malicious wit, that we can blame the nature and role of the contemporary university. Nor, incidentally, do our hostess, our friend, or our offspring need to have spent years at Yale or Princeton. Such is the willed and shameless politicisation of higher education, such is its widespread degradation, that a couple of semesters at Dogpatch State U. will do the job just as well.

Brainwashing sessions

Ridgley’s first chapters deal with brainwashing sessions, and after reading them, with their explanation of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing, one does not jib at the phrase. At first the reader may be a little afraid that Brutal Minds is going to be excessively sweeping and theoretical, but any such fear vanishes after the first fifty pages, when a certain Sherry K. Watt makes her perniciously concrete appearance. Also treading the boards are bell hooks, whose dicta one remembers seeing in the signature blocks of the less impressive of one’s colleagues, and Barbara Applebaum and Cheryl E. Matias, neither of whose names one has previously heard.

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The Imperialist Strikes Back: In Defense of German Colonialism

The Imperialist Strikes Back! Brandon Smith on Bruce Gilley's Latest Book, posted by Mary Grabar, August 9, 2022

The opportunity to question my anti-colonial bias scarcely presented itself to me while I was a college undergraduate. As a patriotic American who resented the whimsical tyranny which Britain exercised over American colonists prior to their revolution (as described in the Declaration of Independence), I took for granted that the practice and history of colonialism were indefensible. However, my collegiate consideration of the worth of colonialism had been largely limited to a discussion in an immersive second-year Spanish class in which one student argued that colonization of the Americas benefited some indigenous people with formal education that they otherwise would have lacked. After reluctantly conceding such a point, I was interested to hear a more robust debate on the matter. Although I believed academia would be the proper venue to discuss controversial topics, it would not be until after I graduated in 2017 that one of my professors would bravely expand upon the virtues of colonialism to curious minds around the world.

Bruce Gilley, instructor of my Comparative Politics and Conservative Political Thought courses at Portland State University, submitted his article “The Case for Colonialism” for publication in the Third World Quarterly academic journal in April 2017.

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