Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities
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Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities
290Hardcover
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Overview
Much of university life is controlled by subsidized paranoiacs, amateur psychotherapists, neo-Marxist totalitarians, “student affairs professionals” imbued with authoritarian mentality, and racialist thought reformers who run workshops that destroy family ties and traditional beliefs to clear the way for new relationships grounded in racialist ideology. These are the brutal minds who threaten and abuse students in the name of an academic fraud called “antiracist pedagogy.”
In Brutal Minds, award-winning professor Stanley K. Ridgley exposes the dangers of radicalization, cancel culture, academic censorship, and the growing influence of socialists “boldly transforming” colleges across the country into reeducation camps of dull conformity.
An educational charade masks activities and ideology as dangerous as those that inspired Communist China’s tragic Cultural Revolution. This book strips away the façade of the modern American university to reveal the malignant bureaucratic viscera inside the institution. It is a dark world, an anti-intellectualist sanctuary where brutal minds find purpose, protection, camaraderie, subsidy, and power.
Dr. Ridgley’s book calls us to action to halt this anti-intellectual takeover of higher education and to restore the greatness of one of Western civilization’s most brilliant creations, the American University.
“A tale of how one of history’s great institutions—the American university—is undergoing an infiltration by an army of mediocrities whose goal is to destroy it as an institution of knowledge creation and replace it with an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda.”
—From the Preface to Brutal Minds
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630062262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Humanix Books |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2023 |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Sales rank: | 1,048,193 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
brutalminds.com
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from BRUTAL MINDS: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in America's Universities by Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D.
Part IV – Cerberus Apparat of Subversion
Students of politics are familiar with the political metaphor of the “Iron Triangle.” This is an unofficial structure of interlocking interests represented by the U.S. Congress, interest groups, and government bureaucracy. The Iron Triangle purports to explain how “things get done” in Washington as contrasted with the schoolbook description of the three co-equal branches of government crafting legislation and policy. The triangle’s three nodes are mutually reinforcing, and it reproduces itself.
There is another “Iron Triangle,” and this one impacts Higher Education. This one is stealthy, less forthcoming, and aimed at the subversion of the American University. Most persons don’t even know it exists, even those who work in higher education, such as faculty and many staff. The interlocking relationships among the three entities of the higher education triangle are clear and, as far as I can determine, have never been identified and described in quite this way.
This iron triangle is dramatically different from the political model. While the political model comprises three separate entities that negotiate to generate outcomes, the higher education triangle, constitutes three discrete entities—three “heads,” if you will— but with a single cadre of persons who can and often do participate as members of all three. At times they participate in all three simultaneously.
In this, the higher education structure is not a triangle of bodies that negotiate but rather constitutes a single body with three heads — a Cerberus. In Greek mythology, Cerberus comprised three heads of a dog with a single body. Cerberus guarded the gates of the Underworld and permitted no escape to the dead souls consigned there.
The Cerberus of higher education exerts tremendous influence over the total milieu of the university. Its three heads are 1) university schools of education, 2) university “student affairs” offices, and 3) outside non-profit professional associations. These three tightly meshed entities share a common primitive ideology, and they constitute a brutish apparat that exercises increasing power and influence on American campuses, mainly to the detriment of students and the overall intellectual decline of the university.
I call it a Cerberus, because it provides the illusion of three independent heads, but they all connect to one body comprising cadre of trained authoritarian ideologues. The following chapters describe the three entities of this Cerberus and their connections.
This is the beast that ensures that any victory or apparent university reform is fleeting, and that the agenda of university degradation will continue.
Behind the welter of policy pronouncements offered by PR hacks, we can identify the actual people who are responsible, not “policies” or procedures. This is why the student affairs Cerberus must be called out in a naming of names and assignment of accountability. Followed by retraining or removal, preferably the latter.
This metaphorical beast will ensure that no meaningful, lasting reform occurs. With these people still in place—zealots with their primitive ideology—no change is possible and abuse is likely to continue.
Part IV describes the theory, the activities, and the elements of the apparat. All of the material in these chapters is drawn from the writings and speeches and conference material of the apparat, which is freely available for anyone to review (as of this writing). All of this is fully documented here — the people, the schools, the programs, the psychological techniques—and it is characterized here in their own words.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents of BRUTAL MINDS: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universityies by Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D.Introduction: Menagerie of Authoritarians
Part I – Deceivers
Chapter 1 – “Academic Freedom”: Endless Pillow Fight
Chapter 2 – Failing Faculty: The Uninquisitive Inquisitors
Chapter 3 – Student Affairs Professionals: The Anonymous Authoritarians
Part II – Deception
Chapter 4 – Critical Cosmology: Why I’m Never Wrong
Chapter 5 – Demon-Haunted World: The Rise of Neo-Medievalism
Chapter 6 – Hook and Hammer: Breaking Student Resistance
Part III – Diktat
Chapter 7 – Thought Reform: The Ideological Grinder
Chapter 8 – Devil’s Toolbox: Amateur Psychotherapy
Chapter 9 – Inside the Classroom: Students under Duress
Chapter 10 – Outside the Classroom: Cult of the “Co-Curriculum”
Part IV – Cerberus – Apparat of Subversion
Chapter 11 – Schools of Education: Faces at the Bottom of the Barrel
Chapter 12 – Student Affairs: Transforming the Universityfor Marx and Mao
Chapter 13 – The Associations: Cargo Cult of Fake Academia
Chapter 14 – The Cerberus Agenda – Apparat of Subversion
Chapter 15 – Conclusion: Program for Renewal
APPENDICES
Preface
Menagerie of Authoritarians
No better demonstration of brutal minds at work can be found than the photos of smiling Nazi students and faculty hurling books into towering bonfires in May of 1933 in every city in Germany with a university.
Those brutal minds consigned the classics to the flames with unmitigated joy, and you sense their euphoria as they destroyed the ideas that threatened their self-conception and the exalted place they imagined for themselves in the world. Ideas that diminished them.
They burned books, 25,000 of them in one night, countless more in the years that followed. And we know too well what followed, what Heinrich Heine warned us about in his oft-quoted caution from his play Almansor: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
The old black-and-white photographs are faded and some of them are cracked, and this puts an artificial distance between us and the grinning book-burners in the photos. This distance affords us the comfortable fiction that these people are somehow different than us, that we would never engage in the barbarous activities the pictures capture. That we would intervene against the barbarism in the photos.
That we would surely stand up to them.
The truth is that these photos capture a reality that is uncomfortably close to where we sit today.
Book-burning is anti-intellectualism, of course. But it’s also intellectual brutality, which is much worse. Intellectual brutality is anti-intellectualism with an attitude and a purpose and a method.
Intellectual brutality is more common than many of us realize, and it is exemplified by the brutal mind. Brutal minds are ubiquitous in the American Universitytoday and these brutal minds tirelessly train the next generation of American youth, even as you read these words.
The university would seem to be the last place for us to look for brutal minds. Yet if the barbarous book-burners teach us nothing else, it is that the university is the first place we should look.
And thus we, too, may have our own opportunity to stand up to the book-burning of brutal minds.
***
So please disabuse yourself of the idealized, stylized notion of the university—ivy-covered walls, quest for truth, debate societies, academic rigor, that sort of thing. Generally speaking, that’s long gone (at least in the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences, and the always-abysmal schools of education).
If that’s what you’re looking for, you can still find it in many delightful small colleges and universities, but search for these you must. Brutal Minds isn’t about the civilized survivors of today’s higher education collapse into neo-medievalist authoritarianism. This book is about that collapse itself and the brutal minds who have engineered it behind a façade offered by slick university brochures with their stock photos of smiling students and stereotypical bow-tied professors, behind the obligatory kaleidoscope of multiculturally assessed faces.
Behind this Potemkin façade, the university has been transformed dramatically from what alumni, parents, and donors imagine it to be. That nostalgic conception of the university is at least two decades behind us, and yet the slogans and the platitudes and the vapid pronouncements of university PR flacks remain remarkably unchanged.
This public façade conflicts sharply with the reality experienced by students, witnessed by faculty, and lamented by staffers who just keep their heads down and survive until the next paycheck. Intellectual brutality is common on the campuses, and these brutal minds tirelessly train the next generation of American youth in their brutal ways, even as you read these words.
For more than two decades, we were lulled into a kind of stupor as we watched repeated iterations of the same ideological struggles that regularly effervesce off the university campuses. Called the “culture wars” or “science wars,” they flame bright for a time, until our attention is inevitably directed elsewhere. Universityadministrators and their public relations flacks assure alumni—particularly the deep-pocket donors—that all is well, and that such robust academic debate simply shows the healthy state of the alma mater.
Sleepy Boards of Trustees are feted and given PowerPoint presentations that show “progress” of a sort, with metrics sufficiently abstract enough and yet seemingly on-point—enough to get the president and his cronies through another year or so of keeping the ship afloat while fending off serious inquiries about what is actually happening on the campus. The president is given a bonus, his staff given three cheers. More important, yet another year passes without explanation of who has access to students and in what ways when that access and the resulting ideological asphyxiation grows ever more dominant and less reversible.
For all the alumni, parents, and general public know, the structure of the university—its personnel, its policies, its academic wing—all remain relatively unchanged because, well, because the university is merely a vessel for knowledge generation and the transmission of that knowledge to iterations of subsequent generations. Right? The university is a creation of the Western world. It is a living institution created as a crucible of civilization and grounded in Enlightenment values. Yes, it is all of these things.
And this is a problem for many people.
It’s a serious problem, because much of American academia constitutes a dark world populated by paranoiacs, by their duped followers, by amateur psychotherapists, by neo-Marxist totalitarians, by unqualified wannabe faculty, by ancillary support personnel with delusions of grandeur, by “student affairs” educrats imbued with Stormtrooper mentality, by Orwellian memory hole specialists, and by thought reformers who violate federal law against human subject experimentation to attack young people in “workshops” designed to destroy their relationships with parents and friends to clear the way for new relationships grounded in a bizarre and hate-filled racialist ideology.
These are the rogues that populate today’s university. It’s an unsavory cast of characters from a Kafka fantasy, and they are academia’s Brutal Minds.
These brutal minds are already on a campus near you. They’re on every campus.
And the students?
The vast majority of students haven’t changed much at all, of course. But the challenges they face and the indulgences they are granted have changed. They’ve changed for the worse, much worse.
Today’s students face a gallery of rogues ensconced in the academy—no, not the oddballs we’ve always associated with academia—and the word “rogue” is not lightly chosen. Some of these characters are outright dangerous, without conscience, and armed with the zeal of a crusader. Many of them threaten the fundamental constitutional rights of students. Others threaten the health and well-being of students.
We’ve seen it coming, of course, for more than two millennia. Plato predicted something akin to this about 2500 years ago, and we can read it for ourselves in Plato’s Republic in his allegory of the cave, more on which in a moment.
Yes, we can read Plato for now on the campus. But if Brutal Minds have their way, this may not always be the case.
Señor Bombástico – The Marginalizad Voice
Enter our first exemplar of the university’s Brutal Mind—a Princeton Classics professor by the name of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, whom I hereby christen Señor Bombástico, one of the faculty types we find in today’s university.
Peralta is one such brutal mind who desperately resents Plato as well as a bushel-basket of other Greek and Roman ancient philosophers. Peralta is a self-described “scholar of color,” which tells us immediately that his resentment of Plato is what you expect and is animated by contemporary ideology.
At a January 2019 conference of the Society of Classical Studies, Professor Peralta attacked the process that brought him to prominence in his own discipline:
“If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
A female professor at the conference took issue with his attack, and Peralta bellowed at her:
“Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
You can be forgiven if you feel no sense of uplift by these words of what Princeton apparently believes is a voice of deep reason and scholarship. If it carries the whiff of barbarism, this is unsurprising, because Peralta is one of the university’s brutal minds, and he struts with a bombastic anti-intellectualism the envy of any would-be gruppenführer, circa May of 1933.
We must look quite hard at people such as this Peralta, people who are threatened by books, who are made to feel small by uncongenial ideas. We must ask who these people are today and what kind of legacy this type of person has bequeathed to us throughout history. Within that history we find the events of May 10, 1933 in 34 German university cities in which German university students, aided by faculty, observed a day of “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” in which more than 25,000 classic texts were burned in bonfires throughout the country.
The particular sentiment may not be shared by the Peraltas of today, but the method of intellectual brutality surely is. You see, Peralta is what is referred-to, nowadays almost tongue in cheek, as a “marginalized voice.”
The working definition of a “marginalized voice”—a definition that is drawn from our lived experience for the past 20 years—is one that propagates strange and often hateful opinion in a panoply of outlets such as blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, books, non-profit platforms, twitter postings, faculty posts with lush perquisites, and panels at prestigious conferences that offer a bully pulpit to whine about the oppression of marginalized voices. There is nothing “marginalized” about them. In point of fact “marginalized voices” are brutal minds in action—over-indulged, over-heard, over-celebrated, over-blown.
Señor Bombástico.
Now, if the occasional lout like Peralta is all we face today, surely this constitutes a speed bump in the intellectual history of the university. Unfortunately, he is not an exception. He is increasingly the lockstep rule.
What Professor Peralta adds to the academy is not the issue (and it appears that his scholarship is sound)—it is what Peralta subtracts from the academy that is his claim to infamy: the works he denigrates, the thinkers he degrades, the decline he encourages. And the danger is this—Peralta is a net loss for the university, as are all of those who think and act like him, and their numbers are legion.
Stone by Stone, Book by Book
Peralta and thousands like him are dismantling or striving to dismantle the university’s intellectual heritage stone by metaphorical stone, much as barbarous tribes dismantled the Roman coliseum for cheap building materials to construct their ill-designed shacks as Europe descended into the period that later scholars rightly branded the “dark ages.”
They are persons bound by Plato’s conceit, and most of them are likely ignorant that Plato described them more than 2,000 years ago, and even if they did know, they would resent that Plato helped construct today’s intellectual architecture that so bedevils them that they must racialize it as “whiteness”—as they racialize everything—and so the brutal minds are bent on destroying Plato and a phalanx of other Greco-Roman ancients and their influence in the modern American university. Even Plato’s very presence in the university threatens them, except perhaps as a thinker who must somehow be discredited by one of today’s worthies, and as an example that serves to bray:
“If we can purge Plato, what makes you think that you’re safe?”
No, brutal minds don’t like great books at all, certainly nothing related to the Enlightenment. Great books with great ideas diminish them, just as they diminished the National Socialists in 1933.
Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, offers this perplexed assertion and question: “Books represent humanity at its best and its worst. . . . I mean, what can a book do? And why is it so dangerous? That it needs to be physically annihilated?”
The impetus for this wholesale rage against the Enlightenment tradition is as easy to recognize and explain as it is to debunk. That is to say, easily. But ridding the campus of its destructive influence is another thing altogether, for the brutal minds are in a race against the clock—they rush to destroy and to remove and to coerce — they rush to cancel — because they recognize that at some point they might well be found out, and their celebration of dunderheadedness will abruptly end.
In fact, these “marginalized voices” are bent on destroying as much as they can of the Western Canon as fast as they can by tarring everything they despise with the pejorative of “white supremacy.” This is the reflexive solution for their mediocrity and for their envy. They might just as easily blame “international Jewry,” or “bourgeois thinking,” or “the kulaks,” or “religious heretics,” as this is the practice of pseudoscience and witch doctors throughout history—to contrive a devil, a Satan, a Mephistopheles. To contrive a rhetorical scapegoat.
“Marginalized voices” like Peralta are more prevalent than people suspect.
Bigoted brutal minds, who have perpetrated the fraud of the “marginalized voice” are themselves engaged in marginalizing the builders of the Western Intellectual heritage in an effort to destroy the foundations of the institution that employs them. This erasure is essential to the psychological well-being of the brutal mind; it is, in fact, a characteristic of the brutal mind in action.
Wherever brutal minds get the upper hand, they destroy, they dumb down, they homogenize, and if necessary they stamp the face of opposition with the jackboot of outright repression. They eliminate the opposition, they remove it, and they censor, block, and outright obliterate the record of knowledge—anything that gives the lie to the stunted intellectual parochialism that animates them.
They cancel.
This Peralta is just a one of the strivers who roam the campus freely, paid well and bent on the destruction of what they only dimly understand and certainly that which they played no role in creating.
Lest one believe that this must be hyperbole of the alarmist sort, let’s take the earlier assertion that on-campus coercive workshops are offered designed explicitly to destroy friend and parental relationships of students so to clear a path for ideologically approved relationships. This must sound odd, if not outright fabrication. Surely, this can’t be right?
But it most assuredly is. Here is an example from a functionary advocating exactly that.
American Hsiao-tsu—Thought Reform in Action
Meet one Sherry K. Watt, a “student affairs” functionary at the Universityof Iowa and one of the most influential of campus cadres. She is listed as Associate Professor in the Higher Education and Student Affairs Program at Iowa, and she qualifies as a first-rate brutal mind—Watt advocates attacking the student’s sense of self through emotional manipulation:
This interconnected examination naturally has the potential to raise complex feelings, such as rage, sadness, powerlessness, pride, joy, endearment, guilt, fear, and resentment, particularly for people who enjoy ‘privileged identities. . . . Engaging in emotionally charged, difficult dialogue with others about changing the climate of our higher education institutions is risky [and it] also necessitates revisiting and potentially deconstructing personal and familial relationships.
It is likely that parents, faculty, alumni, and even senior personnel in various university administrations are unaware that Watt and a phalanx of like-minded “student affairs” cadre are engaged in “risky” activities designed to attack the student’s “sense of self” as well as the personal and family relationships of the students involved. We should ask who empowered and charged Watt and her ideological fellows in “student affairs” with the mandate to destroy students’ sense of self in hsiao-tsu thought reform workshops that also “necessitate” the destruction of students’ personal and family relationships.
Yes, we should ask this so that those responsible for these types of human subject experimentation can be dismissed from the university, or at very least removed from any position that harms students or negatively affects the personal or professional lives of others in the academy.
Watt’s coercive workshop is, in fact, a mainstay instrument for today’s brutal minds, and it is but one example of brutal minds at work—this particular type I dub the “Mad Pseudoscientist.” This book is full of such people and examples, of brutal minds not attempting to hide their efforts, but rather proudly sharing their techniques to “break down student resistance.”
This is an alien alternative world, this world of brutal minds—where amateur psychotherapists, who subscribe to a paranoid psychopathic doctrine, run psychotherapeutic workshops to convert normal people to the cult-like ideology of critical racialism. It is characterized by rampant paranoid psychopathy, by abusive thought reform, by ambitious mediocrities, by coercive instructors, and unauthorized human subject behavior modification.
Could this be even remotely possible? Moreover, the obvious question presents itself: Why haven’t I heard of this before?
You have. It just goes by other names, labels out of an Orwellian-Kafkaesque dystopia.
More than that, it is as if George Orwell and Franz Kafka teamed to co-construct a fantastical American educational institution using the smoldering timbers and singed architectural plans from the 20th century’s most barbarous regimes—a combination of Orwell’s 1984 and Kafka’s The Trial.
***
Brutal minds like Peralta and Watt and thousands of influential others have busily chipped away at the university’s foundation for many years now, inside the classroom and outside the classroom. They have labored right under the noses of the people who are paid to be aware of this and to prevent the erosion of the university ethos. What do I mean by this . . . erosion?
By this, I mean the re-introduction to the university of the superstitious dross that had been flushed out of the institution at the close of the medieval period—alien creeds, pseudoscience, superstition, and outright psychopathy and the transmission of this to students as well as the reordering of university functions on lines prescribed by totalist ideology.
This erosion means the methodical erasure—the cancelling—of certain forms of knowledge and the denial to students of the counterarguments that give the lie to the grotesque edifice that is under construction right now. The majority of professors in the social sciences and humanities are now “social activists”—participants in what they perceive as struggles for emancipation. Go ahead, ask them. They embrace the label, and they’ll tell you how they are “praxis-oriented,” inspired by Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach, with a mission to change the world in accord with their philosophy.
Think for one moment if this were true (it is, and by the end of this book, you will know it to be true), what might that mean for the university?
If this is indeed true, if you are a social activist participant in the struggle, and you have been successful in recruiting an ideologically uniform department/program/institute by excluding badthinkers from the academy, why would you indulge this outdated, traditional notion of the “marketplace of ideas”?
Why wouldn’t you just communicate to your students the received wisdom? Why not just neglect teaching what you abhor? Why permit the ideological enemy a hearing at all?
Why not just cancel it?
There is precedent for this, of course . . .
If you’re a barbarian entering Rome, tearing down statues, burning books, gutting buildings, and destroying temples—cancelling Roman culture—can you be trusted to convey the other side of the argument, to articulate the case for maintaining the Roman emperor? Will you create a safe space for Roman loyalists to gather and discuss the vanquished and “marginalized” Roman way of life? Or will you just cancel it?
If you’re a brownshirt in May of 1933 Berlin, looting libraries and burning books by Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, among others, can you nonetheless be relied upon to protect that marketplace of ideas? Will you permit and subsidize “courageous conversations” about the Jewish intellectual heritage in Germany?
If you’re a Red Guard in 1966 Beijing, burning ancient scrolls, humiliating and murdering professors, coercing confessions in struggle sessions, and smashing cultural artifacts, can you be expected to engage the world of ideas and philosophies in good faith, without truncheon in hand?
You know the answer to these questions.
You do. And if you know the answer, then you already know the answer to what is happening on America’s university campuses.
The Lengthening Shadows of Neo-Medievalism
This may come as a surprise to many outside the university, but it won’t surprise anyone who works on a university or college campus, many of whom advocate what amounts to a neo-medievalist creed and many in an ever-shrinking minority who see reason for alarm, but who remain silent, fearful, and powerless to stop the degradation of Western Civilization’s greatest creation. Who wants to get caught in the maelstrom of the new barbarism, charged with thoughtcrime or violation of the new propriety that shifts with the whims of the braying mob?
If you find this surprising, this perspective on the American university described herein, that’s because you likely share the common view of the American university.
The common view of the university is that of a vessel for knowledge creation and knowledge transmission, free of domination by the contretemps of the day. But this view of value neutrality is an artifact of a bygone era, a Weberian ideal construct. Under the influence of brutal minds, the university has become the greatest ideological recruiting vehicle ever devised by human beings. It’s not meant to be, of course, but brutal minds recognized the university as a superb lever of power and control decades ago. For brutal minds, the university is not a vessel, but rather an instrument—it constitutes the strategic high ground in the battle for the future of American society. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Maoists, and assorted New Left followers understood this during the societal unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s, and they marked the American Universityfor seizure along with other institutions of American society. It would be a long road and a Long March to victory. Today, the heirs of Marcuse largely control the university, and their extremist intellectual brutality renders us nostalgic for the simple ideological lip-service of Marcuse. Universitybrutal minds clearly recognize that they can control the country’s fate 30 years hence.
They aim to do so . . . and they are not your friends. They do not want “civil discourse,” and they do not want to “agree to disagree.” This is not the way of the Brutal Mind. Today’s college campus is replete with a phalanx of many and disparate villains right out of central casting, motivated by ideology, by ambition, by power, by hate, by bigotry, by paranoia, by utopia, by visions of emancipation.
Surely this can’t be so.
But yes, it is.
The ideologues have been calculating in their method, with critical faculty playing their time-tested role of public gadfly, when in actuality it is they who are in command. Moreover, they have battalions of ancillary support personnel who have populated a bureaucracy animated by hubris and who actually believe that they constitute the essence of the university. These persons ache to teach “courses” of their own, and many of them are almost giddy with the pretense: “I finally get to use my master’s degree.” Others begin to hang out where faculty congregate and continue their pedagogical pretensions:
[W]e began to occupy new spaces and places on campus so that we could interact with other campus educators. These spaces might be the faculty commons with colleagues in different departments, the general education committee, a faculty senate meeting, or faculty institutes.
To a person they are animated by the noxious doctrines of critical theory, particularly critical racialist ideology, whose devil is a lurking villain they call “white supremacy.” For Racialists and their fellow travelers “white supremacy” has metastasized into a proxy for anything racialists do not like, do not have, or cannot do. The culprit? “White people” are the permanent purveyors of this dastardly doctrine. If this sounds abnormal to the extreme, it is because of the perverse core of the doctrine, which codifies hate that is grounded in paranoia.
This doctrine is malleable to every occasion. In extreme cases, reality itself is distorted to match the theory.
When a theory is in trouble, the first responders usually spin out a “rescue hypothesis,” which consists in tweaking the theory to accommodate reality that doesn’t comport with what’s said about the reality. For more than a century, the response by Marxists to disconfirmations and anomalies in their theory has been to label the arguments, examples, and disconfirming evidence of its opponents as bourgeois or to label their opponents themselves as members of some allegedly vile group, such as kulaks, landowners, “capitalist roaders,” “deviationists.” In the case of Stalin, the response was extended to incorporate a bullet to the back of the head after the coercive extraction of a “confession.” In the case of Mao, the response was a “cultural revolution,” an expectoration of everything cruel and barbaric stored up from the darkest of dark ages and inflicted on civilization in a searing cascade of violence, hate, and fury.
We certainly do not see ourselves in the villains and victims of Soviet or Chinese Communism. Nor is it likely that you or anyone you know can relate to the primitive sorcery of these totalitarian theories and in the barbarity of their imposition. We are much too smart for that, much too compassionate, much too brave, and certainly not evil enough.
Yet the same phenomenon thrives today.
All of this is familiar to many of us on the campus, who have dealt with the brutal minds.
And this book will familiarize you, as well, with the anonymous authoritarians and their enablers who work behind the scenes on America’s campuses.
Anonymous Authoritarians: Who? What? How?
With all of this, several obvious questions present themselves: Who are these brutal minds? What doctrines do they impose? How do they systematically coerce students and staff in a grand ballet of “milieu management?” These are the questions asked and answered in Brutal Minds.
Brutal Minds rips away the cloak of authoritarian anonymity.
Who are the people whose primary goal is to dragoon students into coercive situations to “develop” them, who psychologically abuse students both inside the classroom and outside the classroom?
Who are the people who inflict unauthorized ideological small-group psychotherapy on young people, perhaps on your own children? Perhaps on you, if you’re a student?
Who are the eager folks who “finally get to use my master’s degree” who run campus diversity workshops to instruct others on their inherent “racism,” and yet are drawn from the ranks of “human lactation staffers,” “dance therapists,” poet-clerks, and amateur off-campus tale-spinners?
Who are the “residence life” staff, whose notions of educational grandeur lead them to embrace an “imperative” to impose on student residents “trainings” drawn from fake academia and non-profit social fantasies?
Who are the “student affairs” types hired to run ice cream socials and scavenger hunts, but who award themselves the much grander enterprise of imposing total “milieu management” on students to “develop” them?
Who are the faculty who leverage their classrooms as fevered crucibles to coerce, abuse, and damage students psychologically in violation of federal law?
Who are the “thought leaders” who generate the blueprints for university thought reform and behavior modification programs—“student development”— and where can we find these policies, procedures, and plans?
What are the bizarre doctrines that inform campus psychotherapy struggle sessions called “racial caucuses,” “courageous conversations,” “difficult dialogues,” “brave spaces?”
What are the off-campus “professional associations,” non-profit groups, and conferences that construct and propagate cultic social fantasies and pass them off as “scholarship,” which then informs the bigoted actions of university brutal minds?
What is the cargo cult of the “co-curriculum,” with its fake faculty, fake classes, fake subject matter, and fake journals, all designed to mimic actual academia?
How are the coercive, quasi-legal methods used by university brutal minds to inflict their ideological diktat on students and staff, most especially in pursuit of the Orwellian notion of “milieu management?”
Brutal Minds answers all of these urgent questions and peels away the façade to reveal the viscera of the modern American university. The university attracts particular personalities to staff the university’s behavior modification regime, and while certainly every person is different, the tasks of intellectual brutality require a certain type, who is generally undistinguished and malleable, easily swayed by ideology, filled with certitude, who enjoys exercising unauthorized power over students, and who pleasurably plays the authoritarian arbiter of “policy.” This book introduces the reader to this menagerie of ideologues who staff the bureaucracies and some academic departments as they flog an image of their own questionable erudition while they construct an inescapable thought reform environment for students.
Brutal Minds exposes the inner workings of the machinery in three parts.
First, it reveals the deceivers who are today’s brutal minds, and those huddle together behind the authoritarian anonymity endemic to any large bureaucracy. Brutal Minds removes the cloak of authoritarian anonymity and identifies several “ideal types” of faculty and bureaucrats.
In these pages, we meet the “Mystic Magician,” the “Subsidized Paranoiac,” the “White Confessor,” the “Mad Pseudoscientist,” and Señor Bombástico. These faculty types do not constitute a majority of faculty, for we still have the rigorous side of campus comprising the STEM fields and business and economics. But in the humanities and liberal arts, they run free in their multitudes, and they seek to degrade the hard sciences as energetically as would any medievalist inquisitor.
Outside the classroom, we tour the campus and pay unwelcome visits to the anonymous authoritarians who control the levers of campus power over students and staff: The “Nietzschean Educrat,” the “Kafka Cargo Cultist,” Orwell’s “Big Brother Bureaucrat,” the “Invisible Austrian.” These oddities constitute the cogs and wheels of the ideological grinder. With Brutal Minds, they are anonymous no longer.
In the book’s second part, we learn the primitive deception of intellectual brutality that animates these anonymous authoritarians—a mélange of ideology, superstition, pseudoscience, and magical thinking that constitute their cultic belief system.
The third section on diktat examines in detail the coercive and quasi-legal methods employed by the authoritarians as they themselves describe them. This abuse of students characterizes the intellectual brutality of the authoritarians who populate the menagerie of university administration, a veritable rogues’ gallery of coercionists. They wear broad smiles and coo the vernacular of “love” and “community” and “emancipation.” They share a common worldview and nestle comfortably in that world, shielded from an outside reality that cares not for their feelings and that would slap them silly if it got the chance.
What to do about all of this, if anything can be done?
It turns out that we can do much. Brutal Minds shows the way.
Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D.2021
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