Point of View January 23, 2025 – Hour 1 : Brutal Minds

[00:00:04] Across America, Live, this is Point of View, Kirby Anderson. Yes, I want to spend some time talking about what's going on in education and in particular what's going on in the university because I think we have seen some remarkable changes.

[00:00:30] I'm just reflecting back, 49 years ago I was first invited in to speak on college campuses and to be honest there were some professors who were quite willing to engage in a back and forth on the campus. We've been working on some of these issues but even at that time we recognize that oftentimes there was kind of a secular filibuster or maybe even a left of center filibuster and there were some that were already trying to indoctrinate students and we've seen that for some time.

[00:00:58] But you've heard people say that I sent my kids off to college and they came back brainwashed. Well, that's sometimes a phrase we use but I think you're going to find out as we get into this actual brainwashing techniques sometimes are used and we've noticed a remarkable change. One is illustrated by this book I'm holding up right now, The Coddling of the American Mind.

[00:01:21] Now you might remember we had Jonathan Haidt on the program and we got into some of those issues and I think it was really important to recognize that the students had changed. But part of that is due to what has happened in the academic realm there as well. And so I wanted you to know more about this and about six months ago I had a chance to watch the Mike Huckabee show and on the program was Dr. Stanley Ridgely who is the author of the book Brutal Minds.

[00:01:49] I went and bought a copy of the book and we wanted to have him on and are delighted to do so. He is a full professor, clinical professor of management at Drexel University's College of Business. He's also studied I might mention at Moscow State University and other institutions as well. A former military intelligence officer. He's actually the faculty sponsor for Turning Point USA and you may have seen some of his columns in places like Newsmax and American Greatness.

[00:02:19] I remember he was one a couple years ago of the $36 million question College Presidents Won't Answer which had to do with of course what was happening at Oberlin College. And of course there's even a review that was done about his book in American Greatness. So there's all sorts of resources that you can find and we certainly encourage you to find out more about the book. But Dr. Ridgely it is just a delight to have you on the program with us today. Well Kirby I'm delighted to be here.

[00:02:47] I've been excited about the opportunity to speak to you and speak to your audience and to talk about this important issue, the decline of American higher education, what we can do about it. Well first of all let's talk about history for just a minute because there's a time when we were obviously concerned about indoctrination. The academy has always been kind of left of center but that sets us up to the brainwashing.

[00:03:09] But there was a time in which obviously indoctrination was taking place but in just a minute we're going to talk about how in some respects that is a much more deliberate action, is it not? Oh it certainly is. And what's important is I listened to your praise and the folks that you were dealing with who were willing to listen to you, willing to debate you. And those guys were good liberals but they constitute the right wing on college campuses now.

[00:03:39] And I am not on the right wing, I'm on the far right which I find very surprising. And so right now, as you note, the brainwashing is deliberate. It's not just the faculty, it's mainly the bureaucracy. And the leftist camp that we have all we have been grown used to or grown used to over the last several decades and if not more, has now grown even more substantially.

[00:04:05] Samuel Abrams at Sarah Lawrence College did research that shows that the left to right ratio is six to one in favor of the left. And in the administration slash bureaucracy, it's 12 to one. And this is very important because these bureaucrats are engaged in what is called milieu management. That's what they call it, which means messaging students 24-7 on crypto-Maoist Marxist ideology,

[00:04:33] which is its current incarnation is DEI, a term with which people are becoming more and more familiar. So yeah, you are right, it is intentional. And I might just mention, here's a booklet I have on wokeness. And of course, when we do a new booklet on that or critical race theory, some of the others I'm holding up, I might even do one on this book, Brutal Minds. But how we're going to break this down is about the first half hour, we're going to talk about this whole idea of what's happening inside and outside the classroom.

[00:05:02] And then give you a little bit of a history lesson, which we've talked about before, and that is the left's long march through the institutions. But let's, if we can, define this idea of brainwashing because that's a term thrown around. But you mean it intentionally because you're talking about a particular kind of way in which brainwashing takes place, because there's a focus there on unfreezing, changing, and then refreezing. Can you kind of explain that to us?

[00:05:31] Well, yeah, when I say brainwash or thought reform, people kind of, you know, cock an eyebrow and poo-poo it, thinking this is some kind of Manchurian candidate. I refer to the 1962 film with Frank Sinatra, the Manchurian candidate with strobe lights and electrodes. No, it's not. It's a very refined and common technique that is used by the Communist Chinese even today. It was developed in the United States by Kurt Lewin back in the 1940s. Unfreezing, changing, and then refreezing refers to the belief system of a target.

[00:06:00] In this case, college students. It refers to the application of psychological manipulation and behavior modification techniques designed to do what? To change a person's belief system. And they are very upfront about doing this. Kurt Lewin appears in the citations in these books, books like Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice. And the idea that they're going to manipulate someone's thought processes in a class that is designed to do that.

[00:06:28] I think people need to understand that we're not talking about this is not something that happens on the periphery. This happens in classes that are designed to do this. It also happens in seminars and caucuses where a person's sense of self is attacked. First of all, you unfreeze the current belief system by attacking it. And this is called, they call this the phase of defending, where they're intentionally trying to break down the current belief system of a college student,

[00:06:54] preparing the way to replace it or install a new belief system, one that involves critical consciousness. This is the term they use. They draw this from Paulo Freire and Crypto Mao was educated, was very well known on college campuses, kind of a guru. And they attack that belief system, replace it with this new belief system, and then they do what is called refreezing,

[00:07:17] which is to give the student lots of activities to do that will, I guess it's what it's called. They say this is going to cause the new belief system to take with the student so there's no backsliding. And this is the whole process. They're quite upfront about it. You're not going to see it in any kind of public display of candor.

[00:07:38] You will see it in their books and their articles, and they have success articles or feedback articles to share how well their techniques are working. If I may, Kirby, let me share with you one name in particular, Lisa Spanierman at Arizona State University. She has actually written an article, and I provide this in my own writing. The article says we can use psychological techniques, she being a psychologist, clinical psychologist,

[00:08:08] we can use these techniques to create a false sense of guilt. And she says this, white males. When we do this, it makes them more malleable and ready to do the work of social justice. Let me jump in real quickly because we have to take a break. I do want to come back to the issue of guilt because in the unfreezing stage, there's the establishment of guilt. And in the changing phase, there's a channeling of guilt.

[00:08:35] So we're going to talk about that because that's very important in everything from critical race theory to wokeness. We'll get into all of that with Stanley Ridgely right after this. This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson.

[00:09:02] Yesterday, I talked about some of the transformations in 1776 that Andrew Wilson discusses in his book, Remaking the World. They are identified by the acronym WEIRDER. W stands for Western and Globalization. E stands for Educated and the Enlightenment. I stands for Industrialize and focuses on the Industrial Revolution. One event was James Watt's Invention of the Steam Engine. Western society longer depended upon muscle power or horsepower.

[00:09:29] R stands for rich and focuses on the great enrichment. Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nation in 1776. The Industrial Revolution and capitalism led to a significant increase in life expectancy and the rise of social development. D stands for Democratic and focuses on the American Revolution. Of course, the Declaration of Independence was ratified in 1776 and the Constitution starts with we the people. The spirit of 76 has spread throughout the world.

[00:09:58] E stands for Ex-Christian and focuses on the rejection of Christianity. During this time, we see the rise of deism, agnosticism, and atheism. Although some believe the Bible, many others rejected the biblical view of God and the authority of the Bible. And R stands for Romantic and focuses on the Romantic Revolution. This is when Rousseau developed the concept of self and expressive individualism. And the seeds of the sexual revolution in the 20th century were first sown in 1776.

[00:10:27] Andrew Wilson catalogs these transformations, but also believes there are many opportunities for Christians and the church in what is becoming a post-secular world. We need to speak truth into this post-Christian culture. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view. For a free booklet on a biblical view of genetic engineering, go to viewpoints.info slash genetic engineering. Viewpoints.info slash genetic engineering.

[00:10:58] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. To do our conversation today about the book, Brutal Minds, The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities, written by Dr. Stanley Ridgely, who is with us. And I might just mention that this book has been out for some time. You might be able to find it in your local bookstore, but we have a link so that you can get it in hardback or certainly in Kindle because there are charts, graphs, and other material that I think work best when you actually can read through it.

[00:11:27] But, Stan, for just a minute, we were talking about this issue of guilt, and I've got in front of me some of the booklets we give out each month to our donors on things like wokeness and critical race theory, the great reset, sex and culture.

[00:11:39] If there's one thing that ties it together, the individuals, the activists trying to promote their particular view, DEI, ESG, critical race theory, whatever it might be, use guilt as a very significant, if you will, kind of almost a mechanism to begin to change people's minds. And that's why I think it's interesting when you go through this process of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.

[00:12:07] Guilt shows up time and again, doesn't it? Yes, it does. It's absolutely essential to the process or the enterprise of the brainwash inflicted on students on the campus by our social justice warriors, more and more by our DEI officers. And I've seen it in action, and I participate in those as often as I can, and I certainly have documented the process in Brutal Minds, naming names, telling you how it's done.

[00:12:35] And I also warn students how to look out for the signs that you're moving into a brainwash session, which may be called, you know, difficult dialogue or courageous conversation or intergroup dialogue or racial caucus. They have very interesting names, and I tell students red flags to watch for whenever this is – one of these things, of course, is, as you mentioned, guilt.

[00:12:56] The idea of trying to inflict a false sense of guilt on students for events or incidents for which they have absolutely no responsibility or completely unconnected, because this idea of sense of guilt weighs on a person, whether it's false guilt or it's real guilt. It weighs on a person. You want to find someone to whom you can pay absolution and absolve yourself of this guilt. And so these folks who are inflicting this notion of false guilt on our students, what do you know?

[00:13:25] They have a kind of absolution that they grant as well. Let me talk about for just a minute something you got to, and that is there are people that oftentimes call point of view, and they want to know, okay, how can I identify this particular curriculum in the public schools? In this case, we're talking about universities, but this is still helpful because you can go through, as you do on pages 60 and 61, talking about the tells or the red flags, and that's when a program is described as a dialogue,

[00:13:53] or we want to learn about equity, we want to learn about race, whatever it might be. Or you can certainly ask, well, do they have informed consent forms? Well, no, we don't need any of that. Or when you walk into some of those situations and they start hitting you with all those issues, I find this helpful because if you have a young person come back from college, you can say, did you ever run into these four points? And they would probably say yes.

[00:14:18] Or if you are maybe a student, you could read through those yourself and know what to look for. So in some respects, you're not just giving us kind of a philosophical overview, you're giving us some ways to avoid the future dangers that come from some of the kinds of programs that we find in the universities. Yeah, exactly right. I do provide as much as I can useful information for the average person who doesn't really want to have to, well, you know, delve down deep into what they're doing.

[00:14:45] But here's how you can recognize when you're in a brainwash situation, because obviously they're not going to say, hey, welcome to our brainwash situation here. We're going to change your point of view. We're going to change your mind. We're going to attack your belief system, destabilize it, and replace it with ours. No, they don't say that. No, but what they have to do is they have three phases. The unfreezing phase is they're going to try to gain your trust. And I think the trust, you mentioned guilt. Well, trust is absolutely essential for the brainwashed to succeed,

[00:15:13] for these people who are facilitators, instructors, sometimes faculty. Gain the trust of the student. And they have very distinct techniques they use, very much like American-style cults. And the unification church, the Moonies, they use what is called love bombing. And they bomb a person, a potential recruit, with a sense of acceptance,

[00:15:38] unqualified, uncritical acceptance of a person, giving them the sense of warmth and receptivity. They feel more belonging than they've ever felt in their entire life, even with their family, because, you know, a good family offers criticism whenever you're growing up. So this kind of Mooney-style love bombing, and they use the term peace and unity, our own social justice people use the terms inclusion and belonging. It's very creepy, if you ask me.

[00:16:06] And the facilitator has techniques that they are instructed to use. I know this is these instructions. I'm members of the various groups of these student affairs people, so I get inside information that they get. And they use terms like, we want you to make yourself vulnerable. We want you to self-disclose, to create a sense of trust with the group, the group, of course, being fellow students. But you have no reason to trust these people. And you certainly have no reason to trust someone who very quickly wants to gain your trust.

[00:16:36] And they want you to do this through various means, interrogation games, like the privilege walk. They want you to engage in a game. Well, it's not a competitive game. It's a revelation game. It's an interrogation game, which dupes you into revealing personal, private information about you, yourself, your family, your income, your friends. And then they turn that information against you when they're basically moving into the changing phase.

[00:17:01] They're trying to get you to confess to your – these days, you confess to your white guilt, to your white supremacy, to your complicity in a system that's really never really specified, to a system of oppression. They're trying to get you to buy into a binary primitive, binary, Manichaean kind of system of oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, good and evil. And they're putting you on the wrong side of that dichotomy, and they say that the only reason –

[00:17:31] the only way you can get the exculpation for your sins, the expiation of your sins, is to change your mind, abandon your false consciousness, step over the line, embrace this notion of critical consciousness that you are a sinner in our doctrinaire scheme, and begin to work for social justice in the way that we lay out for you. Yes. So that's how you can – so the tells you say on the page of 60, I think 60 and 61, tell you how to avoid this, tell you how to recognize this. Cock an eyebrow.

[00:18:02] Do not abandon your skepticism and your critical thinking skills. In fact, this is the time to turn them on and to be wary, because, you know, I'm never in my classroom – I find this very, very bizarre. I never come into my class and say, hey, we want to establish trust here. I want you to disclose. I want you to reveal. I want you to make yourself vulnerable. No. In fact, I tell my students the exact opposite. You know, you have to keep – you're not transparent.

[00:18:28] You don't want to be read like a book, because there are a lot of people out there who do not mean you well, and a lot of those people are on the college campus, I'm afraid to say. They are the brutal minds we have to deal with. You do have a section, of course, on extract the confession, unfreezing, and then destabilizing the belief system, and then eventually the explosive epiphany, and eventually doing the work. So in some respects, it goes from really kind of rattling your cage,

[00:18:55] unfreezing any views you have, kind of refreezing them, and then signing you up, if you will, to be a social justice warrior. You know, it's the explosive epiphany, I believe. It comes from Arthur Kessler, the old intellectual who moved from communism to democracy, and a very famous author and incredible intellectual, incredible writer. I include a quote by him which says, whenever you embrace or basically abandon your ability to think critically and embrace communism,

[00:19:23] it is like this epiphany that all your questions are answered, at least superficially, and it's like a blinding light comes, and you confess your sins. The communist Chinese tried to create the same situation, tried to do so in the 50s and 60s, but certainly with Western prisoners, and certainly with their own intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, to create this situation where you realize, well, I've been wrong all this time.

[00:19:48] I finally, the repetition of your cant and your doctrine, I have revealed, I'm sorry, the truth has been revealed to me, and I realize my sins, and I've come to the faith, which is the belief system that they've got ready and waiting for you there. So, yeah, it's a, I want to emphasize the fact that this is in action right now, that these instructional manuals, the things that I've talked about, the unfreezing,

[00:20:14] the changing, and the refreezing, this is what they do. They claim they do it. They say they do it. They're proud they do it, and they're very proud of how well they do it. Yes. And it's, you know, there's one person, in fact, I can, I'm not shy about naming names. Her name is Sherry K. Watt, University of Iowa. She has a plan on how, and how she teaches, how she can attack the sense of self, the sense of identity of her students. This is absolutely crucial to destabilize the belief system,

[00:20:44] and you have to do this in order to, you know, affect this change of belief system. She targets a person's sense of self. She targets the identity by providing what she calls new information. Now, of course, counter-information or contrary information is not permitted. I've been in situations like this where they have established, the instructors have established ground rules. And, of course, the ground rules for discussion means that you can't disagree with them. Yes.

[00:21:12] And it's absolutely phenomenal. It's phenomenal when you think about it, how efficient it is and how effective it is. We're going to take a break. We have a lot more to cover, and we will continue our conversation on Brutal Minds right after these important messages. It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say men can be women and women men.

[00:21:40] People are prosecuted differently or not at all, depending on their politics. Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens. It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up. But we can't. We shouldn't. We must not. As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never. Never yield to force.

[00:22:09] Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. And that's what we say to you today. This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join Point of View in providing clarity in the chaos. We can't do it alone. But together, with God's help, we will overcome the darkness. Invest in biblical clarity today at pointofview.net or call 1-800-347-5151.

[00:22:39] Pointofview.net and 800-347-5151. Point of View will continue after this. You are listening to Point of View.

[00:23:02] The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, is Kirby Anderson. To continue our conversation today on this book, Brutal Minds, the dark world of left-wing brainwashing in our universities. Dr. Stanley Ridgely with us. And again, we have information about it on our website. If you'd like to join us, 1-800-351-1212.

[00:23:29] But, Stan, we've been talking about what happens inside the classroom. Before we get into the left's long march and illustrate to people that this isn't just a one-off or isn't just a few isolated individuals. It's part of a movement that's been going on for some time. There is some value, I think, in talking about the fact that these ideas that we are identifying inside the classroom also happen outside the classroom through what you might call a co-curriculum. Can you explain that?

[00:24:00] Well, yes, I can, Kirby. The co-curriculum is just an abomination. It is a parallel or para-curriculum that exists alongside the actual curriculum. It's a fake curriculum that has fake instructors, fake faculty, I should say, and sometimes offer a fake transcript. It used to be called extracurricular activity. But in the last 20 years, student affairs functionaries who have begun to give themselves degrees, like a master's in education, that kind of thing.

[00:24:30] They say, hey, you know what? We're college educators just like the faculty. And we should use our student-facing opportunities to educate students. Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the very beginning, the left-to-right ratio is 12 to 1 left wing to conservative or even just reasonable liberal. And thus, all of this milieu management seminars outside the classroom activities are canted to the left,

[00:24:58] and they're involved in this type of brainwashing. These are the folks that are actually doing the brainwashing in this co-curriculum. I mentioned fake transcripts. Well, you think John's University, West Chester University offer fake transcripts. This is to kind of, I would say, camouflage the fact that what they're doing here is not really part of the college curriculum. Faculty have very little to do with the co-curriculum.

[00:25:24] And, again, I want to emphasize it's very much like it's a term called sympathetic magic. And this is where you create a facsimile or a model of a successful program or a successful machine, and you expect the model, a very flawed model, to yield the same results. This is really the machination behind voodoo magic.

[00:25:50] You know, you're going to create a doll of a human being, use the DNA or use, you know, some hair and try to achieve the same results as if you had the individual there in front of you. The co-curriculum is very much like that. It's using kind of a faux magic kind of creation to try to achieve the same results that exist in the faculty, in the curriculum that's taught by the faculty. But, in effect, it's really an inferior model, and students a lot of times aren't even aware,

[00:26:19] and they attribute authority to the figure at the desk in front of them as if they were a faculty member. They're really just some ancillary support staff, probably from the DEI office, running this kind of brainwash. It's a lot of activity going on outside the classroom, and we really ought to focus our attention on that because I don't think it's even realized by a lot of people. Let's also get into maybe the question some people have in their minds, and you devote a chapter to it,

[00:26:47] a hook and hammer, because you're going to get some student resistance. Children or young adults, certainly when they were children in church or children in their family, were hearing one kind of idea. They're now confronting other kinds of ideas. So that's another place where these individuals even have training manuals on how to really break down student resistance. And so that's another key element that you talk about in your book.

[00:27:18] Well, yeah, breaking down student resistance is absolutely essential to the event. I think that a lot of people who are susceptible to this kind of thing, people who come out of high school, they come to college, they're away from home for the first time, they have open minds. They certainly have no idea that the people that they're supposed to invest their trust in have any kind of ill will toward them. And so the brainwashers or thought reformers on the college campus, the social justice warriors,

[00:27:45] take advantage of this and utilize the trust of students, particularly in the first two weeks of orientation, to run these kinds of sessions, the privilege walks and that sort of thing. And this is where they can also identify the students who are going to be a problem. It's very much like the Moonies were very good at discriminating between the folks who are going to be really good recruits susceptible to the message and streetwise people who said, you know, what's really going on here?

[00:28:13] I don't know if I want to be a part of this. And they would have people get off the bus and they would have body language experts in their own cult identify what they call the goats and the sheep. The sheep would be, ooh, I'm just glad to be here, and they'd usher them right on in. And then you have the goats who are streetwise, who have cocked eyebrows, say, what the heck is going on here? This doesn't feel right. Those people would be sequestered out, put on the bus, and sent back to town.

[00:28:39] And so then you then have a group of people who are susceptible to the message and will have a propensity of, you know, voicing any kind of objection is eliminated beforehand. And so, yeah, the students go into this situation. They're wide-eyed and they're ready to trust. And I think that young people need to recognize this, that they don't need to trust the people, the first people that they come in contact with, just because they happen to be in the front of a room running a seminar of some sort.

[00:29:09] And so in other words, putting on your skepticism hat is something that really ought to be practiced. I think that you mentioned at the very beginning about how students come home for that first Thanksgiving holiday and they seem very angry, rebellious at their parents for having betrayed them. And this is something that the brainwashers in their manuals actually say so. Let me name the manual. It's Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice by Leanne Bell and Marianne Adams.

[00:29:39] Then you've got a book by Diane Goodman called Educating Privileged Audiences, meaning white males. You've got Sherry K. Watt in her book Designing Multicultural Transformative Initiatives, in which she tells you how to attack the sense of self of the students to make room for the belief system of critical consciousness that they want to install in them, an appreciation for collective goals and a rejection of the individual. So, yeah, they have manuals.

[00:30:09] They learn how to teach this material. They actually have off-campus groups. And I know you're very familiar with Brutal Minds. And the off-campus groups are professional associations set up for diversity officers, for student affairs professionals. And they actually have in-house institutes where people come from all over the country throughout the year to learn how to inflict this type of thought reform program on students on their campus.

[00:30:36] That is why people say, well, it's a conspiracy. Well, no, it's not a conspiracy. You actually have an organization that is training people from all over the country how to do this on the various college campuses. These are not – these organizations have – one organization has 15,000 members, another has about 8,000 members. The diversity officers group has 2,000 members. I know this because I joined all of the organizations that I write about in my book so that I can –

[00:31:02] so I know inside out what they're talking about, what they do, how they do it, who they are. And so it's – I have a series of red flags that I tell students to watch out for. And we've mentioned this before. And, in other words, lingo, vocabulary that they use is one of the – whenever the – let me see one right here. Yes, you're always in a threat situation.

[00:31:28] When you hear certain terms, when you hear anti-racism, that's a stalking horse to the Manichean binary we talked about earlier. When you hear the words brave spaces, safe spaces, difficult dialogue, racial caucuses, intergroup dialogues. And when someone is saying, we're going to teach you how to do the work of anti-racism, you're in the presence of a brainwasher who's trying to get you to feel guilty and then to recant your racism

[00:31:56] and then to learn how to be an ally of this obscene doctrine that they're propagating. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we want to get into a little bit of this long march to institutions. And that's half of the book, so obviously it will be just an overview. But it relates to some of the things we talk about. I'm holding up my book, for example, on critical race theory. And we begin by talking about the Frankfurt School and this idea of critical theory.

[00:32:21] And then you get into this idea of critical pedagogy and then eventually into critical race theory and Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. And then all sorts of things begin to develop in that regard. And so we're looking at a little bit of this because this is something that has been going on for some time. And in case you find yourself saying, well, this is new information, first of all, I would recommend some of the booklets that we've made available in the past, but also this book,

[00:32:49] because as you have heard him talk, he's mentioned various names and given various references. There's at least, I guess, about 25 pages of end notes so that you can research it for yourself and begin to see that some of this didn't just spring up in one campus or the other. There are individuals that are being trained to do this. So, again, one of the reasons we wanted to focus on this book today,

[00:33:15] Brutal Minds, A Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities, is it really brings a lot to the fore of things that we've discussed here on Point of View. So if you'd like to know more about him, more about the book, we have information about it on our website at pointofview.net. You might be able to find it in your local bookstore, but we also have a way in which you could order it since it's been out for a while, either in hardback or Kindle. Let's take a break. We'll continue right after this.

[00:33:55] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Back once again, the book is entitled Brutal Minds. We do have a link to brutalminds.com. You can find out more there. As a matter of fact, you can contact Dr. Stanley Ridgely there if you would want to do so. Read some of his blog posts and a number of other things. You might want to have him come and speak or just read through all the different material that is available. And, of course, the book itself is available, and we have information about that as well.

[00:34:22] I think it's unfair to have you summarize almost half of your book, but let's see in the time we have. The key issue is this didn't spring out of nowhere. There was an attempt to have what are called the long march through institutions, a leftist march. And so whether it is an educational association, whether it's some of these education schools,

[00:34:47] this was a plan, and this plan is being played out right before our Barry eyes, isn't it? It certainly is. Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher of the new left back in 1968, basically popularized that term. We're going to engage in a long march through the institutions because this is a long struggle. We being, of course, the Marxists and communists, the three Ms of the time were Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.

[00:35:15] So that gives you an idea of where that man stood. And he was part of the Frankfurt School. You gave a great summary of the lineage of this, the Frankfurt School from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s of the Dorno and Horkheimer on through Marcuse and on up to the people we have on campus today. What we see with regard to critical race theory, with regard to DEI, is the latest manifestation of this long march through the institutions.

[00:35:40] I should say that one of the professional organizations that is a big player in transforming the university has as their motto, boldly transforming higher education. Now, this is not a faculty group. This is a student affairs ancillary staff group. They say that they are boldly transforming higher education. In fact, if you look at the brainwash sources that I mentioned, Kurt Lewin and his unfreezing, changing, and refreezing, he called this re-education.

[00:36:10] Have you ever wondered where that term came from? It has an unsavory feel. He's the guy who coined that. It was not unsavory at the time. And he was trying to train criminals out of their criminality with his group therapy, this idea of the brainwash. Well, they very quickly, they being the left, recognized it. Re-education had that unsavory kind of connotation, given the Manchurian candidate film and the idea of the communists and their Chinese and their strobe lights, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:36:38] So they changed it again, and they changed it to transformative education, boldly transforming higher education. And so that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to change higher education into not, well, from what it is now, which is a crucible of knowledge that is very painfully and hard won over a period of, say, 300 years since the scientific revolution. They're trying to change that, change the university into a repository of Marxist indoctrination.

[00:37:06] They've said this quite explicitly. Now, they'll use proxies for Marx. They'll say Paulo Freire. And this is a name that's alien to most people, as well it should be. He's a kind of mediocre philosopher. But his name is revered in schools of education. He was a crypto-Maoist, and he's the guy who has the third most cited book in social science, which is called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

[00:37:32] Again, he is revered by the left and certainly in education schools. And he cribbed his education theory from Mao Zedong. He quite clearly did. He's not an original thinker. And yet education people believe that this guy, they look to Paulo Freire and his notion of critical consciousness, which is basically Maoist thinking, as the end-all and be-all of education. That's what it's all about.

[00:37:58] They want their education, they want their idea of education, what I just described to you, to be thought of as education. They want to supplant the notion of different points of view, different pedagogies, with their pedagogy and elevate that to point to private place. So this is the culmination of the long march through the institution. This type of Maoist, this type of revolutionary activity has never gone away.

[00:38:27] And today we see it playing out in the demonstrations against Israel, which is really thinly disguised anti-Semitism. And we see that the left faculty and the staff on the campuses fully, fully support the pro-Hamas demonstrations on the campuses vis-a-vis Italy, I'm sorry, Israel.

[00:38:53] And they are basically calling for the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement. These left-wing faculty, they haven't seen a cause, a left-wing cause they wouldn't get out and march for. And they encourage students, student affairs people, encourage students to go out and demonstrate. They encourage them to engage in what, quite frankly, is sometimes illegal behavior, certainly violates university policies. And the faculty will join them on the front row of the demonstration.

[00:39:21] Of course, faculty, tenured faculty, really have very little to risk, whereas students are risking an awful lot and they aren't even aware of it. So the long march of the institutions is still going on. It's something we have to be on the committee for, to look for, and to recognize this stalking horse in all of its guises. Let me just mention again that if you want to know more about Marcuse's long march, or, of course, even when we're talking about Paolo Fierre, the pedagogy of the oppressed,

[00:39:49] or of so many other things, the Frankfurt School, maybe some of the diagrams, the charts, this would really help you understand what is happening on the universities. But most importantly, I did mention that we do have a link to BrutalMinds.com. There's a place where people can learn more about you, get a copy of the book they'd like. There's all sorts of things about everything from DEI and all the whole need to restore integrity in higher educations. And, Stan, really the first step is to educate people, which is what we've done today.

[00:40:18] But the next step is to encourage people to take these ideas and implement them. And I'm noticing a lot of DEI programs are actually being jettisoned. A lot of universities are starting to rethink that. The whole issue of ESG, which I'll talk about in the future, those are all changes. So I think we could at least have some guarded optimism if we can get this information out. What do you think? Well, I certainly agree with you on that, that there's a reason for optimism,

[00:40:45] especially this week has been a grand week for those of us who recognize what's been going on on the college campuses and see a, you know, a sea change. Of course, it's going to be a long and difficult march for us to, you know, countermarch to uproot and root out the brutal minds from the college campuses. But it's something that we, I think it's going to be, you know, we're joyful lawyers. We're going to, you know, those people on the front lines and those who support them are certainly going to have a good time

[00:41:13] doing this because this is the Lord's work, and I think the idea of returning sanity to the university. I should say I have a new book coming out next month that really addresses this issue. It's called DEI Exposed, and it will be available for preorder in a short while. But Brutal Minds really does cover the issues of today we've been talking about for, you know, soups and nuts. And if anyone wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm more than happy to do that.

[00:41:42] That's my primary social media place where I do post a lot of my latest work, my latest research. Yeah, and we do have your website. We have Facebook Post X and, of course, LinkedIn and all that. So everything you need to know is at the website pointofview.net. And let me know more when that book comes out. Of course, I was already reading about some of the things you've written about DEI on your website, and maybe we can get you back on that one as well. But it's been a delight. I enjoyed seeing you on Mike Huckabee's program, but I wanted to give you an entire hour to explain that.

[00:42:12] And even though we didn't cover every chapter, I think we did a pretty good job. And, again, thank you for writing the book, and thank you for giving us an hour today here on Point of View. Oh, the pleasure was all mine. Kirby, you take care now. We, again, encourage you to find out a little bit more. Of course, it is brutalminds.com is the website. If you want to understand kind of how this all develops, you know, you've heard us in the past talk about critical theory and what that means, where it came from, how that gets to what is called critical pedagogy,

[00:42:41] and then eventually how it's used in everything from critical race theory to a variety of others. It leads to everything from thought reform to then the developing of this long march through institutions. If you want to get a better understanding of what we sometimes talk about in one book, I would recommend this book, Brutal Minds, The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. And you've been listening to Point of View.

[00:43:11] The Bible tells us not to worry. And yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today. Thankfully, the Bible doesn't stop at telling us not to worry. God gives us a next step. He says we need to pray. But sometimes even knowing what to pray can be difficult. And that is why Point of View has relaunched our Pray for America movement,

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