At one point, the American higher education system aspired to that nomenclature — higher education. It largely followed classical thought, Enlightenment principles, and at the same time allowed for a broad range of views, perspectives, and and freedom of thought. Until very recently, a college degree signified a higher plane of intellectual heft and readiness for success in American and international markets.

Within just a couple of generations, however, the American system of higher education transformed itself into a base indoctrination system for a system of thought so narrow that Dr. Stanley Ridgely likens it to a cult. American Academia brooks no debate, punishes dissenters with the passion reserved for heretics and apostates in religious cults, and instills a neo-Marxist party line rather than deliver the broad and textured education that parents still expect when they send their young men and women to college.

In the preface to his new book Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities (also on Barnes & Noble), Dr. Ridgely offers a gloomy assessment of just what that investment delivers in today’s Academia:

This is a story of one of the great subterfuges in American history. It’s 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. …

You recognize immediately that the vapid Orwellian slogan “Diversity is our strength!” could serve as the proxy for a communist propaganda trope. The demand that persons embrace this trope—or at least remain silent in the face of its anti-intellectualism—is a marker for an authoritarian system. One of many markers that constitutes powerful evidence of the thesis in Brutal Minds.

This is a brutal book about brutal people. It’s about the people who eagerly “live within the lie” and who even more eagerly coerce others to yield to that lie, particularly the most intellectually vulnerable persons on the college campuses—our undergraduates.

Dr. Ridgely and I had a lively and fun conversation last week in anticipation of the book’s release yesterday. His analogizing to cults is no mere rhetorical flourish, as he explains in our conversation. Academics employ the same behavioral strategies as cults do to first identify the malleable and then rebuild them in the neo-Marxist image. This is only part of the brutality that Dr. Ridgely reveals in Brutal Minds, as we step through the process used.

“I’ll relate to you what I mean when I say brainwashing,” Dr. Ridgely says, “because most people tend to think of the Manchurian Candidate, with strobe lights and maybe hypnosis and physical abuse. No, I’m not talking about that. Brainwashing is a psychological manipulation program utilizing behavior modification to change someone’s belief system.

“It’s a three-stage process,” he continues. “They explicitly attack a person’s sense of self, a person’s sense of identity. … This process will destabilize and may cause and deconstruct relationships with friends and family.” That is entirely necessary to “unfreezing the belief system” that students have when they come to the university. When successful, this provokes “anger and resentment and a sense of betrayal” toward families and communities from which these students originate. At that point they conduct indoctrination to instill a new belief system.

“‘A new set of beliefs becomes home base for interpreting experience and creating meaning’,” Dr. Ridgely says, quoting from teaching materials intended to affirm the practice. “‘The past is reinterpreted and reconstructed into a new frame of reference’, quote. That, my friend, is the brainwash laid out. It’s no doubt about it.”

“What happens if you give a tractable young person who is in a new situation, doesn’t really know anyone is feeling their way,” Dr. Ridgely posits, “for the first away from home. Suddenly there’s this group of people who is offering unconditional acceptance and warmth and a just for being there. Everything you say and do is affirmed. And that’s what these brain washers do often, often in orientation in the first couple of weeks.”

Dr. Ridgely and I go on to discuss the impact that has on young minds and why the neo-Marxists and neo-Maoists fear an actual education. We also discuss a number of other resources, and both of us land on The Road to Serfdom as a great companion to explain why brutality is — and must be — built into this process. This interview episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast also features:

• “While [Vaclav Havel] was a dissident, he wrote a famous essay called The Power of the Powerless, and he described Czech society under the Soviets, when people were forced to live within the lie,” Dr. Ridgely notes in his book and this conversation. He explains the connection to today’s Academia thoroughly.
• “You can’t sell Marxism to the American public” directly, he notes. “You’ve got to find a front man for your Marxism. And this is what they did …”
• “I was led to write this book about the infestation into the university by what I call an army of mediocrity that who come out of the education schools — not to teach in K-12 and not to teach in the faculty, but to fulfill or fill bureaucratic positions in the university. And they have virtually taken over the university over the last 20 years in the under the rubric of Student Affairs.”

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!