Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – guest host Gulbransen welcomed professor Dr. Stanley Ridgely to the newsmaker line to discuss his new book, Brutal Minds, and left-wing cultish brainwashing in American universities.
Gulbransesn: On our newsmaker line, Dr. Stanley Ridgely talking about his new book, Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in our Universities. How are you, sir?
Ridgely: Hey, Aaron. It’s great to be here. I’m doing great. I’m broadcasting to you from West Philly, home of high taxes, high crime, and 70 years of consecutive Democrat rule.
Gulbransen: Sounds like you should move to the great state of Tennessee. (Laughter)
Ridgely: Thinking about it.
Gulbransen: We like to have all the good, brilliant people move here. The remaining blue people on the left, they can move. But we’re happy to have transplants, including myself, that are good conservatives. What inspired you to write this book Brutal Minds, and before I forget, where can people find it, by the way?
Ridgely: First of all, you can find it on Amazon. It’s out. It came out just this week. Brutalminds.com. You can find it at Barnes and Noble. It’s on the shelf. It should be upfront. All the booksellers are doing a great job of putting it up there with the new releases right beside Bernie Sanders on the bookshelf.
I’ve visited a number of these Barnes and Noble stores. They’re doing great. What inspired me to write the book was the fact of the data. It’s what I’ve observed. I’ve been, someone described the fact that I’ve been behind enemy lines for, longer than most people.
I’ve been teaching in higher education now for almost 20 years. And from what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced, this is a growing phenomenon, the idea of brutal minds. These are folks who are quite literally brainwashing our youth in a purposeful, intentional program.
And in the book, I just name names, I describe the programs, and I tell you where they are, I tell you what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, who they’re attacking, and what we can do to stop it. These folks are utilizing psychological manipulation and behavior modification techniques that are utilized by modern cults.
In fact, this is the only places in America where these techniques are used are in cults, like the Unification Church or Moonies, and on the American college campus where social justice education and transformative education are being taught. Mainly rooted in our education schools now.
Carmichael: What can be done? You said that the book includes this, so just give us some hints. Are there some things we can do that are the most proactive things that can be done to stop it?
Ridgely: Sure. The proactive thing. There are two main thrusts. One is long-term solutions, but parents with college kids who are in college now don’t want to get these long-term solutions. They want to know what they can do now. What they can do is students and parents can make themselves aware of what constitutes brainwashing because they’re not labeled as such.
You don’t know you are in a brainwash in the very same way that American cults do. You don’t know that you’re being approached by a cult to join their community. You’re approached a different way. They have smiles on their faces and songs in their hearts and they feel, they offer love and warmth and inclusion and belonging. That’s the way cults do it.
And so students on the college campuses drop their guard, they’re encouraged to make themselves vulnerable. When you see and hear this, if you’re a student, recognize that you’re in a threat situation. This is how they do it.
And by the time you realize that you’re in this threat situation and you’ve already suspended your critical faculties and succumbed to the cult teachings. And this is why parents find their students so angry when they come home for that first Thanksgiving dinner. And they seem so alienated from them.
So angry about how the parents don’t know what’s really going on in the world, et cetera, et cetera. So knowledge about how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it and what these scenarios look like and what your rights are. You just walk away from this stuff.
Recognize that you are not being taught ordinarily by regular faculty being taught by less-than-competent bureaucrats armed with their online education degrees. So that would be the first thing for parents to stay close to their students and be involved with their student’s education. I guarantee you the folks at the colleges will not like that, and that’s a good thing.
Carmichael: If you have a change of administration, can the Secretary of Education, Department of Education bring and the Justice Department bring to bear enough pressure to change this so that it’s not incumbent on the parents and the students to figure it out?
Because after all, the taxpayers are the ones who are paying for the cult-like atmosphere. Can the federal government bring to bear chooses to?
Ridgely: Yes, certainly with regard to where federal dollars are going. I think you know that when federal dollars are involved federal government extends its control and its influence into higher education, and so federal dollars are involved.
I think that the Department of Education could certainly act with the laity in swiftness to say, to do what Governor Ron DeSantis has done down in Florida with regard to certain noxious agendas and noxious ideology that is pervasive in higher education. And that kind of thing can be rolled back.
Private universities provide a different scenario, but they too can be affected or influenced by virtue of the federal dollars that flow to private schools. I would say, of course, that’s the longer-term solution that I mentioned that I talk about in the book at great length.
But what I try to offer is what can parents of students do. For the people who are in college right now, and the pie in the sky buy solution is going to be great, but what can they do now?
And I offer a series of actions they can take. And it doesn’t require a great deal of courage to do it. It’s essentially asserting one’s individual rights and recognizing when this type of activity is involved on campus.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Stanley Ridgley” by Drexel University. Background Photo “College Classroom” by Dom Fou.
