A Close Look at Leftist Thought Reform
By Mason Goad, May 16, 2023
Review: Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities by Stanley Ridgley (Humanix, 290 pages, $29.99)
I only attended Vanderbilt University’s 2022 Jumpstart Virtual Conference to see the presentations on “anti-racism” in STEMM education and research, but I decided to stay for the lunch-hour keynote presentation on “White Emotionalities,” anticipating that its absurdity would be entertaining.
I was wrong.
The speaker, Cheryl Matias—professor and director of secondary teacher education at the University of Kentucky—spoke with glee as she reminisced about her classes, how she had made her white students cry in front of their peers after accusing them of oppression and racism at every turn, stirring some to understandable anger at her baseless charges.
The (mostly black) audience, meanwhile, took to Zoom’s chat box to exclaim their joy at Matias’s stories, expressing how those college kids—who just wanted to be teachers—deserved even greater emotional agony at the hands of their “educators.” The spectacle only lasted about 15 minutes, but it remains one of the most unnerving incidents that I have witnessed while working for the National Association of Scholars. The Mephistophelian spirit was on full display.
It was unsurprising, therefore, to see Matias featured so prominently in Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities, a new book by Dr. Stanley Ridgley, professor of management at Drexel University. Ridgley, who studied Matias’s process closely, notes that she “uses language eerily similar to the narratives of thought-reform interrogators, whose task is to elicit the proper confession from political prisoners or from intellectuals enduring a rectification campaign.”
This certainly seems true, and Matias appears to be quite good at it. In 2017 Matias and two others wrote an article that included student narratives. The following emails were sent to Matias by one student, Craig Darland, near the beginning and end of a semester, respectively:
1. Profe, I would love meet [sic] with you sometime but just to be clear, I have no misunderstanding as to what the readings were saying. I simply don’t agree with their conclusions, or yours. I fully understand all the key concepts in those readings and can prove that through a verbal discussion. Understanding what they’re saying doesn’t mean I have to agree with them. I hope you don’t expect your students to blindly agree with every reading you give them. I hope you aren’t having a personal reaction to the opposition I gave to the readings last night. I look forward to meeting with you in the near future to resolve whatever issues you’re having.
2. Profe, my mood has changed because I’ve come to accept the truth of these articles that we’re reading. Honestly I’m still upset sometimes because I find these readings insulting and at times, biased. But my ability to reason and reflect has helped me to come to terms with this new knowledge I’m absorbing. Really it’s an eye opening and fascinating experience to view the world differently after 38 years of seeing, thinking I knew what was going on. I feel like I should say ‘thanks’ but I’m not going to do that because now I’m depressed and angrier than I used to be.
Darland was so thoroughly brainwashed by Matias’s “teaching” that he became one of the co-authors of this very article. He probably continues to propagate such racist nonsense to impressionable children in his current role as a middle school teacher. If Darland’s story does not speak to Matias’s success, or raise concerns about who teaches the teachers, nothing will.
Out of these concerns come two crucial questions: how exactly does this process of indoctrination work, and what might we do to stop it? In nine accessible chapters, Ridgley answers these questions.
He begins with the fact vs. fiction of “brainwashing,” and its origins in the theories of Kurt Lewin’s “re-education” programs, which were later utilized, if not perfected, by Mao Zedong’s cultural revolutionaries and placed into mainstream education by people such as Cheryl Matias and the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire.
Walking through the actual process of thought reform, Ridgley then explores how such techniques are employed on college and university campuses—both inside and outside the classroom—and how any student resistance is broken.
However, to understand indoctrination tactics is not to understand the full process of indoctrination. Noting this, Ridgley then turns to the apparat that has taken over higher education, documenting the dealings of education schools, student affairs offices, and nonprofit professional associations, which he identifies as the three major, nefarious players. Ridgley aptly analogizes this woke iron triangle to Cerberus—the three-headed dog from Greek mythology who guards the gates of Hades to prevent the dead from ever leaving.
Continuing with the Greek analogies, Ridgley notes that, fortunately, the woke Cerberus currently guarding our (post-)modern schools has a large Achilles heel: the cessation of our complicity. If faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, trustees, and any other stakeholders of higher education simply refuse to comply with the nonsensical, racist, sexist, and unscientific demands of the ideologues, these thought reformers would be almost immediately expunged from the academy.
Ending our complicity is, unfortunately, much easier said than done.
Ridgley concludes with a set of practical recommendations for different stakeholders. For college and university administrations, he offers sound ideas such as requiring student affairs employees to attend basic civics lessons and eliminating residential life programming made to mimic coursework.
For students, Ridgley details the “red flags” they should watch for, such as when facilitators begin to solicit personal information and offer videos, or even games, that rely heavily on the rhetoric of critical social justice. And for everyone else, from the state legislators to the “student affairs supernumeraries,” he offers words of advice and admonition.
“[I]f we learn nothing else,” concludes Ridgley, “we should always remember that behind the façade of ‘social justice,’ coercive brutal minds are invariably alike, whether in Stalin’s Russia, in Mao’s China … Or in our own American university.” Indeed, the flags may be different, but the methods are all the same, and in that there is hope—so long as we warn each generation about what those methods are.
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