liberalism – Dr. Jeff Koloze

Photo credit: Goodreads.com

Five years after publication, Dr. Gad Saad’s elaborations of woke nonsense in higher education and elsewhere and Islam’s threat of destroying the West are still valid and masterly.

A colleague from a woke [that is, a DIE or DEI community college (of course)], recommended that I read Dr. Saad’s work as an introduction to the growing number of academics who fight against postmodernism’s kidnapping of higher education, transforming it from a site where truth is discovered to a mental ward to soothe the hurt feelings of stupid people who cannot think for themselves.

Thus, Saad’s experiences in academia mirror my own dealings with woke DIE administrators, faculty, and students who are offended by objective truths, such as “there are two genders” or “religion has a significant purpose in the world, despite what any postmodern ‘professor’ claims”.

But who cares what I think? I’m just a filthy rich retired English professor who throws his money at any solid prolife and Republican cause he sees.

Saad’s statements are the ones which are eminently quotable and worthy of discussion. For example:

George Orwell’s maxim that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool” (16) could serve as a further subtitle for Saad’s entire volume. Five years after publication, it is obvious that the Left, the woke usurpers in higher education, and the Democrats are utter fools if they believe men can menstruate, or that illegal aliens were not preferred over American citizens under the Biden reign of terror, etc.

“While each mind virus constitutes a different strain of lunacy, they are all bound by the full rejection of reality and common sense (postmodernism rejects the existence of objective truths; radical feminism scoffs at the idea of innate biologically-based sex differences; and social constructivism posits that the human mind starts off as an empty slate largely void of biological blueprints)” (18).

Aha! “Common sense”! Did the American President Donald Trump get the idea for this phrase from the Canadian Saad? Inquiring minds want to know…

“The problem arises when domains that should be reserved for the intellect are hijacked by feelings. This is precisely what plagues our universities: what were once centers of intellectual development have become retreats for the emotionally fragile” (27).

Ben Shapiro says much the same in his famous dictum that “facts don’t care about your feelings”. How sad that American universities and Democrats have lost their intellectual ability to discriminate between a fact and a feeling.

Speaking of which…

“Clear-thinking people know that there is a place for both emotions and intellect, for humor and seriousness, and understand when to activate their emotional versus cognitive systems as they navigate life. But people who have fallen prey to idea pathogens have lost control of their minds and their emotions—and those pathogens are spreading rapidly and threatening our freedom” (40).

Needless to repeat. I cried for joy at the birth of our newest grandchild and out of intense sadness while watching the documentary about the beloved Queen Elizabeth II, but I must think, not feel, through ways to refute the race hatred of Democrats when they attack white men for a nonsensical concept like toxic masculinity.

“Progressive seem to believe that if they say the words ‘diversity, inclusion, and equity’ often enough, all problems will be solved. But of course only certain types of diversity, inclusion, and equity matter. Diversity based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are foundational sacraments in the Cult of Diversity. On the other hand, intellectual and political diversity are heretical ideas that need to be expunged. If Saudi Arabia’s state religion is Islam, the official quasi-religion of Western universities is Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (or DIE for short)” (60-1).

Vivek Ramaswamy argued for intellectual diversity, a genuine category of diversity, in his Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 2021). Thankfully, President Trump is working to destroy such racism despite academics’ and Democrats’ fascist attempts to subjugate those with whom they disagree.

“Scientifically speaking, postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism, and transgender activism are all based on demonstrable falsehoods. But when one’s ideological commitments are paramount, the rejection of scientific facts becomes the necessary collateral damage” (69).

Hmmm…we see that when young people who march for Hamas terrorists on university campuses blabber incoherently if they are asked why they protest.

“Postmodernist bullshitters like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault succeeded in academia with their charlatanism because of the assumption that if something is nearly impossible to understand, it must be profound (note that there are individual differences in the extent to which people are swayed by bullshit)” (75).

Joy to my ears! Didn’t every English major who was forced to read such dribble think the same thing? I mean, as the criminal-in-chief of the Biden crime family would say, c’mon man. Literary theories may be fun to apply to a work of literature, but they ain’t got nuthin’ against good old-fashioned formalism.

“Science should be about the pursuit of truth, and not about the defense of one’s preferred political ideology or personal beliefs” (121).

True dat! Abortion pill researchers know firsthand how their research cannot get published by “scholarly” journals because their results demonstrate that chemical abortions are harmful to women who seek to kill the unborn child either to the same degree or worse than surgical abortion.

“There are many forms of cultural enrichment, including restaurants of varied cuisines, that come from living in a heterogeneous and pluralistic society, but the cultural and religious values that some immigrants bring with them to the West manifestly do not add to our strength” (127).

Heads up: it’s Islam he’s talking about, which, as Giorgia Meloni, Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri della Repubblica Italiana (trying to be well-educated here by dropping some beautiful Italian into this review), states, is incompatible with Western values.

“Many people have a strong aversion to directly blaming Islam because it feels gauche or intolerant to do so. They would rather give Islam a pass and place the blame on some supposedly ‘distorted’ version of the faith. The reality though is that there are no codified holy books of Islamism that are distinct from those of Islam. Islamism, the political element of Islam, is an integral element of the religion” (134).

Nuf said.

“To discriminate, in the sense of making a distinction rooted in a probabilistic reality, is to be human. To profile is to be human” (139).

As any faculty member who escaped the clutches of woke college administrators and purple-haired adjuncts can assert, today’s students have a kneejerk reaction to the verb “discriminate”, having lost its etymological sense, which Saad reaffirms.

After noting that there are 14.5 million Jews in the world versus 1.8 billion Muslims (158), Saad asserts that “there is more Jew-hatred in the trilogy [of the Quran, the hadith, and the Sira, the biography of Muhammad] (9.3 percent) than in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (7 percent)” (161).

Two comments. First, it is remarkable that such a minority of the Earth’s population can produce such life-affirming and profound work. What Muslims have done the same? As the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco once joked, give an Italian a ceiling to paint, but, if you want a doctor, ask for someone with an obviously Jewish surname. The idea is that because it is the Jews, the People of the Book, who are book learners, who are educated, and who value wisdom collected in publications. (I assert this truism despite my own physician being a good Slovenian boy who is prolife.)

Citing the Religion of Peace website (https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/), “As of July 19, 2019, there have been 35,339 Islamist terror attacks in nearly 70 countries. This is astronomically higher than all other religions combined” (164).

How tragic, utterly tragic, that, five years later, that same site now shows, as of today (4 May 2025), “Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 47,373 deadly terror attacks since 9/11” (italics in original). How can any “religion” be proud that its hatred of Jews and Christians accounts for a 34% increase of terrorism and murder? One can only conclude that Islam is not a “religion of peace”; it is an ideology of killing.

“Granted, most people who self-publish or start a YouTube channel will not find an audience of hundreds of thousands, but in the battle of ideas, every voice counts—even if your circle of influence is limited to your family, friends, and neighbors” (174).

This statement gives me courage that the hours I spend after Mass and before doing yard work or the laundry writing social media posts can influence others. This “filthy rich retired English professor who throws his money at any solid prolife and Republican cause he sees” will accordingly continue the newest phase of his life’s work because the threats against academic freedom, the nation’s existence, and the West need all of us to do our part.

The French phrase “Dis-moi qui sont tes amis et je te dirai qui tu es: Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” (174) is simply trenchant. Besides, it’s cool to have a little bit of French whose sight words I can translate in a review, n’est-ce pas?

Finally, any author who includes the famous case of Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio which won the massive lawsuit against the idiotic woke Oberlin College for falsely claiming that the bakery was racist—the buzzword of all buzzwords for idiotic woke people—deserves everybody’s praise (186).

What more can be said in this idiosyncratic review? Just this: readers would delight in an updated edition to determine the effects of the Trump Revolution on these threats to Western values. While he may wait until the end of the Trump presidency for a complete evaluation of its efforts fighting against the threats he identifies, I trust that Saad is working on that volume already.

Image credit: Goodreads.com

Packed with substantial endnotes and an extensive bibliography, thus making his work approachable to both students and ordinary citizens trying to understand contemporary American political culture, Powers makes a compelling argument regarding the anti-discrimination regime’s challenges to traditional liberalism. He moves from a discussion of multiculturalism as developed in teacher education, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the preeminent American challenge to traditional liberalism), to postmodernism’s efforts to expand the categories of persons and groups who have been discriminated against, to the recent expansion of social protest by the woke movement.

Powers employs a variety of definitional methods to engage his reader. For example, his denotation of “liberalism”, though written as a stipulative one, comports with the standard definition of the term: “Liberalism, as I use the term, refers to the extremely influential modern and contemporary view of political life that begins and ends with some defining notion of individual rights and freedom, as well as some view, therefore, of the importance of ‘limited’ government” (18; internal quotes in original).

An interesting use of negation occurs in the definition of “multiculturalism”, which “does not have anything to do with diversity. Its only important meaning, [is] a simple, powerful, unified political meaning rooted in the civil rights revolution” (22).

The definition of “anti-discrimination”, the major concept of the work, in contrast, involves scouring a paragraph to determine its attributes. Anti-discrimination “is a bold and wide-ranging program of moral reform [whose] moral in question is a simple one: discrimination is unjust, an evil heretofore tolerated but no more”; this “massive political project” involves a “politics [which] has been and continues to be a radical force” (279).

Other terms which are now identified with the new political order, “woke” for example, are not as clearly defined, although, to his credit, Powers explains that “This general phenomenon (activist-led social institution-building)” and “woke capitalism” help the reader to understand how deeply the anti-discrimination regime has penetrated ordinary life (83; parentheses in original).

Both students and faculty will appreciate Powers’ claims, some of which, albeit simply stated, can generate hours of class discussion and, hopefully, trenchant student writing on serious topics. “Anti-discrimination is the cause of multiculturalism, not the other way around” (13) or “The perspective of liberal pluralism is a moral one that aims above all at finding social peace among people with contradictory viewpoints and conflicting interests” (206) are relatively innocuous.

Claims such as:

“As a demand for justice formalized in group representation schemes, inclusion means forever reliving the pain of the past and affirming group mistrust for the present and future” (262),

“Anti-discrimination seems unable fully to escape the hold of its necessarily negative starting point. There does not seem to be any important place in it for transcending the plane on which it fights against evil; there is no important place for reconciliation, for forgiveness, for integration even” (272), or

“today, merit and personal responsibility are said to represent the language of privilege, a mask for hidden or implicit bias, a cover for racism” (284),

however, would rile any philosopher or theologian and agitate American students to the point that they must eschew slogans learned from woke professors and use critical thinking skills to formulate their moral positions. These are tasks which Powers would approve as a counter to an inherent negative characteristic of the new politics, as he suggested in a litotes whose humor one could easily miss: “Anti-discrimination morality is thus not only a spirited morality but a somewhat angry morality, though its defenders would insist that it has earned the right to its anger” (267).

Powers’ writing style contributes to the readability of the volume. For example, the paragraphs built on “that” and “it” parallelisms (5-6) and parallel verbs (45) and the point-counterpoint method contrasting the morality of liberalism and anti-discrimination politics (265) impress the reader with succinct phrases about various concepts, as does a helpful table contrasting multiculturalism and traditional liberal pluralism (225).

Some stylistic features, however, should be reexamined. As scholarly as the volume is, there is no need for excessive page-length paragraphs. Also, although he is able to use enumeration correctly to guide the reader, as when he writes that there are “four characteristic features of life under this [anti-discrimination] regime” (48), more enumeration in topic sentences would assist readers to follow Powers’ thought. For example, in discussing “Several other undeniably radical features of anti-discrimination politics”, the reader can locate the “first” and the “second”, but it is unclear whether the “Another radical dimension of the anti-discrimination regime” a paragraph later is a continuation of the previous paragraph or a new enumeration (280-1). Thus, quantifying the number of “Several other” initially would make the reading more mellifluous.

Finally, while he explicitly states that “It is not the purpose of this book to enter into the question of reform in any detail” (290), the activist reader (student, faculty, or ordinary citizen) may discover that Powers’ discoveries can be applied to contemporary social movements. For example, if he argues that anti-discrimination law, which is mostly accomplished by statute, is more effective than constitutional law, then such a position might be an opportunity for pro-life theorists and activists to argue that the unborn child has a right to life based on principles of anti-discrimination diversity, inclusion, and equity (65ff). Similarly, for the more politically minded, “By becoming the party of anti-discrimination, the Democratic Party” (66) could become an easy target for Republican Party activists because of its extreme support of woke culture.

The volume is attractively produced in a readable font. Best of all, especially for the student researcher, the thorough 296-page text is expanded by 66 pages of endnotes and a 78-page bibliography. The 22-page index should be expanded in future editions to include important terms often mentioned in the text (such as “abortion” or “transgender”) as main entries.

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture and woke zealots and bans conservative and pro-life books, buy this book directly from the publisher: https://www.staugustine.net/9781587310454/american-multiculturalism-and-the-anti-discrimination-regime/.