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Book reviews

Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (Regnery, 2020)

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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.

Categories
Book reviews

Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz’ Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation (DW Books, 2023)

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After reading this book, every parent will say, “This woke crap has got to stop, and it’s up to me to do something about it.”

The third word in the above quote was much more vulgar in the first version of this review, but I changed it because this is a book review and not a rap or trap song filled with obscenities and vulgarisms.

The problem of my editing the first sentence of this review, however, obtains: parents will be angered to the point of uttering vulgarities or obscenities when they learn to what degree that woke ideology has penetrated social institutions which were once safe for everybody, especially their children, including Disney (105ff), the American Library Association (108ff), and the American Academy of Pediatrics (136ff).

Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz do a stellar job of defining “woke”, demonstrating how that leftist philosophy has permeated the culture.  Best of all, the authors punctuate their several chapters with suggestions on how parents can fight back against the woke indoctrination occurring in their children’s schools and entertainment venues.  They state their purpose in writing the book clearly:

“In this book, we set forth with a few objectives: expose how the woke are infiltrating American childhood, provide parents with the tools to fight back, and tell the cautionary tales of parents who didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.” (17-8)

Numerous paragraphs could be included in any review to highlight facts and opinions which clarify the perversity of the woke movement.  For example, the quotes culled from the book preparatory for this review take nine pages, single-spaced.  The task of determining which quotes are worth mentioning brings me perilously close to the limit suggested for quotes.

But the fear of trespassing copyright law must not stop me from highlighting several trenchant facts and opinions which the authors include in their research.

For example, some facts are simply shocking; I can see how they would easily contribute to parents’ anger against woke teachers.

“A 2018 study by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge and University of Georgia psychology professor W. Keith Campbell published in Preventative Medicine Reports found that ‘even after only one hour of screen time daily, children and teens may begin to have less curiosity, lower self-control, less emotional stability and a greater inability to finish tasks.” (53)

Tell me again why public school teachers’ unions pushed so hard for online instead of in-classroom learning.

“By June 2020, the management company McKinsey & Company had ‘created statistical models to estimate the potential impact of school closures on learning.’  The company found that its models predicted the worst impact on the very students the equity-warriors pretend to care most about: ‘The average loss in our middle epidemiological scenario is seven months.  But black students may fall behind by 10.3 months, Hispanic students by 9.2 months, and low-income students by more than a year.  We estimate that this would exacerbate existing achievement gaps by 15 to 20 percent.’” (69-70)

Tell me again how woke teachers are supposed to be fighting for students because of “equity”, a concept that was once sound and justifiable, but which leftists took over as a tool to use against “white privilege” and other canards.

“The Biden administration was in on the crackdown of parents from the start.  In an internal memo, the NSBA [National School Board Association] revealed that they had had discussions with the Biden White House before sending the letter.  In an October 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett wrote that it was President Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona who had solicited the letter from the group.” (74)

Tell me again, National School Board Association and your state affiliates, why you hate parents so much.

“In 2015, Verdant Labs released an extensive study on the political affiliations of professions.  They used political contribution data to figure out which jobs lean Republican and which lean Democrat.  What they found was that teachers were overwhelmingly Democrats.  Elementary school teachers were Democrats by an eighty-five to fifteen margin.  There were eighty-seven Democrats teaching high school for every thirteen Republicans.  School health educators were even more ideologically slanted at ninety-nine to one.” (76)

Tell me again how such partisan teachers can be fair in the classroom.

“[Ibram X.] Kendi is just one of the people banking on schools paying up to make sure everyone knows they’re not racist.  It’s a system ripe for con artists.  […]  It seems like a scam because it is.  In April of 2021, the New York Times broke a story about BLM’s co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors ‘snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone’.” (84)

Tell me again—  No, better not; don’t raise my blood pressure by talking about the racist and pro-abortion agitprop Black Lives Matter.

“American librarians are talking out of two sides of their mouths: they are decrying the ‘censorship’ of books that are wholly inappropriate for children while at the same time engaging in the actual censorship against classic writers like Jane Austen, Dr. Seuss, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.” (114)

Tell me again why a masterly British literary icon (a woman, too), rhyming children’s books, and a series of books about prairie life in the nineteenth century must be not only banned, but replaced with drag queens grooming children by encouraging them to twerk their little butts in public libraries.

The English professor in me recoils at the recommended verbosity and faulty causation of the following example of woke nonsense, this time promoted by the American Medical Association:

“In late 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) released ‘Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts’ as part of a multi-year project called the ‘Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.’  […]  The document calls for doctors to change their language to insert progressive politics into everything, even statements of fact.  For instance, instead of saying, ‘Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States,’ members are encouraged to say, ‘People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States.’  Everything must be modified to fit woke orthodoxy.” (149)

Tell me again why it’s not only improper but also wrong (in the moral sense) to tell an African American or another minority person that he or she is obese and should stop eating so much damned McDonald’s.

Quoting Dr. William Malone:

“the vast majority of childhood-onset gender dysphoria resolves naturally, ‘with 61-98% of children re-identifying with their biological sex during puberty.’  While there are no studies yet to provide comparable data for adolescent-onset gender dysphoria, one can imagine it would not be far different.” (172)

Instead of my own “Tell me again” repetition as a response to the authors’ presentation of facts, their own commentary a page earlier is a perfect conclusion to the ad hominem attacks which transgender activists use against parents who affirm that there are two genders:

“The battle for gay rights was always about acceptance—mainly, the right to marry.  For ‘trans rights’ it’s a different ballgame completely, especially when it comes to minors.  ‘Acceptance’ of a transgender child comes with body-altering modifications that can cause lasting damage.  That fact is ignored and denied by its proponents.  And if you bring up that pesky little fact, you’re told you’re a bigoted transphobe who wants eight-year-old trans kids to kill themselves.” (171)

Quoting Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University:

“‘More and more young people,’ he says, ‘are seeing sexual content before puberty—not because they’re seeking it out, but because it’s been delivered to the smartphones their parents are buying them.  In the current generation of young people, their first orgasms are tied not to real-life experiences, but to pornography.  We know from brain research how influential first experiences are for mapping the brain, which could explain how year after year, we’re seeing fewer and fewer young people interested in sex, dating, and committed relationships.’” (199)

Tell me again why students whose ages are single digits must have sex education which does not merely show, but recommends (in alphabetical order) anal sex, exposure to “Minor Attracted People” (MAPs or pedophiles; page 201), gender bending, homosexuality, masturbation, multiple sex partners, oral sex, or other sexual practices which my innocent mind cannot understand.

Not all is doom and gloom, though.  The authors are vibrantly optimistic that parents can effect change in their children’s schools and thus eradicate the woke nonsense which pervades the culture.  They pepper their volume constantly with affirmations of how parents are the force of change.  The following are the more concise expressions of what parents can do to achieve this change:

“Parents have to start drawing a sharp line when it comes to their kids.  Our children belong to us.  The home is where we teach our children to stand up for themselves and learn they don’t have to hide their true beliefs.  There are a lot of jokes about ‘safe spaces’, a term that hit the popular lexicon when colleges began providing rooms with Play-Doh and crayons where students, the majority young adults, could hide from controversial opinions.” (44-5)

“The home is the last line of defense.  In totalitarian societies, parents have to pretend to believe the lies that kids are taught at school, lest they make themselves or their children a target.  In a free country, you don’t have to do that.  You can and should explain to children that life isn’t black and white and that America’s history is complicated, just like any other country’s history.  You can and should reassert the morals that matter in your family.  You can and should teach your child to be himself or herself and not be coerced into other people’s opinions.” (46)

“No amount of nonsense equity education can take the place of actual academic instruction, and no amount of rejiggering the standards will help.” (87)

“Many activists like [Quisha] King [spokesperson for Moms for Liberty] recommend that parents start with involvement at the school board level.  Attend the meetings, support candidates, and take seriously the local elections, as they have the biggest effect on what happens inside your child’s school.  Support candidates who want school choice.  Push for curriculum transparency.  That one should be easy, and you can assume that a school district with nothing to hide will not have a problem with telling you what they teach.” (100)

“What can parents and concerned residents do about the woke takeover of the publishing industry and library system?  Given that a great deal of the shift in kids’ literature is driven by publicly funded institutions like schools and libraries, one librarian suggested, ‘Patrons need to use the online purchase suggestion forms that most libraries have and start asking for titles!  I had already been trying to figure [out] a way to get your books into our libraries before today, but it is difficult to justify ordering from lists of different companies without a specific patron request or without surrounding libraries doing the same.’  Moderates and conservatives should also vote with their wallets and support smaller publishers in a David and Goliath fight against the massive power that Scholastic (with its in-school book fairs) and other large publishers wield.” (126; brackets in original)

“Just like with books, paying attention to one-star reviews online and looking up potential shows and movies on Common Sense Media are important steps for parents wishing to keep tabs on what their children are watching.  The assumption with any new show has to be that there will be objectionable content; and even shows we grew up on like The Muppet Show and Blue’s Clues can’t necessarily be trusted.” (131)

“We cannot afford the luxury of shutting out the outside world; we have to stay engaged, stay in the fight, and work to send wokeness to the dustbin of history.  We should do it not just for the mental and physical health of our own children, but also that of children around the country for whom there is no voice.” (164)

The volume has some flaws.  One intellectual problem is that the authors may have misunderstood that Catholic social justice is not equivalent with its distortion by woke zealots (156).  The volume itself is flawed because there are no section breaks within the chapters; thus, for example, the reader must try to follow the explication of twenty-four pages on transgenderism in schools without subdivisional headings which would help the categorization of the ideas presented.

Worst of all, the book has no index.  Faculty, parents, and students who want to quickly ascertain, for example, how the abortion business Planned Parenthood is involved in gender reassignment surgery and hormone blockers in children (pages 177 and 185) must plow through whatever chapter the reader thinks may concern that anti-life entity.  Not even the twenty-four pages of small print endnotes, giving URLs for internet access to sources (pages 271 through 295), can assist the faculty, parent, or student researcher as well as a detailed index.  One hopes this mission will be corrected in subsequent printings.

Despite these minor flaws, Mandel and Markowicz’ book is a mellifluous, yet aggravating read of the penetration of woke nonsense in American life.  It will definitely inspire parents to get involved in the fight to make education great again for their children.

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture zealots and bans conservative and pro-life material, purchase this book from DW Books directly: https://store.dailywire.com/products/stolen-youth-by-bethany-mandel-and-karol-markowicz.