Commentary: How to muzzle the three-headed diversity monster

If you are a parent, you may have had the following experience: Your beloved child, whom you laboriously reared for 18 long years and instilled with life-affirming values, goes off to college. You give a hug and wave. “All will be well,” you say. The residential adviser in the dorm seems so warm, so welcoming.

But upon coming home at semester’s end, your child seems somehow changed. Suddenly words like “equity” and “social justice” have become a part of her everyday vocabulary. You are perplexed by the “courageous conversations” your child is starting about how all white people are racist — a nefarious category that may include your own family. On top of this, she now identifies as “they.”

What happened? Well, according to Stanley K. Ridgley, author of “Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities” (Humanix Books, 2023), your child has become the victim of a dangerous cult that has swept across our nation’s system of higher education.

As a business professor at Drexel University, a former military intelligence officer, and a “Great Courses” lecturer on strategic thinking, Ridgley was the ideal man to write this book. Over six years, he exhaustively researched how this radical takeover has unfolded and what we can do about it. The subject is one that should interest every parent, student, alumnus, and taxpayer in America.

The stages of indoctrination

There is an “anti-racist pedagogy” currently being applied on college campuses everywhere. As Ridgley explains, this apparently benign program is actually a method of thought reform — more commonly known as “brainwashing” — that is designed to modify beliefs and behavior. The goal is to replace the student’s beliefs with the beliefs of his or her “educators.”

Ridgley traces this method to two sources: Mao Zedong’s methods of ideological reform in China during the Cultural Revolution and social psychologist Kurt Lewin’s model of “re-education” developed almost simultaneously in the United States. There are three stages to the Lewin-Mao program:

1) Unfreezing. An organized peer group destabilizes personal identity and promotes conformity. To deconstruct an old belief system, organizers “love-bomb” victims with unconditional acceptance, use euphemisms to manipulate language, and separate insiders from outsiders.

2) Changing. The peer group installs a new belief system. To break down individual resistance, victims are shamed, guilt-tripped, and threatened with ostracization.

3) Re-freezing. The peer group solidifies the new belief system, giving members ceaseless “missionary” work proselytizing to others in workshops and writing manuals.

Very interesting, you might say. But should I really be concerned? Isn’t the hype about cultural Marxism just far right-wing fearmongering, as many experts say? Surely this could never infiltrate the bastion of higher education.

Wrong. The experts who work so hard to deny cultural Marxism are the very ones pushing this agenda. Ridgley documents how they use deception and secrecy to achieve their ends.

The three-headed monster

Ridgley colorfully uses the myth of Cerberus — the three-headed hound guarding the gates of Hades — to describe the tripartite structure of the diversity bureaucracy.

The first head is made up of the university departments themselves. By lowering academic standards and hiring an army of mediocrities, education schools turn their departments into “boot camps” enforcing ideological orthodoxy.

The second head is made of offices of student affairs. The talentless staffers employed in these offices weaponize the university administration, coercing students into submission by spreading racialist ideologies through every aspect of campus life.

The third head consists of nonprofit associations aligned with the universities. Foremost among these clubs are the American College of Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. These professional clubs mimic academia. They provide training and fake credentials, feeding departments and student affairs offices with people who can’t cut it anywhere else.

Ridgley defines these groups as “cargo cults” that create “a primitive model or copy of an original, with the expectation that the imperfect copy will deliver the same results.”

Muzzling Cerberus

Fortunately, Ridgley details a comprehensive plan for how to combat this radical takeover. He offers several levels of solutions.

Students on campus can take steps to prevent indoctrination. They can respond to the “red flags” of thought reform by resisting the approaches of enthusiastic staffers, denying requests for personal information, confiding in trustworthy faculty, and refusing to participate in programs that use racialist euphemisms. If forced to participate in such programs, students should demand informed consent, record all content presented and information on those in charge, and seek redress within the university’s grievance procedure before contacting outside organizations.

Parents should take an active role in your child’s higher education. The best way to prevent indoctrination, of course, is by grounding children in civic-mindedness, a strong value system, and a confident sense of self from an early age.

More immediately, Ridgley advises parents to probe student affairs administrators with specific questions about the details about the material guiding campus programs, campus activities, secretive judiciary proceedings, and the potential for discrimination.

The highest — and most difficult — level of reform involves “refreshing” the university administrations themselves. Ridgley assembles a list of 15 specific strategies for doing this. The key, he says, is establishing transparency: Since these crafty cultists employ guile, knowing exactly what they are doing is crucial.

Administrations must cut ties with nonacademic clubs that feed student affairs offices, impose boundaries on the duties of faculty and staff, and modify or cancel racialist curricula. They should subject their schools to outside audits, investigate campus activities, set up counter-programming workshops, and assess administrators for their ideological commitments. Extremist staffers should be retrained and noncompliant ones removed. For any of this to work, state legislators need to provide new legal sanctions and exercise the power of the purse.

Although Ridgley’s strategies are comprehensive, he acknowledges that implementing them will not be easy. In order to overcome this “bureaucratic monstrosity” with its “unthinking minions,” citizens from every sector of society will have to work together — and read this book to learn how. It will be a long, hard road, but your grandchildren will thank you when they still have a free society in which to live.

Andrew Benson Brown is a Missouri-based poet, journalist, and writing coach. He is an editor at Bard Owl Publishing and Communications and the author of “Legends of Liberty,” an epic poem about the American Revolution. Visit his website at Apollogist.wordpress.com.