STARRS Podcast
STARRS Podcasts includes the series STARRS & Stripes which interviews military veterans, talks about their careers and military service, and their concerns about what is happening in today's military. See our website, starrs.us, for more information.
STARRS Podcast
Left-Wing Brainwashing in the Military and Academia with Dr. Stanley Ridgley and Dr. Ron Scott
This important episode of STARRS & Stripes looks at the radical and dangerous left-wing ideological influences and indoctrination reshaping both the military and academic world and those in it. Host Al Palmer interviews Dr. Stanley Ridgley, a professor, former military intelligence officer and author of, "Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities". Joining the interview to discuss these issues is STARRS President Col. Ron Scott, PhD, USAF ret. It's important to recognize and expose the left-wing indoctrination techniques used against service members and students so that its effects are neutralized.
Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities
https://www.amazon.com/BRUTAL-MINDS-Left-Wing-Brainwashing-Universities/dp/163006226X/
Former Military Intelligence Officer publishes new book about Left-wing brainwashing
https://starrs.us/former-military-intelligence-officer-publishes-new-book-about-left-wing-brainwashing/
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For more information about STARRS, go to our website: https://starrs.us which monitors and exposes the CRT/DEI/Woke agenda in the Dept. of Defense and advocates a return to Merit, Equality and Integrity in the military.
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Well, hello America. This is Al Palmer, united States Navy retired, and I'm here for another episode of STARRS. We're happy to have you with us as we explore some of the operations and things that are happening around our military today to make sure that we can keep it safe and able to carry out its important function of defending you and me, the American public. To do that today, we're going to have a discussion about a very critical item right now, and that has to do with the issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and critical race theory and how that came to be through the efforts of some various ideologies that we'll talk about. But to do that, I've enlisted the help of our president of STARS, my friend and president, el Presidente I like to call him Ron Scott and he's here to tell us a little bit about how this all works with our institution, the STARRS organization, which stands for Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalization in the Services. And, ron, it's great to have you again with us, sir, today. A little bit about you. You're an Air Force Academy graduate and you are also a pilot. You flew a pilot. You flew F-4s in the Air Force, as I had some time in that as well, but you also had time in OV-10s and commanded organizations throughout the Air Force that went into the Middle East and have served us greatly for over 30 years. And, Ron, sir, it's great to have you with us again.
Al Palmer:As part of our discussion today, we also have Dr Stanley Ridgely, who's a PhD and holds an MBA. He's a clinical full professor of management at Drexel University's LeBeau College of Business. He holds a doctorate and a master's in intelligent international relations from Duke University and an international MBA from Temple University. He's also studied at Moscow State University and the Institut de Gestion Sociale in Paris, a former military intelligence officer and served five years in West Berlin and near the Czech German border, where I received the George S Patton Award for leadership from the Seventh Army Academy in Bad Tölz, west Germany. So, stan, sir, it's a great pleasure to have you with us and I can't wait to hear some of your discussions about time both in Europe as well as working with the Soviets. So welcome aboard to both of you today. And with that, what I'd like to do is start the discussion, I think Ron, with you. Sir, can you tell us a little bit about how we got into DEI in the military and why that's such an important issue today?
Ron Scott:Yeah, you bet, al. It should have been something that's considered pretty innocuous by any standard. I was alerted on the 7th of July 2020, by a classmate from the academy about a three-minute video that was produced and published by Air Force Academy football coaches. They chanted Black Lives Matter and gave five examples of racial injustice, all five of them false. I could appreciate the sentiment. It was about two months after the George Floyd incident, so emotions were running pretty high and these coaches who depend upon recruiting were running pretty high, and these coaches who depend upon recruiting athletes, especially from our underrepresented communities, and so I think they were sympathetic to the effort and wanted to show some compassion about the issue. Well, my concern is that their support of this movement Black Lives Matter movement was tantamount to supporting Marxism, because the founders were Marxist trained. They admit it in the public forum, and so I wrote a blog article two days later and posted it, and a good friend of mine, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Rod Bishop, saw the article and asked permission to forward it to the superintendent at the academy Lieutenant General Jay Severia at the time and I told him I was honored for him to do that.
Ron Scott:Well, that's what got us started. We worked for several months to convince the superintendent that the video was dangerous and that it really was a poor representation of an institution that's supposed to be apolitical, and so they finally did take it down about nine months later, with a more positive theme, emphasizing dignity and respect. While that was more positive, I reminded General Bishop that it was an example of aesopian language, which is a Marxist tactic that uses language that's deceptive, and so the reason they were emphasizing dignity and respect is because of the unwritten justification for it, ie systemic racism, and that's something that General Saverio was claiming to exist at the academy, and then it goes on beyond that. But that's really how we got started, al.
Al Palmer:So how did that go over with the cadets and the staff at the Academy at the time? Did they embrace that or did they say, gee, I don't know, you know, we don't know what's going on? And did that get through the hierarchy and the academy? On the military side?
Ron Scott:Well, the cadets were pretty much go along to get along. Occasionally a cadet would share with us that they were concerned about it. They didn't like it, but they feared saying anything about it in public because it would highlight them that they were non-compliant with the prevailing narrative, and so there was a lot of fear that basically stifled any kind of public dissent from the cadets. But we did get cadets that shared with us their concern and their disappointment about it.
Al Palmer:So did the superintendent buy off on this ahead of time, or did they react to it when it happened?
Ron Scott:He did. We said that something political like that shouldn't be allowed and he admitted that he supported it and that the public affairs and JAG also supported it. We had filed an IG complaint about it and the IG came back and said that it was not political but yet, ironically, by us expressing opposition to it, we were considered political because we were dissenting from that narrative and so it was just a double standard. And it's just sad, and I'm sure Dr Ridgely is going to talk about this when he shares what he's discovered. You know, people want to believe what they want to believe, even if there are facts that are contrary to that. They get emotionally anchored with a thought or an idea, and that's what happened here with this Black Lives Matter and the diversity, equity and inclusion praxis that represented that.
Al Palmer:So that was what 2019, 2020?.
Ron Scott:July of 2020. Okay, just to quickly expand on that the day after the football coaches published that video 8 July 2020, general Severia issued a letter to the Academy family, cadets, faculty staff, parents, friends talking about systemic racism in America to include the Air Force Academy systemic racism in America to include the Air Force Academy. Thus, he had directed his staff to complete an assessment due to him September 18 of 2020. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request early October of 2020 asking for a copy of that report.
Ron Scott:Almost three years later, it took a Judicial Watch lawsuit on our behalf to get a federal judge to compel the academy to release that report. When they did, we had in our hands a 167 page document. Every page had been labeled for official use only to shield it from the public inappropriately, so they had to line through fo uo on every page. 52 entire pages were completely redacted. Of the remaining pages, there were other redactions, but what we discovered in the unredacted part of that report is that there was no evidence of racism, let alone systemic racism the criminal part of this, in my opinion at least, the immoral part. During the time they shielded this report from the public, they trained 90 cadets to be diversity and inclusion officers and NCOs throughout all the units 40 squadrons, four groups in the wing, 90 cadets, and to this day they wear a purple rope over their left shoulder, signifying to fellow cadets that they are the equivalent of the political officer in their respective units.
Ron Scott:that exists to this day.
Al Palmer:But thinking back to that time in 2020, I don't remember a widespread government DEI CRT program or an issue. How did that get into the military so quickly?
Ron Scott:It operated under the radar. A couple more very important facts for the record. In the fall of 2008, the Black Congressional Caucus chartered the Military Leadership Diversity Commission in the 2009 National Defense Authorization Act. They did this without any debate. So what they did? They stood up this commission to promote discrimination.
Ron Scott:On page 18 of their final report, which came out in March of 2011, they stated explicitly that we could not treat people equally and those that grew up in the equal opportunity era. It was outdated, that it was important to discriminate to achieve the equity that was needed so that underrepresented minorities were now being promoted to the general officer ranks. That was one of the primary goals. They were overrepresented in the enlisted ranks, but underrepresented at the flag officer ranks. The other concept that they were explicit about was the danger of assimilation, because assimilation subordinated different subcultural values, and they didn't want to do that. They wanted to amplify subcultural values, which was contrary to assimilation. That was in 2011. Five months later, the president issued an executive order that established diversity and inclusion personnel and programs across the entire federal government. Once they had demonstrated they could do this in the Department of Defense, they used that as justification then to permeate that throughout the rest of the federal government?
Al Palmer:Yeah, and I guess that was my recollection of that that we actually set the tone in the military for what would follow in a broader DEI.
Ron Scott:Exactly Now. The last thing I'll say on that is that once the Military Leadership Diversity Commission stood down a couple years later, when the Defense Department DEI cottage industry had realized that not all the recommendations had been implemented, they stood up the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. Now it's still in existence and they just recently applied to have their charter renewed. It's headed up by retired Black four-star, lester Lyles, who also chaired the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, and so there's a history here of STARS getting involved in the Daco-Dye effort, which perpetuates the deliberate discrimination that was instantiated from that Military Leadership Diversity Commission effort. And so we're still working that and we're hoping to get congressional interest to bring in leadership in the Daco-Dye enterprise and to have them explain to the general public how they can honestly justify deliberate discrimination in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other statutes.
Al Palmer:So, Dr Ridgely, you teach this subject matter too. I know. What are your thoughts on how this came about and how it's manifested itself today? I mean, was it just an idea somebody dropped in, or did they enlist people to actually push it in the senior levels of the services?
Stanley Ridgley:Well, I think that the left has always been fascinated by the hierarchical nature of the military and they know, and they have always known, that if they can manage to insert some sort of directive at the very apex of the military hierarchy, that will very quickly disseminate throughout the ranks and the ranks will obey what the upper echelons are saying to do, because that's the nature of the military. You look at policy, you receive your policy directives, you receive your orders and you carry them out. And this is something that cannot be done, it can't be replicated in the civilian world. And the left has recognized the advantages of having this type of hierarchical structure. And if they can seize the commanding heights of the military, the Department of Defense, and insert this type of ideological balderdash at the highest echelons, get a DEI commissar appointed in the Pentagon, which I think you have a number of them then have this person sit at the table and insist upon this type of ideological indoctrination of the type that Ron described going on at the Air Force Academy, then this will very quickly propagate throughout the military, far more quickly than it will propagate in any other organization in the country, quickly than it will propagate in any other organization in the country. So I think that in essence answers the question as to how it happened so quickly.
Stanley Ridgley:The upper echelons were targeted. The unfortunate death of George Floyd gave them the opportunity that they needed. That was seized upon, both in the military and, of course, in my bailiwick, which is higher education. It gave them a raison d'etre to make this move and implement a lot of the policies that they had been champing at the bit to implement for quite some time. I have to say, neither the military nor any university in the country had anything to do with the death of George Floyd and I, quite frankly, I'm getting tired of hearing these constant genuflections to the death of this, the unjust death of this convicted felon. Justice was administered in that incident and I think we can move on, but no, we've tried to. We, being the royal, we have attempted to elevate this unfortunate incident to a kind of touch point in this so-called racial reckoning that we saw evolve over the subsequent years and the rise of this ideology of DEI, which is the implementation arm, the activist arm of CRT or critical race theory, certainly in the university.
Stanley Ridgley:It's unfortunate that one of the great institutions of the United States, the military, and certainly the military academies has now succumbed to a certain extent to this ideology.
Stanley Ridgley:I think it can be rectified equally as quickly if the danger is recognized and the right people begin to take actions to rectify that situation and restore the United States military to its former glory, I should say, in terms of its uniform treatment of soldiers and officers. The military has always been the great democratizer, taking people from all backgrounds, races, creeds and colors and putting them through the same treatment. And I think you'll find no other institution in America where so many Black people of color are in positions of authority, certainly in the NCO ranks, than in the United States military. And I think that there is an imbued or an inherent respect for ability, for merit, for brotherhood, sisterhood. Now, that is incomparable, it cannot be compared to any other institution. Well, the left wants to destroy that and replace it with something else, and as we further continue along our discussion what that something else is, as we can begin to get very specific about that.
Al Palmer:So it's interesting too, as you say, where this was injected into the military. I would note that, you know, just a couple of years ago, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, general Mark Milley, got into this with Congress and some of his testimony where he said you know, I've got to find out about this. I got to read about it and I'm thinking where the heck did that come from? What was the impetus all of a sudden for him to get interested in a subject of CRT, dei, all of a sudden, overnight and at the same time? Another coincidence is now the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, general CQ Brown, who at the time was the PACAF commander, pacific Air Forces, which covers all of the Air Force in the western part of the hemisphere. He was creating his own DEI program in PACAF without, I guess, consulting anybody else. He just did it and developed it. So now here you've got two of the top generals in the services, all the services, who have been doing this pretty much at the same time. What a coincidence. Your thoughts on that?
Stanley Ridgley:Well, I think that it's a matter of ideological indoctrination and belief, and what the left has always propounded is that their business is to change the world, not simply describe it. This is Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach. The purpose of philosophy is not to simply describe the world, but we have to change it, and change it for the better. And once you sign on to this type of social activist agenda, it arms you with not only the tools of change how to go about undermining institutions but it arms you with this incredible certitude that you are doing justice, that you are in possession of the truth and that this justifies most anything that you want to do with regard to implementing your social justice aims. It's social engineering. It has really nothing to do with empiricism or the world as we know it, the world that we recognize. Instead, it has to do with acting on the basis of a theory, not acting on the basis of looking at a problem, looking at our system, and saying this is right, this is wrong. No, they don't do this.
Stanley Ridgley:This theory is very contrived and it's applicable to any situation, and they look to guidance in the theory for what they do, not guidance of what is happening on the ground. This is why so much of what's happening seems so bizarre and disconnected from reality. Because it is disconnected from reality, they are comparing and measuring our behavior according to an ideal situation in their own minds that has been crafted and given to them, and this is the art stick by which they measure reality. And they're trying to establish institutions and they're trying to mold human beings to think a certain way and behave a certain way according to this doctrine that they have embraced. That to me, I think, is kind of a universal explanation of what is going on. It's happening on the university campuses as well.
Al Palmer:I can tell you that, yeah, so, ron, we talked about this before. I think this is not the first time somebody has used the military as a testbed for things like social justice or other social engineering programs, as Stan alluded to too. You know, can you remember a case where this was done before, back when you were younger?
Ron Scott:Well, I'm thinking 1973, fresh out of. My first assignment was as a personnel officer at the 861st radar squadron in Aiken, south Carolina. One of those duties was to be the social actions officer. So I was trained to be a social actions officer, how to start educating people on the dangers of racism and radicalism and how we should treat people with equal opportunity. It was my next assignment as a brand new first lieutenant at Goodfellow Air Force Base that I was appointed to be an investigating officer for a racial incident that took place at one of our security gates. Goodfellow only had two gates, north and South Gate, and so a carload of Black young people approached the South Gate or North Gate and wanted to go to the NCO club, and none of them had a military ID card. So the security guard turned them away but alerted the other gate that these folks were trying to get access to the base, and so, sure enough, they showed up at the gate. But by then the radio transmission had been monitored at the central security desk. So they dispatched additional security policemen to the other gate. And so the car arrives and they asked for ID cards. Of course nobody had ID cards, but one of the other security policemen starts sticking his finger in through the window, poking people in the chest Do you have an ID card? Do you have an ID card? Poking people in the chest, do you have an ID card? Do you have an ID card? And one of the occupants said a word of profanity in response. So they had all the individuals get out of the car, had them on the ground spread-eagled. One of the passengers was six months pregnant, and so they told them they couldn't enter. They got them back in the car and they left.
Ron Scott:So my job then was to investigate that incident, to find out what actually happened and should there be disciplinary action. Well, there was obvious discrimination. They went after these individuals because of their skin color, and so part of my recommendations was to give everyone involved a letter of reprimand and to establish an unfavorable information file. For the squadron commander, who was a major, I recommended that he receive an Article 15 for allowing that kind of culture to exist in his squadron and to be relieved of command. The wing commander, who happened to be the first woman wing commander in Air Force history, norma E Brown, agreed with all the recommendations, issued the letters of reprimand and the Article 15, and relieved the commander of his duty. I told the wing commander that I didn't put this in writing, but I highly encouraged her to call every single individual in that car and offer an apology on behalf of the United States Air Force. And she said you know, we run the risk of them suing the Air Force by admitting that kind of guilt. I said, well, number one, we were guilty and, number two, they have every right to bring a lawsuit against the United States Air Force. And so she agreed, she contacted each individual, offered an apology on behalf of the Air Force and to the person they thanked her for admitting that what happened that night was inappropriate no lawsuits. So that was an early experience in my life that, yeah, discriminatory behavior can happen, it still does, and when it does, you address it when it happens and you set the record straight. So that was one of my first experiences, al.
Ron Scott:But to piggyback on what Stan was talking about earlier, and with our flag officers and why they do what they do at the three and four star level, it's extremely political. Those nominations to get a third and a four star is political. And so when they interview individuals to see if they're going to advance the next rank, that general officer, that admiral, needs to be congruent with the political values of the administration that is advancing them to more senior ranks, which justifies why I hear too often when somebody is approached to say this is not right and something needs to be done about it, and to get a response like my hands are tied or this is above my pay grade is cowardly. They lack the integrity and the courage to recognize that this is wrong. Something needs to be done about it and I'm gonna stand for what's right, and we don't see that today going to stand for what's right and we don't see that today.
Al Palmer:So here's a kind of a collateral question in that. If, in fact, as you were dealing with the equal opportunity aspects of an earlier time, does that mean that the equal opportunity program was hijacked by DEI and the Marxist influences? I'm beginning to think maybe that was the case. They used a valid concern at the military at the time because after 1947, when we got rid of the segregated forces and then we started then increasing our attention to treating people a little differently, you know that treating people a little differently, you know that was probably a good program. Equal opportunity at the time. I mean it guaranteed people some access to remedying problems that developed from that. And then all of a sudden now here comes DEI, which is a wholly different approach, but it seems that they actually took over for what they used to be doing under equal opportunity.
Ron Scott:Yeah, it's been co-opted, it's been turned upside down. In that final report, march of 2011, they were critical of this whole equal opportunity framework, that it was important to discriminate, to level the playing field, to to achieve the type of equity that they think was necessary and, as I mentioned, they even criticized assimilation. That assimilation is bad. I mean so much for report was unum and trying to bring together disparate populations based on merit and skills and aptitude and that sort of thing.
Al Palmer:They they basically said that was outdated, but here again, the military is different than the outside world in this regard that if you are going to demand people have a very high level of performance and merit and ability to do the job almost flawlessly, otherwise somebody dies or gets hurt. You know you can't do that with just anybody, can you? And doesn't that impose some ability to restrict the work that's being done to the people? Can actually show that they can do it Unlike. You know if you're a unlike, if you're an accountant and you know Morgan Stanley in New York City working behind a desk. It's a wholly different idea of how we work.
Ron Scott:It is different, and I'll tell you I'm optimistic because the current Sergeant Major of the Army I'll tell you I'm optimistic because the current Sergeant Major of the Army, robert Weimer, has eliminated diversity as a criteria for advancing for promotion, and we were shocked, as the senior leadership here stars, that a person in his position, the highest ranking enlisted member of the US Army, was pretty explicit at taking diversity out of play, and so we can only presume that the Chief of Staff of the Army was behind the scenes supportive of that effort, and we're still waiting to see how that plays out. We sent a letter of congratulations to Sergeant Major of the Army Weimer, congratulating him for having the courage to do that. We're still waiting to hear back from him, and we'll probably renew that letter and make it even more public type of thing, the type of actions that, even though it was subtle, a lot of the people in the public don't know about it or would understand the significance or the implications.
Ron Scott:It's a step in the right direction.
Al Palmer:Well, hopefully there'll be a little bit more of that coming along here. So now that we've kind of delved into a little bit of how we got it into the military and kind of where it is today. What do we do now to fix it? How do we get rid of it?
Ron Scott:Well, I'll jump in there, Making it public number one, educating the general public and then also working with Congress to let them know that they have tremendous authority in Article 1 about organizing and equipping and providing rules and regulations for our armed forces. So, even though a lot of this diversity, equity and inclusion is, in my opinion, in stark violation of the law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other statutes, Congress needs to get more involved and more aggressive in eradicating this from the Department of Defense and the entire federal government and following through with teeth making sure that it is being eliminated. Budgets zeroed out, Individuals that were filling posts like that terminated or transferred to other needed positions. So there's a lot that can be done right now, but it's going to require courage to do it.
Al Palmer:So, stan, you know, looking at the results of what's happened in the military, you know it's not just a program somebody put in there and we all don't like it. We don't buy Starbucks coffee for people and talk about it too much, but there is a net effect, isn't there? That's happened in this. We've lost people. We've lost them through attrition, through people who don't want to stick and stay out in the military for their enlistments or their contracts with the military, with their officers. But we've lost also a great deal of talent in that too. And having to replace that, particularly in the mid grades and the middle ranks in the officer corps. After you've had people in for five or 10 years, it's hard to get that kind of talent back quickly and it's expensive as hell to replace it. So that's something that's. That's something that's happening because people don't want to stay. They used to want to stay in much greater numbers, used to be 60, 70 percent, uh. Now it's down like 40 or so, uh.
Al Palmer:And I noticed that the more that they were paying, particularly my service, the were paying people as mid-grade officers just to stick around and they're saying no, I don't want to do that. I've had too much of this kind of indoctrination stuff that's going on, whichever type it happens to be, and there's too much paperwork that goes with it. There's too much lost time for training and gaining expertise in your particular specialty, so they're not sticking around. And, even worse than that, we're having greater trouble trying to find people who want to come in to the services from families who used to be the place to go. And this may be part again of the deconstruction, if you will, of the military from the inside, if you're a conspiracy theorist. But we know that these figures are real. We know that the recruiting and the retention is dropping, and it's dropping precipitously, and I guess my question to you, stan, is so do we see some way that we can correct that, knowing how the bad guys, other ideologies, work?
Stanley Ridgley:Well, first of all it's a lot to unpack there, but I'm going to start by pointing out that the military ethos is one of cohesiveness and unity and achieving the objective creating a sense of unity and a bond in military units, because one's life quite often depends upon it. And the effect of DEI in the military is to work against that cohesiveness. It's not designed to create a bond among people. It is designed to create a belief in oppressors and oppressed. It's designed to create the idea of enemies to your left and right. It's designed to increase suspiciousness. It's designed to increase paranoia that is endemic, that is unique to them, that is, I should say, endemic to them, as, say, a white person or a black person or a person of color, that their personality depends upon that, that they cannot overcome their innate racism, et cetera, et cetera. When the idea is to break down these individual differences, to increase an emphasis on commonalities and the idea of a shared burden, a shared mission, and to create that unit cohesiveness. That's very tough to do, to create a cohesiveness where none existed before and to break down barriers between people who might be not natural. You know, bedfellows in in at large, very difficult to do. The military has always been good at doing that Well.
Stanley Ridgley:Dei brings in this notion of tribalism, this notion of you are a member of a distinct group and you are, rather than being judged on your how you measure up against a yardstick of achievement, you're now going to be judged by the fact that you are a member of a particular group and that you're expected to behave a certain way, and then if you're a member of an out group, that's a villain. We have to be suspicious of you. And so this is what is meant by teaching divisive concepts. It's not just divisive concepts, it's very harmful, debilitating concepts that simply aren't true. It's not just divisive concepts, it's very harmful, debilitating concepts that simply aren't true. It's pseudoscience. It always has been, and I'm very surprised that this type of primitive alchemy or kind of astrology, this type of magic thinking, has made its way back into the university and has somehow found its way into the one of the most merit-based, merit grounded institutions in all of uh, our society, and that is the us military. It's always been based on what you can do. How far, how far can you march with a 60 pound pack carrying an m16? How far can you carry your buddy in a carry? For a certain distance, how far can you do that? How fast can you run? How strong are you? How much endurance do you have?
Stanley Ridgley:All of these objective measurements that are necessary to gauge a person's ability to achieve the mission have been slowly eroded, in the sense that they take second place to well. We don't really care about this person's aggregate, of how well they perform in the field. We're going to look at this person's skin color and we're going to promote that person and bring this person in so that we can achieve something that has absolutely nothing to do with the accomplishment of the mission and that kind of goes against everything the military has stood for, which is to accomplish the mission and to do so with the idea of duty, honor, country, and the idea that you will not lie, cheat or steal, the idea of honor. These are all being eroded in the service to these marginal values of diversity and Marx's dictum of equity from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That's the first major expression of equity that we know of.
Stanley Ridgley:And the idea of inclusion. Well, the military has always been inclusive. I don't understand why this, I would say, foe, this notional of inclusion that is attached to this fake ideology of DEI. Whenever, the military has always been a place of inclusion, the idea of your brothers and your sisters in arms. You know, when you go into combat I've never been in combat, so I'm not going to say well, whenever you go into combat, as many of my comrades have told me, you're not fighting for these lofty ideals, you're fighting for the person to your left, the person to your right, and you're fighting for your unit and you're fighting for survival. And what the military has always done is to inculcate these types of martial values is to inculcate these types of martial values, and I think DEI has been doing its best to break down those values and to create this divisiveness.
Stanley Ridgley:And there's a larger agenda at play here to remove the military as a bastion, the last big bastion that protects American values, the ideas of traditionalism, traditional family, the idea of cohesiveness, the idea of patriotism, and that's the ultimate goal is to break that down and to destroy it. And I think that we need to be on the Kaviv, we need to be ready and to recognize that this is what their goal is. And again, ron mentioned the best way to stop this is sunlight. Transparency is the best way to go about doing this and to make it known to the public again and again and again that this is what is happening and that this is wrong If you want a strong America and you want patriotism, to inform our officer corps and to inform our enlisted ranks. And we have to recognize that we, that these values are under assault by a bunch of folks who do not have the best intentions with regard to the future of our country.
Al Palmer:And another way of doing that, too, seems to be not just those identifiable characteristics that we have that are different, but it's also things like getting rid of standards when all of a sudden some part of a group can't perform well. The latest thing has been well, we'll just eliminate or reduce the standards until they can get through the program and they will be all happy and everybody's going to be equal and they pretend that the program is just the same as it always was. Exactly.
Stanley Ridgley:Well, we had that problem.
Al Palmer:Well, we had that problem. I saw it directly when I was in the Navy flying Tomcats. They were pushing some women through their training and getting them certified and checked out in F-14s to go to sea and they sent them out there, you know, partially equipped. They got them through very quickly. Why? Because there was a bit of a competition with the Air Force to get the first women into combat. So they sent a couple of the women out into a fleet squadron. They weren't ready and sure enough, one of them ended up binding on the end of the carrier deck, you know, and killed both of them, just lost it. And they went back and looked at it and realized they reduced the standard so much just to get them through the first three women and they lost people in doing it and that was a painful lesson for the navy.
Al Palmer:But there's other ways that that's done. I think today too, it's not just for any kind of a person. We have a general problem sometimes today with physical fitness and standards and they're starting to reduce them again. Like you say, how far can you march with a 60 pound pack? Well, we'll take it down from 10 miles to maybe half a mile. How about that? And everybody be happy, and then we can maybe tailor that a little bit more for women who want to be rangers or SEALs. Well, where do you stop that?
Ron Scott:Well, part of that is publishing something like Stan did with his book Brutal Minds. It's about cold water in your face and why his book resonated so well with me. I'm at the United States Air Force Academy from 1969 to 1973. We had all these love fests and hippies and the radicals, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers. You really did in that class, didn't you? And what was going on during that time? Mao's Cultural Revolution during the same time frame. And so when I read Stan's book Brutal Minds, it's like, oh my God, it's happening here in America. And he chronicles it and heavily documents it in his book Brutal Minds. Stan, what was your biggest takeaway in that, when you put that book together?
Stanley Ridgley:My biggest takeaway. I think I want to thank you for the praise of the book. My biggest takeaway in doing the research for the book was the fact that there is this group of people on campuses nationwide and they are all virtually all of them are employed in something called student affairs and they are all trained in this same way that their job is to. They believe themselves to be college educators and their job is to transform higher education into an indoctrination facility for these types of social justice enterprises. Now, I mean this quite literally, that they believe it's their job to transform higher education. Even though they are not faculty, they are engaged in brainwashing our students and utilizing brainwashing techniques thought reform techniques is the official term for it that were used in communist China, used in North Korea and developed here in the United States by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s.
Stanley Ridgley:Kurt Lewin was a social psychologist at MIT and he developed this three-stage process whereby you could change a person's belief system. He is the father of what became known as group therapy. This guy's name is again Dr Kurt Lewin. He developed a three-stage process and this is what I found fascinating that the propagators of this brainwashing on campuses are quite up front about what they do. The three-stage process is to attack and unfreeze a person's belief system, to change that belief system and then to refreeze the new belief system and then engage the student in activist activities so that the student will not backslide and have a recidivism to their previous belief system. This is clear-cut. This is what they do. They say they do this in their manuals. There's one of the very popular manuals. There's one called Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice by Marianne Adams and Leanne Bell, and in this manual, which was first published in 96, marianne Adams and Leanne Bell and in this manual, which was first published in 96, republished again in the second edition in 2006, another one in 2016, and again in 2023, they utilize Kurt Lewin's three-stage process. They give it different names, but it's all the same three-stage process.
Stanley Ridgley:And the key to this and this is a key to protecting yourself from this type of activity one factor they need the student to do to engage in this voluntarily is to gain the student's trust, and they do this very surreptitiously by engaging students in games such as the privilege walk, interrogation games, serving up free pizza, having karaoke night, and by saying in these small group sessions you know, trust the person to your left and to your right. Make yourself vulnerable. Let me give an example of self-disclosure. And then they disclose something to the class and then they ask for disclosure. You can disclose something about you or yourself, your family, and they get students trusting them. Well, this sets up the student for having their belief system undermined. I'll give you an example Sherry K Watt.
Stanley Ridgley:Dr Sherry K Watt, at the University of Iowa, published a book called Transforming Multicultural Initiatives, or Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives. She believes, and it states in this book, that she attacks a student's belief system to destabilize it, to create a sense of vertigo which makes the student ready to accept new truths, which is this new belief system. The book that I previously described to you, teaching for Diversity and Social Justice is quite upfront about what they do and why they do it. They want to destabilize a person's belief system, the student, so that then they can ready the student and fill the student with this new belief system, which is based on crypto-Maoist doctrine called critical consciousness, developed by a Brazilian Maoist by the name of Paulo Freire. Most listeners probably have never heard of Paulo Freire this is by design. He was a crypto-Maoist Brazilian educator in the 60s and 70s, wrote an incredibly influential book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which is a love fest for Mao and Marx and even Lenin and Stalin to a certain extent. And this guy is considered part of the pantheon of theorists in education schools across the nation. Well, when you say Frere, paulo Frere, no one knows what you're talking about. Well, what you're talking about is crypto-Maoism. It is that extreme. Paulo Frere absolutely was a fan of Mao Zedong's cultural revolution that you mentioned, ron.
Stanley Ridgley:From 1966 to 1976, this abomination of the cultural revolution took China, took about a million people alone as a result of that and basically tortured and crippled a lot of people for life, hundreds of thousands of people, for no other reason than that they were perceived as being disloyal to the communist regime. And Paulo Freire believed that. And he stated as much verbatim that Mao came up with the most congenial solution to the problem of the people of the century. He says well, stalin shot down the peasants and Vladimir Lenin shot down the peasants, and Fidel hadn't had yet the opportunity to shoot down enough peasants.
Stanley Ridgley:Mao Zedong came up with quote the most congenial solution of the century, and this was the Cultural Revolution, the idea that you could re-educate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of your people into a new way of thinking. That new way of thinking, of course, was critical consciousness, putting aside bourgeois traditional values and embracing a neo-Marxist view of the individual as part of this collective subservient to the collective good, and embracing a materialist view of history and basically putting aside you better put aside those bourgeois thoughts and ape and mimic the Marxist ideology. Well, that's what's going on on America's college campuses. When people say Frere and a lot of people do they're meaning crypto-Maoism. Where is Frere revered? He's revered in schools of education, and these books that I've mentioned to you are used in schools of education right now.
Stanley Ridgley:This is not something a long time ago. This is not something I'm speculating about. This is not me connecting dots that are hard to find. This is what they say. They do up front, they chest thump about it, they brag about it, they offer after action reports to show how well they're doing it. And this is what's so brazen about it that they're so upfront about what they're doing. And yet they've managed to keep it on the down low, as they say, because they substitute for your hearing and your listening. They substitute a lot of lingo for what they actually mean they're doing. They talk about student success, they talk about student learning, they talk about student development and they talk about this as kind of a proxy for what they're actually doing. When they mean student learning, student development, student success, they're inculcating and indoctrinating students in this Freirean, neo-marxist view of society. And I will add this, the coda to this, the kicker, I should say the chaser to all of this is that they include this view that they have given you, the student, access to hidden knowledge.
Stanley Ridgley:You become part of the anointed. You understand the contradictions of society. You now can peer into the contradictions of society and see the relationships of power and privilege, the relationship between oppressors and oppressed, victimizers and victims, exploiters and exploited. Moreover, you should take this information back home with you and lecture your parents, because they don't know what they're talking about, which is why you have this incredibly bad time on that first Thanksgiving visit.
Stanley Ridgley:When your students come back from college and they seem so angry about something is because they have been basically told that you parents have lied to them all these years and not recognizing the fact that their parents are probably a lot smarter than the professors who have been propounding this and the bureaucrats who run these workshops on campuses are really what I call midwits. This is a whole parcel of what I call midwittery. So this is really kind of what's going on in the college campuses and this is kind of a long way of answering your questions of what I found most surprising that this is going on in broad daylight right there in front of you, and yet it goes unremarked upon, certainly by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which absolutely refuses to acknowledge this hierarchy that you've got in place here that is doing this to our students.
Al Palmer:So do you think that the collateral part of that in the military is this notion that when they do DEI, that that becomes a force multiplier? Somehow, by doing this we're enhancing people, we're getting them to be a more productive, better part of the military, when in fact it's really corrosive? Is that where that came from, do you think in?
Stanley Ridgley:academia. I don't think they're thinking they're making it a better military, except in the sense that they're making the military more in line with their own ideological proclivities. Now, ron mentioned something that I found fascinating, which was the purple rope that the cadets at the Air Force Academy wear, the 90 chosen to become the diversity political officers. You know, part of my new book that I'm writing right now investigates the DEI hierarchy that has been established on college campuses and apparent well and the Air Force Academy, of course.
Stanley Ridgley:Course is one of those that they have their own hierarchy, that you've got a political officer like the old soviet nkvd. Uh had the political commissar, or the zompolit which was another name for it, which would be the political officer who was assigned as kind of the co-commander in a unit and the zomp's function, the Commissar's function, was to keep an eye on the political reliability of the officer who was the actual military, and it was not a good relationship. If you want an example of what a Zompolite is, you can go to the movie the Hunt for Red October and you'll find that Sean.
Stanley Ridgley:Connery yeah, sean Connery finds that the guy that Sean Connery has to get rid of. He wants to defect with his submarine to the west. There's one guy that he knows of on the sub who's. You know that he has populated the sub with the handpicked crew, except for one guy, and that's the NKVD political officer who is there to watch Sean Connery to ensure his political reliability. Sean knows he has to do something about this guy and he takes care of him. You can watch the movie to figure that.
Stanley Ridgley:He did it because this was the guy who had his eye on him. Well, he's wearing a purple rope, just like these guys at the Air Force Academy. He's wearing a purple rope, just like these guys at the Air Force Academy their job. And I would say that the same exists on civilian campuses as well.
Stanley Ridgley:The diversity officers say, in the engineering school or in the school of design or in the school of business, is there not only reporting to the hierarchy within the school? He or she is reporting to the hierarchy of the DEI office on the campus. You see, we have problems in our school. He or she is reporting to the hierarchy of the DEI office on the campus. You see, we have problems in our school. We have faculty like Dr Ridgely, who is not playing ball with. He doesn't like the idea of a diversity oath, taking an oath to tell what he wants to do with diversity, how he's supporting diversity initiatives and equity and that kind of thing, how he's not integrating these types of values into his classes.
Stanley Ridgley:Now, I made that example up, of course, because I don't put up with that kind of thing, but many professors have found and the examples are legion around the country of diversity officers coming in and trying to train faculty to act a certain way and to integrate certain things into their classroom. Now, these are midwifes, these people coming in to talk to faculty and try to tell them how to do their job, to incorporate these values. They call them values, dei. These are values now, they're not simply preferences of a certain unit on the college campus. So you have to be you know, watch out what you say, what you do, who you're talking.
Stanley Ridgley:Toukach, you got a stukach. We would call that person a stool pigeon. Well, dei offices have set up anonymous snitch lines where someone can accuse, say, someone like me of being insensitive in certain ways that are kind of left out there hanging and they begin an investigation and based on this anonymous complaint, without the knowledge of the person that they've complained against. Now think of what that sounds like. That sounds like the Soviet Union. It certainly sounds like communist China.
Stanley Ridgley:A snitch line where you can. You, being the snitcher, can get, even with someone you've chosen, who you know. So I'm going to report on dr, dr scott. I'm going to report on al, because I don't like him, I don't like the way I was treated. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to use this snitch line, keep my name anonymous and started have an investigation of this guy. Now, now I know nothing's going to be, nothing's going to come of it because he didn't do it but you know, and so he'll be exonerated.
Stanley Ridgley:But man, I'm going to give him a hard time with this. And this is this is far more typical across the campus. You know, I can look at a campus website for half an hour. I can go through it, scrape through it, recognize the vernacular that they use to hide what they're doing. I can take out, pick out the structure, pick out the hierarchy and tell you how deeply ingrained your the DEI program is at a particular campus. One of the worst you can go to the campus website yourself is Smith College, the women's college in Massachusetts. It is completely overrun and permeated with the diversity, equity, inclusion cult.
Stanley Ridgley:I call it a cult because it is demanding from you that you treat people around you in the way that the theory tells you to treat them. I see it as inculcating paranoid personality disorder and training people to be paranoiacs according to this doctrine. It's as if a crew of paranoiacs has assembled and have taken over an institution and training people how to become people afflicted with paranoid personality disorder, to behave in ways that paranoiacs behave, to treat your fellow students with suspicion, with a narcissistic, grandiose view of yourself as being in the possession of truth. And this is what they do and it's a terrible, terrible thing. And I think the more people read Brutal Minds, which is on the shelf behind me, read Brutal Minds and I think that you'll find that the questions that have been plaguing you for a long time are answered right here. And there's no mystery to it. It's simply a matter of showing an interest in what's actually going on and then recognizing that what I described is in fact what is going on. It is thoroughly cited.
Stanley Ridgley:I've always said I'll give 100 bucks to anyone who can find three errors of fact in my book. Now, no typos, typos don't count. I'm I have a lot of typos, I admit that. But as far as errors of fact, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you can find three. A lot of people say my book is riven with lies. Well, show me some lies and I'm happy to give you a hundred bucks. But no one's going to take that because the book is truth down the line. I like to say it's beyond criticism. But you can criticize my book on aesthetic grounds it's too long, it's too short, it's too dull, that kind of thing. But as far as fact, no, I let the louts on campus, the villains on campus speak for themselves, and their testimony is oh so damning.
Ron Scott:Stan, let me add said on three May, the second day of the Daku Dai meeting defense advisory committee on diversity and inclusion, chaired by general Lester Lyles, they had the chief diversity officer for the central intelligence agency give her presentation. Now he reports directly to the director of central intelligence in that presentation. Now he reports directly to the director of central intelligence. In that presentation he said that when individuals are pushed for promotion, he gets an opportunity to look at every single one of them and if they have not sufficiently demonstrated that they are promoting diversity and inclusion, he vetoes them, he drops them off. He has the authority to drop them from the promotion list and then he can reach into the organization and identify those that he feels are worthy for promotion because they have sufficiently demonstrated their embrace of diversity and inclusion. That's on our website.
Ron Scott:Cindy recorded that presentation and you can hear it for yourself. So the presenter was audio only until the very end. And General Lyle said Dr Laurentis, we've heard you, but we didn't get a chance to see you. Can you turn your video on? And so he turns his video on and you see a white male. And here's the drama. General Lyle says oh so you're a white male.
Stanley Ridgley:And he goes yes, and you can see I buy into this stuff I mean you know when, when you do, when you demean your, your ideology and your belief system as something you buy into, that tells you all you really need to know about it right I mean, I mean, I I have no doubt that these DEI people buy into it because it's very lucrative.
Stanley Ridgley:You have a lot of, you know, like 2020, when you were talking about Iran, when the whole George Floyd thing came about and really acted as a wedge issue to crowbar and shoehorn a DEI onto the college campuses a lot of so-called DEI experts came onto the campuses as consultants. A lot of people started writing books about DEI and they hung out their shingle and they began running seminars and webinars and caucuses and reading groups advertising themselves as DEI experts. Well, what's a DEI expert? Someone who basically can mouth a bunch of cliches, bromides about oppressor, oppressed, and tell you that you are an oppressor and that you need to behave yourself, you need to recant, you need to confess, and that's basically the entire litany of it, the whole notion of white supremacy behavior. It's based on a fraud. I should tell you, one of the most prevalent pieces of information that shows up in these DEI seminars is what's called the white supremacy behavior list. It was produced in 1999 by someone called tema okun and she, she, she simply made the list up. It's 15 white supremacy behaviors such as oh, punctuality, you know, being on time, attention to, to detail, perfectionism, things like that, you know, things that you accept to do a good job. Basically, success behaviors. Individualism is on the list, the great motivator of our entrepreneurial society. Well, that's a white supremacy behavior. No, they're success behaviors.
Stanley Ridgley:Well, this debunked list that she completely made up. She didn't come up with it doing research. She simply, seriously, she made it up. She says I made the list up. She didn't come up with it doing research. She simply, seriously, she made it up. She says I made the list up and she says this in her dissertation that she wrote in 2004. I've read her dissertation. I've seen her confession. It's.
Stanley Ridgley:And yet this list appears again and again and again in DEI trainings. It's a fraud. It's an out and out fraud. There's no other word for it. It's a fraud, it's an out-and-out fraud, there's no other word for it.
Stanley Ridgley:You know, you've seen too many instances of plagiarism in academic papers from these DEI types, most of whom are midwits who are, you know, getting rich off the gravy that's being ladled out, and I think the gravy train's coming to an end. They do a lot of navel gazing and talking about their feelings. You'll find this in with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi, who write an awful lot about how they feel about things and they're providing the idea of an inner truth. They really can't be substantiated by fact, but they kind of know it's true, that kind of thing, and they can just make things up, like the former Harvard, the late Harvard law professor, derrick Bell, who was the father of CRT or critical race theory, who created the idea that you can do methodology, methodological work in law school, by using Aesopian language, by making fables, weaving fables, and he created this whole genre of the idea that I'm going to just make up a story, I'm going to start with a point I want to make and then I'm going to kind of weave a story fiction around it and publish that. And he did so with the Harvard Law Review numerous times and he created characters like Geneva Crenshaw and he would have discussions with Geneva Crenshaw, this fake person, about racism, and then he would have this published in Crenshaw, this fake person about racism, and then he would have this published in the Harvard Law Review.
Stanley Ridgley:There's fables. He's had whole books of fables published. One's called Faces at the Bottom of the Well, another one is and we Are Not Saved. These are books that I buy, I read them. I quote them and cite them in my own books, in my own research. The important point to remember is he made it all up, he made it up, and so these are the three methodologies. You know navel-gazing, where you just simply talk about your feelings this is Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi and a host of others and then you can do some yarn spinning, like Derrick Bell, where you just create fables. Or you can simply plagiarize your work. You don't have to just copy what someone else did, and we've seen this in the case of Claudine Gay, the erstwhile president of Harvard University, who retired because she, number one, couldn't defend well, actually would not condemn the anti-Semitism on her own campus. And, of course, liz McGill, who resigned from Penn.
Stanley Ridgley:Now, liz McGill did not plagiarize anyone that we know of, but certainly Claudine Gay, who had a very thin resume in terms of published work, we found that she had copied a lot of it, including her dissertation, and so those are the three main methods that really undergird the whole fraudulent enterprise of DEI. Those are the top thinkers of DEI. Imagine how bad the people down the line are who are actually running these workshops, and that you're actually a faculty member. You're going to learn something from this mid-wit consultant they brought in, who just hung out their shingle, and they have 30 years worth of diversity work. It's a fraud and I don't hesitate to call it a fraud, and I wish more people would. I think that once this becomes more well-known, if you read Brutal Minds, you'll see evidence of this fraudulent work and then my current work that I'm doing now on my next book. It lays it all out there for anyone who wants to know the truth.
Al Palmer:Do these fraudsters have any kind of standards or objectives? That they're staying there? That's what their mission is. Do they have anything concrete?
Stanley Ridgley:that they're actually working towards?
Stanley Ridgley:Well, the concrete. They're very clear about what their goals are. Their goals are to educate you in your if you happen to be a white male like myself. They're going to educate you in your complicity in racism, because you have to look at the undergirding tenets of DEI. They don't like to say this. They don't ever say this publicly. They won't because it's all derived from CRT, which basically says that racism is permanent. It's not going to change. If you're a white person, you are racist to the core. That's not going to change. All you can do is try to be a better person, and you can do this through the help of these types of seminars and these types of expensive caucuses that we're going to run you through, by playing games, learning more about the real history of America, which is a contrived, bowed-arised, cramped ideological history that divides people by race into two camps a good and evil, oppressed and oppressor. It's all. Paulo Freire and I mentioned Freire and the neo-Marx a few minutes ago it all derives from his work. He's a Brazilian, so I assume that he rates as a person of color. He's a third world. He has third world credentials. He has a nice gray beard like Karl Marx, but he has a kindly visage and they can get away with citing him. They believe that they are transforming the university, one of their professional groups. Their motto is boldly transforming higher education. They want to transform the university into a Paulo Freire, neo-marxist institution that trains people for the struggles of the future in social justice.
Stanley Ridgley:Now, most every university in America, if you go to the website, somewhere on their website they will use the term, more or less use the term, social justice. They're very upfront about that social justice. Well, vladimir Lenin used the term social justice. Joseph Stalin used the term social justice. Mao Zedong used the term social justice. This is no accident. But they can't get away with saying socialism. They can't use the M word except in an academic sense Marxist. They certainly can't use the C word unless you're an academic pursuing that type of enterprise on the campus. They can't use communism, but they can use social justice. Well, I attack social justice every chance I get.
Stanley Ridgley:A book that I would recommend to our listeners today is Thomas Sowell, the brilliant black economist. His book most recent book is Social Justice Fallacies. It came out just last year, I think late last year. Amazing book. The Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek wrote on the mirage of social justice. In a famous trilogy he wrote called Law, legislation and Liberty, but his famous essays were on the mirage of social justice. He completely demolishes this whole notion of social justice.
Stanley Ridgley:Well, you ask yourself well, why does it continue? Why do people keep using this? Because it's so anodyne. It has positive valence, it sounds so good.
Stanley Ridgley:And if you're a young college student, freshman coming out of high school, where you've got a taste of this type of indoctrination, and you hear some professor and some lout who's doing a seminar say, oh, social justice, that's what we're all about. Working for a better world, working for the collective good. Oh, that really resonates with a young, idealistic person. They say, wait a minute, this is what I've always thought I wanted to do. I want to work for social justice. And it's intentionally vague, you know, I want to work for the collective good. Well, you know, it's one of those things where you start asking people what the collective good is that we used in the Soviet Union and in communist China. And the Soviet Union said well, you know, I want to grow, I want to graduate from high school, go to college, become a doctor. Said no, no, no, no, you can't be a doctor in Moscow, you've got to go to Novosibirsk and you've got to work on a dam. Because we're building socialism. That's for the collective good, and that's why you're going to Novosibirsk. Your individual desire to express yourself and realize your dream, no, no, that doesn't matter.
Stanley Ridgley:And in communist China it was during the cultural revolution they had a movement called a Maoist movement, called up to the mountains and down to the villages. That was their unimaginative slogan, but it did mean exactly what it sounds like. Youth, communist youth were taken from the cities and either said, up to the mountains or down to the villages, where they would work for a year or two alongside peasants working the fields, so they could learn about justice and learn about what it meant to be a peasant. You know their version of the proletariat, and so this was why were they forced to do this? Well, it was perceived and exalted as the collective good. That's what the collective good means.
Stanley Ridgley:It doesn't mean working at a soup kitchen. You know, serving the homeless in a soup kitchen. You can do that and anyone can do that. But would you want to be ordered to do that, as opposed to pursuing your dream to become an engineer? I don't think the average student would want that, and yet that is the bottom line meaning of what social justice is all about and the collective good is all about. There is no such thing as the collective good. There is you working as an individual, supported by your family, and you supporting your family and living your best life in a moral way, creating wealth for yourself and for your fellow human beings. That is the individual good, and the collective good is the sum total of all those individual goods, not just some collectivist social engineer's idea of sending you off to Novosibirsk to work on a dam.
Al Palmer:So Ron Stan mentioned the term values as being substituted for the realities of what we're doing. This has come up again lately with the West Point graduates and the West Point cadets, where their motto that Douglas MacArthur gave them back in the 60s was duty, honor and country. And they've now taken that out and they've substituted values instead of duty, honor and country. And so people say well, wait a minute, what's this values thing? As you say, it's just a big bucket. You can put whatever you want in there and it's changeable. It's not durable, it's not something that you can even relate to. You know personally, if you, you know, I mean it's values. Well, what are what's this thing about values here? So you know.
Ron Scott:Thoughts on that, ron well, it's kind of a post-modernist uh effect where you have to eliminate tradition, you, you have to discount tradition and basically deconstruct everything up until now and reconstruct it.
Ron Scott:And it plays very, very well into the Marxist mentality where you want to promote class warfare, and so you're really promoting revolution. You know what's in the past is bad. You know let's rebel against that and in the end we'll have utopia. But that's guided and shaped by the political elite, the people who want to tell us how to live our lives, about the collective good. And you know you're better working aside the peasants than being an engineer or becoming a rocket scientist like Elon Musk. So it's very dangerous. I've advanced my own thought in terms of bounded rationality and how you can shape rationality. And you start with assumptions and beliefs. They shape your values, your values shape your attitudes, your attitudes shape your behaviors, and so if you have external influence in terms of shaping your values or your attitudes, it can shape what you want to believe or your assumptions, and so it's very dangerous what we're experiencing right now, and we have groups that are getting away with it. I think what's so important about Stan's book Brutal Minds? You know he focuses on the universities, but you've got K through 12 now that uh are already prepping and shaping these young minds so that when they get to the university and now you know they're going to be educated and get ready for, you know, a great adventure and and they're what they're
Stanley Ridgley:doing at the universities, as Stan describes in his book Brutal Minds borders on criminality in my view, because it's deceptive, it's disingenuous and Psychologists are concerned. And I'll make an accusation right here.
Stanley Ridgley:Lisa Spannerman at Arizona State University is a psychologist. She's a dean of some sort at ASU and she is guilty, and she's laid it all out. She's guilty of saying we can, using psychological techniques, we can make people feel guilty about anything if we utilize the right stimuli in a classroom, and so why don't we take white males and make them feel guilty, get them feeling guilty about something that they had nothing to do with, and at that point we can more easily recruit them to engage in, in her words, social justice activism. Now, what she's just described is brainwashing. Basically is utilizing a technique that can make someone feel falsely guilty about something they had nothing to do with so as to prepare their mind to accept their task of doing a social justice, working for social justice cause. Now, that, to my notion, is malfeasance. If someone wanted to file a complaint, I'm sure they would have good grounds for doing so, and so, yeah, it's a terrible thing.
Ron Scott:Stan, I think you're hitting on something that we're on the verge of doing, that you know. We're right now in the discovery mode what is happening and then what are the implications, and at some point, something needs to be done about it. And you really write about that in your concluding chapter in your book. You've got three steps you want to remind us on what needs to be done.
Stanley Ridgley:Well, what needs to be done in terms of what it is you're thinking about doing? If you're thinking about reforming the university, there are long-term steps you can take and then there are short-term. If you're thinking about reforming the university, there are long-term steps you can take and then there are short-term, if you want to. A parent with a kid in college is not going to want to be that interested in the long-term because they want to get their return on investment for basically the money they're spending on a college education. They can take certain steps to ensure that the son or daughter is not subjected to the brainwash. And I mentioned at the very beginning. I said these folks want trust. They want they have to gain the trust of students before their brainwash can work, before a thought reform program will work. And the key for a student is to recognize that these people who desperately want you to trust them don't deserve your trust. They have something up their sleeve. They do. They have an agenda. Anyone in life who is trying to gain your trust really, really fast use car salesman, that kind of thing. Well, they've got something that they want to sell you and what they're selling on the college campuses is neo-Marxism and they want to get your trust so that you can reveal to them information that's none of their business so that they can then use that against you. Now the longer term solution is to basically now there's Lisa Spanierman, yeah, I tipped Rachel Alexander for that news story. I tipped her off to this woman and her activities in the classroom. But the longer term solution, of course, is to if your state universities are particularly vulnerable to the money that's going to them, they want no strings attached funding from the states that fund their universities, whether it's Arizona State University, university of North Carolina or Cal State Berkeley, I think state legislatures who are made aware of the activities that are ongoing can communicate. No, you're not getting largesse, this kind of largesse. Until you begin revoking and ending these types of brainwashed thought reform programs and restore your integrity as an institution and prove that you are worthy of self-governance, we will have a hand in seeing what you're doing on the campus with regard to spending the taxpayers' hard-earned money. And so I think that parents, donors, alumni and students all acting in concert and I will tell you, if parents and students were to you know around the country were to simultaneously somehow magically read brutal minds and understand what's going on in the college campus and simply act in a way that protects themselves, they would render these types of programs on the campuses completely ineffective completely ineffective. And for those more adventurous and activist types, they could really get some of these folks on the campuses in trouble for the types of activities that they're engaging in, which are borderline illegal and, in some cases, outright illegal. So there are options available and, of course, legal help is also available.
Stanley Ridgley:The Alliance Defending Freedom is one. America First is another organization. The Alliance Defending Freedom is one. America First is another organization. The American Council on Trustees and Alumni is another organization. That-chairman of Philadelphia's chapter of Moms for Liberty. She's doing good work in our city of brotherly love. Turning Point USA is another great organization that mobilizes students on the campuses to not take this kind of nonsense. I am the faculty advisor for Drexel University's Turning Point USA and they are doing. These students are doing great work. They're young patriots, they're critical thinkers and all we want is for students to put on their critical thinking caps, and you know cock an eyebrow you know like that and say, hey, you know, this stuff doesn't sound right, it doesn't smell right, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Stanley Ridgley:And are you telling me the whole truth? And they become inquisitive and begin to tug at the strings of this tapestry that has been woven for them, only to find out there's really nothing there and that there's a vast world of knowledge, philosophy, history, political science that's awaiting for them, that has debunked this nonsense a number of times in the past, and all that they are facing right now is just old wine and new bottles offered up by bartenders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, serving up really low-grade liquor, and I hope that we can expunge these people off the campuses and get back to the business of higher education.
Al Palmer:Amen to that yes indeed so where does that reside in the university, for instance? Is that with a board of trustees or the president leadership? How does that flow, do you think to solve the problem?
Stanley Ridgley:Well, it depends on whether it's a private university or a public university. Individual faculty members can do what they can do, but I should tell you, most of the brainwashing happens not in the classroom. There are some louts you know faculty louts who utilize their bully pulpit as a propaganda instrument. But faculty, by and large physics professors, math professors, business professors we don't have time for that nonsense. Even we wanted to do that. But history professors, sociology professors, folks in the education schools live and breathe this nonsense. And most of the problems you'll find are in the bureaucracy called student affairs. And they run this parallel curriculum on the campus called the co-curriculum. I know, ryan, you're very familiar with this, having read Brutal Minds. It's a co-curriculum. They offer fake courses, fake classes, fake instructors who are not professors. They even offer a fake transcript not professors. They even offer a fake transcript. And this is where a lot of this stuff is propounded. And so I think that and these folks who run these programs are not even hired like the faculty, it's like a circle of friends hired we have a lot of substandard people come into the campuses that aren't really qualified. They like to think they're faculty but they're not and they want to pretend that they're faculty now that they're on the campuses. They're not and they want to pretend that they're faculty now that they're on the campuses.
Stanley Ridgley:This has to be rooted out. It has to be exposed for what it is and a stop put to it. And this can be done by the faculty, senate and pressure on the boards of trustees. I call them sleepy boards of trustees in my book. I know Ron's probably familiar with that term Sleepy boards of trustees who simply rubber stamp what the president wants to do. Things are going well. Here's a raise, here's a bonus. You're putting up a new building. That's great. Student success is on the rise.
Stanley Ridgley:Whenever the board of trustees is completely clueless about what is actually happening, well, I think that the anti-Semitism we've seen on the college campuses in the last year really has opened the boards of trustees' eyes at many universities, both private and public, and this is just again just a thread that they're tugging on. And I think if you start tugging on that thread really forcefully, you're going to find that a whole lot of stuff is going to unravel. Several of the administrators were fired at Columbia universities when they were caught texting to each other, mocking Jewish presenters at a presentation, mocking their call for anti-Semitism to be banned at the campus, to quell these expressions. Well, these administrators at senior, most senior level were caught and they were eventually fired. Well, we can't fool ourselves that these are the only louts that were doing this sort of thing or that believe this sort of thing.
Stanley Ridgley:There are examples of a disease that is on our college campuses that is only going to be routed or ousted with hard work. Hard work and diligent work by the good guys and I like to think there's a lot of good guys out there. All we can do if only we can mobilize them, give them the information they need to get the job done, and say here are the critical nodes where the brainwashing or thought reform is happening and here's what you can do to put a stop to it.
Ron Scott:Well, stan, we're getting involved in some emerging developments and, given your expertise in this area, I'd like to kind of put you on notice that I'm going to recommend you be part of some of these efforts, if you don't mind. So we're going to stay in touch with you because you've got a wealth of knowledge and analysis here that helps us to understand what we're up against.
Al Palmer:Well, you know the Vice one of the biggest things, stan, is getting that message directly back out to our viewers and to the public, so they understand the intricacies of this too, because you know you're absolutely spot on when you're talking about, for instance, the hunt for Red October and the political officer being in charge instead of the commander of the submarine. I mean that's absolutely grotesque, but this is the kind of way we can do it, I think.
Stanley Ridgley:Yeah, I think that if you look at the parallels of this DEI hierarchy the old NKVD it's fascinating the idea we're going to keep an eye on you to ensure your political reliability, irrespective of whether you're doing a good job or not. Part of your good job is going to be, you know, genuflecting to these values of DEI. And I think that Ron just gave this horrendous example of some believer who is not even going to consider for promotion someone who is not again, again, kneeling or bowing before and genuflecting for these, before these so-called values, when they're nothing but ideological preferences. And I think we need to bring that out and make that crystal clear, and I do that. It doesn't make people like me, but that's not what I'm in this business for. It certainly makes people feel uncomfortable, people who have, who have you, have forgotten their critical faculties and don't like discomfort and prefer collegiality toward the pursuit of truth.
Al Palmer:Well, it's important work, stan, and thanks for being a part of it today to help us through this, and I would just leave maybe all of us with one thought here that the issues of people staying and joining the service won't be solved until we come full circle and realize that we've got to keep this healthy and we've got to reinstitute integrity, honesty and this other thing we talked about before accountability, and this other thing we talked about before accountability, because without that, the troops can't trust us to lead them and we can't depend on them to be there when we need them and to have the kind of merit that's going to take them through battle and keep them healthy so they can survive too.
Al Palmer:So that's kind of what I'm thrilled about in doing this on the Stars and Stripes podcast and Ron is kind enough to let me do this for a while, but I think this is a great way for the visitors who come to our podcast to see the kind of important work that we're doing, and thanks to both of you today for making that clear, I think.
Ron Scott:Great Thanks Al. It's been a real pleasure Al.
Stanley Ridgley:I do appreciate it. It's always good to be with Ron and good to be with you too, al, and I hope that your listeners have hopefully learned something, and I've learned something too.
Al Palmer:Well, that's the idea here. Education and knowledge is invaluable, so with that for our visitors, you can always find out about us on starsus that's stars with two R's, dot US and you can see our podcast there. They're archived and some great articles and books that very much like Stan's are there. You can see what they're about, too, so we look forward to seeing you back another week. Thanks very much for being with us tonight, and God bless you.
Ron Scott:My pleasure, thank you, thank you.