Customer Reviews

Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(9)
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2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

A solid book that may or may not shock the reader. If you are unfamiliar with eugenics, for example, some of the "revelations" may sicken you. Much of the material in the book is known to those who follow religious, political and scientific issues closely, but it is a nice compilation of closeted skeletons to have on hand. The writing style makes long and tangled personal histories brief, yet does them enough justice to see the virtue in people where they did good. With a few exceptions, Cashill allows his subjects some wiggle room, even after he rips apart their motivations and desires. It is unavoidably a political text, so read at your own risk.
I am a conservative with libertarian leanings, and I enjoyed the book. Liberals may not be so enthusiastic. I had known about most of these subjects beforehand, but Cashill provides a good summary of the lesser known sins of the left's saints.

We've heard the "facts" so often that they have become the mantra's of the contemporary world--from the noble intentions of "premature antifascists" who bravely fought for a noble cause, to the handful of visionary Americans who challenged fundamental beliefs about sexuality, the environment, cultural anthropology, race, and the progress of the Soviet Union, to name just a few. With clear, incisive prose, Cashill reveals the long-simmering debates over truth and trust in a dozen different arcane-sounding fields from the epidemiology of AIDS(was there EVER a threat that AIDS was about to become a heterosexual disease?) to biochemistry (was it ever actually demonstrated that DDT posed a major threat to the environment? or was the elimination of DDT the first step in unleashing an ecological menace that now moves toward us all like a silent tsunami?).

Above all, this is simply a wickedly delicious book stripping away both clothes and supposed halo's from a pantheon of our cultures' god-like heros. It is a disturbing and compelling read.

There are critics posting reviews here who focus entirely on Mr. (Cashill's coverage of the debate over and against Darwinism, which is one small portion of the book. Some critics here reflect the defensiveness and intellectual insecurity that Cashill is prompting us to question. There should be no fear among thinking people in reading a concise and lively synopsis of the debates over Darwinism, any more than one should fear or be repelled by Cashill's brilliant dissection of what is accurate and what is historically falacious in the famous film Inherit the Wind, a work which probably did as much to establish the images of rigid/bigotted/fanatical creationists versus open-minded/fair/courageous/humanist evolutionists. Cashill's surgical knife and passion for the truth are at their best in these ten or twelve pages.)

Cashill's book should be required reading in universities. It is certainly essential for anyone who wants to critically understand the intellectual foundations of our times.

(One critical note to the publisher: the lack of a full-fledged bibliography is a significant flaw in the publication of this book. It is now time that publishers who have discovered the vitality and intelligence of more conservative readers ratchet up their assumptions about intellectual standards. While the information is in the book, the informal footnotes are no substitute for devoting the few pages it would take for an actual bibliography.)

In his book "Hoodwinked" Jack Cashill has developed an alarming thesis, and provides clear evidence that much of what passes for "progressive" beliefs of the cultural elite in the West, are actually based on foundations of pure fraud. There are countless examples provided, and while some are seemingly harmless ramblings of lost souls trying to gain glory, others depict a more savage and harmful intent.

First, my criticisms of the book are as follows. I felt the author could have improved his prose greatly by including his source material more readily in the text. While well documented in the back, the book reads too much like an essay, and less like the researched prose it is intended to be. Second, there were several examples in the book that were stretches at best. He would have been better off taking a half dozen of his points and expounding in more detail than filling in with examples not as relevant or as strong.

That said, the book is quite strong. Jack spends the first few chapters delving into the origins of "progressive" thought. There are several stories of well documented frauds that were trotted out to serve political interests. Of the most alarming is the work of one Walter Duranty who falsified the horrors of Stalin and legitimized the Soviet Union in the West. (Page 32). This gave rise to many of the liberals that still sympathize with Castro today for example, for much of the same reasons. Of course these lies come out in time, yet surprisingly as the book depicts, they are ignored by the cultural elite who continue to trot out time and time again philosophical "truths" long since exposed as frauds. The exploits of John Kerry (Page 91) who falsely staged his own Viet Nam "protests" in the 1970's for political gain only to have the truth hurt him 30 years later in his run for the Presidency, shows that this tactic is alive and well in the academic and left elite.

There are simply too many examples of these frauds and deliberate deceptions to count, but here are a few highlights:

A movement by some leftist academia to try and give Africa claim to the intellectual powers of the Greeks rested on the supposed plunder by Aristotle of an Egyptian library built "25 years after he died" (Page 108);

Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado comically claims to be a Native American (which he isn't) and fabricates stories which have been totally shown to be false. One for example, was about US Soldiers deliberately giving the Native Americans smallpox (Page 139), which has no basis in any facts at all. In a move which simply captures the academia mindset, CU makes him the Chairmen of their Ethics Committee!;

The acclaimed work of Rigoberta Menchu, her supposed autobiography: "I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala", is shown to be totally fabricated, yet the cultural elite ignore the facts, and "The Chronicle of Higher Education" even states: "It doesn't matter if the facts in the book are wrong" (Page 147) and allow it retain its heralded status as non-fiction and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!

The origins of Planned Parenthood are nothing less than eugenics and racism. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the group was famous for her work "The Pivot of Civilization" written in 1922, in which she based the organizations foundation on; "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective". (Page 222) As hard to believe as this is, it gets far worse than this. Remember this when you hear the shrill marketing slogans about "choice".

The sections on the personal habits and pedophile supporting Alfred Kinsley are too horrific to print here. Yet this hasn't stopped Hollywood from depicting him sympathetically. So desperate for a justification of their lifestyle, the obvious lack of reliability of his methods and the illegal activities he fostered and encouraged towards abusing children, are left ignored.

Overall, this is a fascinating look behind the scenes of so many well documented frauds which continue to be propagated even today. The book is well written and interesting, but has its flaws as I noted. You will never view the academia and cultural elite of the left the same way again after reading though, so if the truth doesn't matter to you, then skip this book.

"The left's attraction to the obviously false is nothing new. For well nigh a century, in fact, America's intellectual elite has been crafting and enabling fraud on a wide range of critical subjects, among them history, anthropology, political science, science, sexology, health, and criminal justice. The culture that this fraud has produced is a veritable house of cards, one vulnerable to the first unprotected zephyr of truth."

That's Jack Cashill's synopsis of Jack Cashill's good book, which was written too quickly and published too soon, perhaps to cash in on last year's controversy du jour, Ward Churchill. Churchill was merely a recent and transitory example of fraudulent progressive posturing, part of a project that goes back at least to Sacco & Vanzetti, Darwin & Marx.

Mr. Cashill carefully notes that his object is not to debunk Darwin, but he demonstrates that Darwin's useful research was warped and twisted by useful idiots whose project is the apparent ejection of God from God's green, evolving earth. Marx, Godless from the ground up, didn't require the luxury of being misunderstood. Marx's contribution to the progressive project was clear & costly: Chang & Halliday, in their recent biography of Mao, show that establishing Marx's utopian kingdom was almost infinitely bloodier than Montesquieu's estimated body count from the earthly kingdom of Christ.

About other things, Cashill is careless. Lillian Hellman is born in 1905, then she's born in 1904. A victim of the Black Panthers is correctly identified as Betty Van Patter; then, two or three times, as Betty Van Tapper; then back to Van Patter in the index. Leonard Peltier is called "Chippewa Sioux," a surprising amalgamation of tribes that hated each other.

That's small stuff, but troubling. If a writer is careless about his own details, is he careful about bigger things? And Cashill's big story about a Godless progressive plantation (run by smart progressive elitists) where everything but God is permitted is a story we need to hear. This book is a good first installment of the story, but a better writer needs to write the next chapters.

If only Whittaker Chambers were with us now. Since he isn't, these wise words from 2nd-Amendment theologian Ann Coulter will suffice: "People don't commit acts of great evil or great courage out of thin air. Character is developed out of a lifetime of choices. Almost every decision you make, however small, will be a step closer to God or a step closer to the devil. ... When you go along with the in crowd and don't speak out against liars, against promiscuity, against abortion, you are taking a step closer to the devil. But it's never too late to stop and begin taking steps toward God. It's a lot easier to make that journey with companions who know the way."

Amen.

There are two kinds of intellectual frauds: those who stand alone when their perfidy is revealed and those who discover that their cause has been taken up by a radical left wing ideology and incorporated into that ideology. In HOODWINKED, Jack Cashill uncovers a decades old cabal of pseudo-socialists whose sole purpose is to advance a spectrum of thought that began with Marx and continues unabated until today. Cashill ties together a long string of people and events who are linked only in their combined propensity to show that America is the worst most evil country the world has ever seen.

Cashill notes that American culture is a fabric woven of an assortment of myths, sex, crime, politics, science, and history. For decades, supporters of the belief that capitalist America exists only to serve the blessed few over the downtrodden many have distorted this culture into a witches' brew that now serves as the basic core values of the leftist Democratic party. Cashill classifies these hucksters and highjackers of traditional American values into three broad categories. First, he lumps your basic criminal types who initially had no political agenda. Sacco & Vanzetti, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Alger Hiss, and OJ were all convicted (well, except maybe OJ), of serious crimes but the elite and effete socialist America-haters were quick to pick up their cause and interweave it into their own. Second were the self-aggrandizing hucksters who knew quite well what they were doing. In fact, Cashill sees a common thread among the likes of Ward Churchill (a non-Indian), Michael Moore (a crude falsifier of the film media), Walter Duranty (A New York Times reporter who saw a Pultizer in his future even as he excused the worst of Stalin's excesses in the 1930's), Noam Chomsky (an avowed anti-Semite, anti-capitalist, anti-Bush), and Michael Bellisiles (who foisted off the hoax that the America of the frontier days was far less gun oriented than was commonly believed). This class of frauds Cashill sees as motivated by an unholy desire for gold, glory, or god. And in the third grouping lie those giants of American iconic mythic lore who are simply too big and central to leftist ideology to be allowed to be torpedoed by basic and provable evidence. Alex Haley of ROOTS, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Alfred Kinsey all carry self-inflicted verbal and printed gunshot wounds yet paradoxically are defended by the left who apparently count on their near monopoly of the mass media to insulate them from criticism from an American red belt that they are sure are too dumb to spot the difference anyway.

It must have been no easy task to write this book since to do so is to cause readers to question the inner worth of public icons of seeming honesty. I did not know of the foibles of some of the figures noted above. And my ignorance was probably the very reason for the need of HOODWINKED. Cashill has performed the needed and illuminating exposing of a monstrous and self-serving effort by a very large set of blue belt Gore, Kennedy, and Clinton supporters to change America into a sociological petri dish from which they can reign supreme over those who disagree with their warped and illogical need to revise truth into their own version of that truth.

This is one of those books that everyone interested in how government works, and history books are written, and news rooms run, should read. Cashill goes into the nitty gritty of how politically correct expedients have given the truth a back seat in news reports as well as history books and university classrooms.

Nor is truth the only casualty in many US institutions and media outlets. Cashill also details how spin and policies actually cost lives through "eco-colonialism," with just one of these "big lies" having killed millions of people worldwide (all with almost no comment on the part of the American press). And it is still getting people killed even today.

All Cashill's facts are carefully documented and cleverly detailed in what is as entertaining to read as it is chilling to consider. In short, this is a must-read book for those wanting to know the truth about what has been going on behind the scenes in America over the last few decades.

I chuckled when I first started reading Jack Cashill's "Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture." How could I have not? He started out discussing the same old cast of tinfoil helmet wearin' loonies we've seen in countless other books. Cop killer and left wing poster boy Mumia Abu-Jamal? Academic charlatan and tenured basket case Ward Churchill? Chubby propagandist Michael Moore? Who HASN'T heard of these guys? Moreover, who hasn't read chapter and verse about their outrageous shenanigans? Heck, I can turn on the television on any given day and hear something about Churchill and Moore. What made me laugh was, after providing us with a short sketch of each of these kooks, Cashill promised to deliver a book like none other, a book that will expose the fraudulent basis of the progressive agenda. But surprisingly, he comes through! I figured "Hoodwinked" would turn into a simple rehash of previously covered individuals and movements, and to some extent that's true. There are people in here we've seen in other books. There are wacky ideas here we've seen other places. But there's also obscure people and ideas that have rarely received coverage in other conservative texts. Of course, Cashill discovers it's all anti-Americanism at the core.

Since most readers of this book know the ins and outs of Mumia, Churchill, and Moore, there is no need to discuss these losers. Let's start with where Cashill begins, all the way back in the 1920s when Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti ran afoul of the cops and ended up on death row for murder. As atrocious as their crime was, it paled in comparison to what happened after their conviction. In short, anti-American groups supported by the communists used the case to slander the justice system. It didn't matter to these elements, Felix Frankfurter among them, that the two were guilty as sin. The important thing was to introduce an element of doubt about the efficacy of our legal system. Cashill notes the tactics used in the Sacco and Vanzetti imbroglio would reemerge time and time again in future radical activities. Outright lies played a big part, and lies would continue to fuel the "progressive" agenda. For example, Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews, two reporters working for the esteemed New York Times, turned prevarication into an art form. Duranty knowingly hid information about the Soviet famine from his readers, and Matthews worked hard at covering up the truth about what the communists were doing during the Spanish Civil War and in the takeover of Cuba.

So a couple of red hacks spewed garbage in the newspaper. Who cares, right? Unfortunately, duplicitous behavior spread far beyond journalism. Cashill introduces case after case of the most egregious falsehoods, mind-blowing instances of lying on an epic scale. And wouldn't you know it? Most of it occurred in the hallowed halls of academia. Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist and a proven fraud, receives her just desserts here. So does a chap named Michael Bellesiles, a historian who wrote a book about gun ownership by purposely doctoring the evidence to support his anti-gun conclusions. Emory University insisted he resign when another historian uncovered his fraud. Cashill includes an entire chapter centered on Darwinism, not to discount the theory but to expose how many incidents of phony evidence scientists have used to bolster evolution. My favorite section of the book deals with Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan "peasant" who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her book "I, Rigoberta Menchu." In her autobiography (more like fiction), she claimed right wing elements in her country murdered family members and stole their land. Investigation of her claims turned up a plethora of half-truths and outright malarkey.

I could go on and on. Cashill discusses the horrific ideas of Margaret Sanger, the diseased mind of Alfred Kinsey, and the lifetime of lies spewed by Lillian Hellman. "Hoodwinked" is most shocking not in its discussion of oftentimes objectionable material (see Kinsey), but that fact that a lot of this stuff became widely accepted dogma. Public policies based on this junk have influenced millions of people. As Cashill explains, that's exactly the effect progressives sought. They wanted to change American society to mirror their own warped views of humanity, a view that placed man at the center of their moral and intellectual universe. God, religion, moral codes--all of these antiquated concepts had to go straight into the dumpster if the left-wing wished to achieve positions in government and academia and thus exert powerful influence over the rest of mankind. Those people responsible for uncovering the blatant fraud committed by the various personalities in the book usually suffered for their devotion to the truth. One thing you can say about academics: they don't take kindly to having their mentors yanked out from under their feet. When someone comes along and upsets the apple cart, you can bet your bottom dollar that that person will pay a price for their heresy.

The only problem I had with "Hoodwinked" is one another reviewer mentions, namely that some of the cases Cashill produces for our reading pleasure are problematic. There's no doubt that Kinsey's research involved serious ethical lapses, but relying on information from anti-Kinseyite Judith Reisman might raise a few eyebrows. She's the lady who developed a theory that says watching adult films causes the brain to suffer from the scurrilous effects of "erototoxins," or a combination of chemicals that can physically alter the mind. Obviously, it's not a proven theory. Aside from this instance, the rest of the evidence Cashill produces here is solid stuff that has stood the test of time. I highly recommend this book; it's informative and a lot of fun to read. Buy a copy and give it to a liberal!

This book should be on everybody's shelf. I thank Jack Cashill for providing me with the truth regarding the infamous Sacco & Vanzetti episode in American history. Never before was I aware that these two convicted murderers had little interest in politics. They were not dissidents, but common criminals. Their case was used by radical Leftists merely as a way to slime the American justice system. Cashill doggedly takes to task the false heroes of the liberal establishment. Some of them may be best described as gullible dupes. Others are out and out liars. Cashill's rogue gallery includes Alger Hiss, Ward Churchill, Michael Bellesiles, Rachel Carson, Rigoberta Menchu, Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsley, Lillian Hellman, and countless others. A number of these individuals are literally responsible for the deaths of millions. This may especially true of the previously mentioned Carson and her absurd attack on the pesticide DDT. Did she have the best intentions? I am not interested in playing God. We need only be concerned about the horrific results. Utopian minded liberals have placed these icons of progressive thought on flimsy pedestals made of quick sand. The evidence the author offers is more than sufficient to destroy their ill deserved reputations. Only the committed ideologue will remain unconvinced.

I rarely so unambiguously recommend a particular book. Some books are just not for everyone. Jack Cashill's work, however, is a rare exception. There is too much information that requires your undivided attention. The agenda driven liberal media and institutions have pull a fast one on us. How can we rectify the situation if we remain ignorant of their errors? Please take my advice and purchase a copy of Hoodwinked. The odds are highly favorable that you won't regret it.

Cashill has done a great job of reviewing why liberal believe in so many wrong causes from Saccho and Vanzetti to Mumia. Also how the reasons why they get hoodwinked. A must read for understanding the political debate today. As a former liberal myself I can't explain why it is the left hold on to so many lies except to say in my case it was a willingness to be hoodwinked. Way to go Jack.

I agree that the author's source notations are clumsy and annoying, but I have seen that technique used elsewhere, too. There are two stories in this book, however, that expose the nature of the cultural left with clarity. The first is Cashill's report on the notorious Walter Duranty. The Duranty affair should have been enough to obliterate the New York Times reputation years ago. That newspaper seems to have been a lying rag long before Jason Blair came along. The other story is that of Mary Lefkowitz, asking a question of an "Afrocentrist" speaker at a university engagement in which the speaker claimed that Aristotle participated in the destruction of the library at Alexandria. "How," asked Lefkowitz, "could Aristotle have helped destroy a library that wasn't built until after his death?" However, when the embarrassed "scholar" could not respond, Lefkowitz's colleagues and the multiculturalist crowd expressed anger toward her, rather than the bogus "scholar" who came to campus to feed hokum to the ignoramuses that sustain the multi-culti madhouse.

The destructive ban on DDT is also worth reading about. Rachel Carson has a lot of human woe on her head.