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AN INTERVIEW with Daniel Flynn author of Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. Quotable:

Ra^thergate is a microcosm of the main idea of this book, which is that ideology makes smart people fall for stupid ideas. Had Dan Rather and his underlings at CBS been motivated by getting at the truth rather than advancing a specific political agenda, they would have never fallen for the forged memos.

And this:

Intellectual Morons breaks new ground in a number of areas. Specifically, all of Margaret Sanger’s major biographers fail to mention her very detailed plan for American concentration camps housing millions. I do. None of Alfred Kinsey’s biographers even bothers to interview one of Kinsey’s child victims. I do.

And this:

The individuals discussed in the book all have massive cultural import, and have fallen for or propagated foolish ideas. Sex pervert Alfred Kinsey’s reports helped launch the sexual revolution. The modern feminist movement began as a result of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Stalinist W.E.B. Du Bois finds his face on a U.S. postage stamp, his life the subject of two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, and his name gracing the tallest library in the world at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst .. Paul Ehrlich touted a coming environmental apocalypse and received foundation prizes and bequests well into the seven figures; appeared frequently on The Tonight Show, Today, and other widely watched television shows; and sold millions of books .. Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the New Left of the 1960s, waged war on language by renaming intolerance as tolerance, violence as nonviolence, and dictatorship as democracy. Marcuse’s Newspeak led to the Left rationalizing censorship, acts of violence by radicals, and support of totalitarians like Castro or the Palestinian terrorists—all while claiming to advocate tolerance, non-violence, and democracy .. Leo Strauss is the Right’s deconstructionist. He saw the entire history of philosophy as a massive conspiracy theory, in which nearly all of the world’s great thinkers — Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, etc. — dishonestly advanced one message suitable to the masses while encoding their real message “between the lines” to other wise men. Strauss purports to find these hidden messages by using a form of numerology, searching for implied contradictions, projecting special meaning on the first and last words of a text, and adding importance to passages in certain locations of a book.

Daniel Flynn is also the author of Why the Left Hates America. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack