Product Description

For a century, "progressive" writers and filmmakers-multiculturalists like Ward Churchill and Alex Haley, sexual revolutionaries like Kinsey and Margaret Mead, quasi-Marxists like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, and radical naturalists like Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson-have been using falsehood and fraud as their principal weapons in their assault on traditional American culture. For years, an unconnected squad of literary detectives, anthropologists, scientists, and historians, has been picking off the frauds and their enablers one by one. Taken together, the work of these critics is devastating. Jack Cashill's Hoodwinked synthesizes their dogged research and reveals the depth and breadth of the corruption at the very foundation of contemporary intellectual culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #621680 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

A lie repeated often enough becomes the "truth"
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.

Good book, if you don't care for Alfred Kinsey and Ward Churchill.
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.

How Many Americans Know They have been HOODWINKED?
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.