Ideology: A Mental Straight Jacket

Many widely respected ideologues willfully ignore reality in support of their agendas, the former executive director of Accuracy in Academia told the audience at a recent luncheon sponsored by Accuracy in Media.

Dan Flynn, author of Intellectual Morons, charges some prominent members of Academia with relying on ideology over reason. “In academia,” he says, “you have people sworn to uphold the truth who wage war on it when it doesn’t support their cause.” Their ideology acts as a “mental straight jacket” which keeps them from the enlightenment of truth that reliance upon facts, reason, and reality brings.

One such ideologue is the recent highly publicized Alfred Kinsey, “a charlatan who embarked upon research to confirm his pre-drawn conclusions,” says Flynn. He is the author of the Kinsey Reports, a series of “scholarly works” which, some say, set off the mid-20th-Century sexual revolution in America. Kinsey’s “fraudulent scholarship” and desire to push his agenda led him to “pay a friend $500 to pretend to be his Institute for Sex Research’s statistician.” He also stacked his studies with prison inmates while withholding blacks, senior citizens and religious people from his survey data, a charge that Kinsey admits. In research on whether or not children enjoy sexual encounters, Kinsey relied on pedophiles’ testimonies. “He interpreted ‘violent cries,’ ‘loss of color,’ ‘an abundance of tears,’ and ‘sobbing’ as symptoms of sexual climax for infants and young children.”

Despite these and many other charges, Kinsey is still the “number one cited sex researcher.” His studies continue to be upheld as scholarly and credible by much of academia. Flynn warns, “when you base knowledge on a house of cards you will be wrong a lot more than you will be right…The Kinsey Reports of the 1940s and’50s tell us next to nothing about the sexual practices of Americans. What they tell us about Alfred Kinsey, and the intellectuals who continue to promote his findings, is far more revealing.”

Another sexually revolutionary icon Flynn takes aim at is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and one of the five greatest [sheroes] of history, according to NOW (the National Organization for Women). This supposed hero was a “femi-nazi” long before radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase.

In 1932, one year before the Nazi party came to power in Germany, Sanger wrote a “Plan for Peace” where she advocated a number of policies that should make modern feminists cringe. Sanger petitioned Congress to appoint a “Parliament of Population.” In her own words, this “Congress Population” should:

– keep the birthrate at its present level

– keep the doors of immigration closed to…certain aliens detrimental to the stamina of the race

– apply a stern policy of sterilization and segregation to those whose objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring

– give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization

– apportion farm lands for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.

Margaret Sanger, widely considered the mother of feminism, openly advocated sterilization, segregation and slavery! Her biographies, however, say that she is a hero for choice and a champion of reproductive freedom. “You can’t have it both ways,” says Flynn.

Not all of the Intellectual Morons Flynn profiles are deceased. Flynn calls Noam Chomsky, “Michael Moore with his brain on steroids.” Chomsky is the guru of the post-sixties left, and some say he is the most widely cited academic in the social sciences that is alive today. But according to Flynn, “Chomsky has a track record of making a fool of himself.” In the 1970’s, Chomsky “served as an apologist for Pol Pot.” He said the “killing fields were a hoax, a New York Times invention.” He also blamed America for these people’s deaths. “He based his opinions on his own sympathy for communism and hatred for capitalism,” says Flynn. Chomsky argued that “a few thousand people at most” were dying when in reality Pol Pot killed well over a million (so many that they stopped using bullets; instead, in order to save ammo, they started using plastic bags that they could use over and over again to suffocate people).

Later, Chomsky argued such ridiculous notions such as the “standard of living in Cuba was equal to or greater than in the United States.” And recently, in the buildup to the war in Afghanistan, Chomsky projected that we would see between three and four million civilian deaths. The actual count was in the hundreds. It is a wonder that Chomsky has any credibility at all. “But,” Flynn argues, “because he is politically correct he can get away with being factually incorrect.”

Abraham Taylor is an intern at Accuracy in Media.