Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture | 
| Author: Jack Cashill
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 206137
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 1595550119
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.20973
EAN: 9781595550118
ASIN: 1595550119
Publication Date: June 14, 2005
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 44 more reviews...
 All the news that was not "fit to print" March 4, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is about the suppressing of information and the promoting of misinformation that have characterized American society for the last thirty years. Cashill takes up one major story after another and exposes what really happened.
For one, the horrors of Stalin's methods in the 1920s were known to New York Times reporter Duranty and to Britain's Cairns. Both suppressed the truth. Duranty lied about it in the Times. Also, in truly Orwellian fashion, American intellectuals in 1939 swung from being pro-war, then anti-war when Stalin signed with Hitler, then pro-war again when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. The ammunition generated in between however (that America was a war-mongering, imperialist state bent on world domination) would be revived again in 1946 after America had served its purpose and defeated Germany. In our times, Chomsky would turn it into a mantra of the "cultural establishment."
The story of New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews and how he supported Castro by reporting in the pages of the Times that Castro had a vast force is revealing. The people of Cuba might have successfully resisted but for that misinformation. Matthews (and others) had done similar service for the Spanish Civil War years before.
One of the most telling revelations, from the point of view of how things work today, is that of Munzenberg, who dispensed Soviet propaganda from afar through agents inside Europe and America. These agents "reported" things the way the Party wanted them reported and manipulated the "fellow travelers" (people friendly to the ideology of communism who "voiced the dogma du jour as artlessly as if it were [their] own" (p. 16) ). Otto Katz was his operative in Hollywood.
The point of the Sacco-Vanzetti chronicle is the methods that were used: (1) Paint the pair as innocent, helpless victims who are members of a minority group, (2) Paint the guilty party as America (or Massachusetts or some other government entity). "It was Munzenberg's idea" his widow would later reveal (p. 20). Through his agents and contacts, Munzenberg turned Sacco and Vanzetti into worldwide heroes of oppression. The same technique was used to turn a cop-killing thug like Mumia unto a media icon and a darling of the American "cultural establishment."
Another standard mantra was to first deny that atrocities were being committed in some favored country (Cambodia, Africa), then blame the atrocities on America, then attribute them to "inter-tribal conflict" rather than to the fanatics of some ideology or other (communism, Islam) liquidating those who disagreed with them.
"Like cholesterol, multiculturalism has a good kind and a bad kind." (p. 98). A large part of the book reveals the mutation of the civil rights movement into today's multicultural movement, and exposes postmodernism, Afrocentrism, Alex Haley, AIM activist Leonard Peltier and Rigoberta Menchu. The point is not merely that these are frauds but that they were turned into world-class celebrities. When they were exposed, this information was either suppressed or buried on back pages. But it can be found in the pages of this book.
In the last two chapters, Cashill's conservative predilections come to the fore (pro-religion, anti-sex, anti-abortion), and his discussions of Darwin and birth-control are inconclusive at best. One interesting revelation, however, is that the heterosexual AIDS scare begun in the late 1980s was, if not a hoax, at least a gross exaggeration.
Still, there is enough valuable material that this book should be read, especially by all those people who are not going to read it.
 "A lie, told often enough becomes the truth" July 22, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
"A lie, told often enough becomes the truth"-----Lenin
Cashill has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue, and is a former Fulbright professor in France. This hard hitting, captivating and well written book focusses on how radical naturalism, sexual hedonism, Marxism, and multiculturalism have sabotaged our moral culture; and the hoaxes from Piltdown man to global warming. Eventually there will come someone who catches the lies, enabling us to discern the truth; Cashill fills this book with people who've brought us to this difficult time. He backs up his investigation with substantial end notes.
Chapter One invites us into the world of the "new morality"; created by the likes of Michael Moore, Ward Churchill, and the many other intellectual liberals who follow this road to oblivion. These are the men of fraud and deceit; of a man centered world.
Chapter Two, though a bit drawn out, examines the great lie of communism, socialism, and Marxism. Marxism has disguised itself in the liberals (sorry, "progressives") of America. These radical beliefs are so strong in being right that it overrides the conscious: leading to the shameless discrediting and proving the west wrong; the lawyers new strategy of getting off (foreign) criminals; the hyperboles, false reporting, and deliberate ignorance of the atrocities world-wide, and apologists attitude in journalism; and Hollywood and the great classical writers influence. Cashill also takes a look at histories influences: such as the coming of communism, Marxism, and progressivism's roots. "The progressive mind is a many-turned thing."
Chapter Three deals with multiculturalism, and the "no objective truths" that is postmodernism; and the relativism the teachers and professors are filling are kids heads with, for example: the early cultural falsehoods of the black man, and blaming the Anglo-Saxon for their ills. Who cares about the truth if there is an ideology to defend. God or man, that is the choice.
Chapter Four: the book would not be complete without mentioning Darwinian naturalism, and the spawn: the fraud of Haeckel, Hitler's Nazism, Mendel, Gould, and of late, Dawkins. Ehrlich's population control and environmentalism blessed us with his predecessor Al Gore. We can thank the eradication of DDT for the progressive environmentalism movement (a sore subject with me); many millions of lives have been lost from malaria.
Chapter Five brings us into the social engineering of Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood and the fall out: Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey. Many of these propagators and hoaxes still blindly live on today.
"When their own dreams fail, as those dreams inevitably do, progressives are more likely to either ignore or romanticize the past than to reevaluate it."
Good accompaniments: Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About America" and Michael Crichton's "State of Fear"
Wish you well
Scott
Fantastic February 23, 2007
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
A tour de force from one of our most overlooked prose stylists and one of the strongest intellects in the conservative movement. The one and two star reviews are liberal sour grapes. It is true that if you read TNR or The Nation, you will not like this book.
 You Can't Tell A Book By Its Cover February 16, 2007
8 out of 21 found this review helpful
Upon reading HOODWINKED an observation by the anthropologist Franz Boas came to mind:
"We could read our newspapers [and books] with much greater satisfaction if our language, like the Indian Kwakiutl idiom, compelled us to say whether a report is based on self-experience, or inference, or on hearsay, or whether the reporter has dreamed it."
HOODWINKED, published by Nelson Current, the political imprint of Thomas Norton, Inc., a publisher of Christian books, is authored by a PhD in American Studies from Purdue, winner of both a Fulbright professorship and film documentary awards. Certainly Dr. Cashill has appropriate "self-experience" to argue his thesis that:
"Control of the cultural establishment is just one reason why fraud plagues the political left. The less obvious but more fundamental reason is that progressive authors and their cultural support groups live in a world where God, if not fully dead, is irrelevant. By default, progressives tend to ground their morality in the shaky materialist philosophy introduced by the Greek philosopher Epicurus and popularized by Darwin and Marx."
Looking for compelling evidence of the left-wing conspiracy Cashill warns us of, I read on to his coverage of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair (which I concentrate on in this review). He introduces it with the section heading: A COUPLE OF WOPS IN A JAM. Although, as Cashill notes, there are dozens of books, including six volumes of published trial transcripts (Henry Holt, 1927) and extraordinarily detailed internet site accounts (e.g. Court TV's CRIME LIBRARY), Cashill relies largely on Robert H. Montgomery's SACCO-VANZETTI: THE MURDER AND THE MYTH (Western Islands, 1965) while marginalizing, tainting or dismissing those whose analysis differs from his such as then Harvard law professor and later Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter's THE CASE OF SACCO AND VANZETTI - A CRITICAL ANALYSIS FOR LAWYERS AND LAYMEN (Little Brown, 1927), the views of later Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the proclamation by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in 1977, the 50th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti "that any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti."
Instead, Dr. Cashill points us to the evidence against them: the "guns, bullets, and shotgun shells that would match those used in the two crimes" and gives short shrift to the concept of "reasonable doubt" and the ample alternative case put forward, for example, by Frankfurter. [Credible forensic evidence is still being debated for and against Sacco as the murderer (cf. J.E. Starrs, JOURNAL OF FORENSIC EVIDENCE, 1986, 31, 630-54; Henry Lee, FAMOUS CRIMES REVISITED, Strong Books, 2001). Cashill decries the "Manichean divide" he claims liberals set up, managing in the same breath, to complain about the "standard Democratic stump speech" of John Edwards in the 2004 U.S. presidential race, and that "progressives worldwide have historically shown little faith in the wisdom of their fellow citizens."
Dr. Cashill has not relied on "hearsay" for his rendering of events, but rather, has imposed his own Manichean divide on them. His account leaves out or glosses over what made the Sacco-Vanzetti affair a cause celebre world wide and not simply among those wishing to promote, or being duped by, a Marxist agenda and propaganda campaign, as he claims was the case. The trial of these two Italian anarchists was defined by judicial, prosecutorial, defense and juror errors,submerged in an atmosphere of very scary times in which an anarchist under FBI custody crashed out the 14th floor to the street below, a murderous bomb exploded on Wall Street and another in front of the home of an attorney general. Hence, contrary to Cashill's certainties, and to the detriment of his overarching thesis that we are hoodwinked, it is most unlikely that the many questions about the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti will ever be answered. That is, unless one dreams it.
Left Out--The Truth Shall Make You Flee October 13, 2006
7 out of 16 found this review helpful
Looking for a well written, concise, documented expose of leftist-liberal political/social/historical/academic prevarications over the last century. Look no further. This is the book. It deserves a Pulitzer Prize. It drives a stake through the rotten and dishonest heart of so called "progressive" ideology of the so called "intellectual elites".
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