Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand

“When it comes to skewering liberal academia, Mike Adams has no peer. But in this book he goes beyond skewering.
Letters to a Young Progressive
is a full-on indictment of the radical secularism on our university campuses that relentlessly attacks our kids’ faith in the God of the Bible and encourages them to embrace radical ideologies. As a professor, Adams has seen the results from the inside, and he’s also directly combating these forces and making a positive difference. This book is essential—as is Adams’s work on campus dealing with young adults. We need more like him in the trenches if we are to help save the younger generation from the onslaught of forces militantly hostile to God and traditional values.”

—DAVID LIMBAUGH,
New York Times
bestselling
author of
The Great Destroyer, Persecution,
and
Crimes Against Liberty

“Quite often it’s not what you don’t know that causes you problems, but what you think you know that really isn’t so. With the wit of Twain and the logic of Buckley, Mike Adams shows why much of what liberals teach our kids really isn’t so. Adams exposes the false assumptions liberals make about human nature, and how many liberal positions are literally logically self-defeating. Don’t go to college or join the next victim movement without reading this book!”

—FRANK TUREK,
founder and president
of
CrossExamined.org
, co-author of
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist
and
Legislating Morality,
and author
of
Correct, Not Politically Correct

“I thank God for Mike Adams. His book is way more than an entertaining read, though it is that! It’s a call to a self-righteous generation to give up imaginary causes that inflate the ego but do nothing to promote real justice in the culture. The chapters on abortion alone are worth the purchase price! If you are a conservative student or parent, read this to engage a center-left nation that would rather feel than think!”

—SCOTT KLUSENDORF,
president
of the Life Training Institute

“Four decades ago I could have used a professor like Mike Adams who cared enough to challenge the Marxist thinking into which I fell. If you love a student who is also succumbing, this book is an ideal present. Two hours with it can awaken a propagandized brain that will otherwise wallow in two or more years of misery.”

—MARVIN OLASKY,
editor in chief of World News Group,
and author of
The Tragedy of American Compassion

To Marilyn Adams,
a praying mother who never gave up on me

Preface

The story you are about to read is true, though the hero of our tale is a composite character, representing countless students I’ve taught over the years. They enroll in universities for a valuable education and instead become increasingly enraged at the world and disgusted with other people. This is unfortunate, because they are getting angry over things that aren’t even true. They are misled by a miserable generation of professors acting on the principle that misery loves company.

In North Carolina, where I teach, parents who didn’t get to go to college themselves work and save and sacrifice so that they can proudly send their kids to join the alleged best and brightest and be successful. But after a short time on a university campus, the kids start rejecting their parents’ values—the very values that have provided for their education. Ironic, isn’t it? Sometimes the parents begin to wonder whether they’re making a wise investment by sending their kids to college—or at least to a secular college. Tensions arise between kid and parent, and the parent notices that the kid has stopped respecting the parent’s point of view. I notice, too. When I comment on students’ angry outbursts of disdain for other people, suggesting they might show a little more humility, I inevitably hear back, “You sound just like my dad.”

When I began writing these letters, I didn’t realize I was writing a book. In fact, when I first wrote the first letter, I was already at work on a completely different book. But after a series of encounters with students whose worldview had been soured by progressive education, I thought of all the other bright kids across the country, tens of thousands of them, who are intellectually impressionable because they are bright, and how they are being led astray by professors who take pleasure in making students angry and alienated. I wanted to do something to counter that.

If this account sounds personal, that’s because it is. I was once one of those bright kids, lost for seventeen angry years because of professors who lured me into their reasonless angst. It almost killed me. But I survived.

Unlike most true stories, this one has a happy, if surprising, ending. Start reading and keep on reading. Don’t cheat by flipping forward to the last chapter. The destination requires a journey.

PART ONE

SIGNPOSTS ALONG THE WAY

“Rhetoric is no substitue
for reality.”

—Thomas Sowell

LETTER 1

No, Zachary, Glenn Beck Isn’t Charles Manson

Dear Zach,

I hope your semester is going well. I’ve been pleased to have you in my class on famous American trials (CRM 425 or “Trials of the Century”), and I’m taking the time to write in response to a remark you made during our recent discussion of the Manson case.

As you undoubtedly recall, we were discussing Charles Manson, who directed members of his “Family” to commit a series of grisly murders in 1969, and when I noted that Manson had exploited his followers through fear, you interrupted, “Sort of like Glenn Beck?”

I probably have too many pet peeves for a man of my age, and students’ blurting out questions or comments without raising a hand—particularly when I am in the middle of a sentence and the comment leads the discussion astray—is one of them.

But I haven’t written to scold you. I can’t do that because I don’t have the moral authority to do so. You see, I used to be like you. Let me explain.

A fundamentalist Baptist mother and an atheist father raised me, and when I went off to college in 1983, I declared myself an agnostic. Had I remained an agnostic, things might not have been so bad. But instead, while I was a graduate student, I declared myself an atheist. There was nothing intellectual about my decision to become an atheist; it was behavior-driven.

In 1989, I began a short career as a professional musician to help pay for school, and started experimenting with amphetamines and methamphetamines. The drugs nearly killed me. In late 1990, I had a fight with my girlfriend and suddenly found myself taking a trip to the emergency room after my heart stopped beating. That was a direct result of the pills. I later realized I also had a serious problem with alcohol.

I was passionate about being an atheist. I once told a fellow graduate student, the wife of a pastor, to “Go [rhymes with ”truck“] yourself” when she tried to “witness” to me.

I adopted leftist politics to go with my atheism. The connection to the progressive worldview was clear and simple. In rejecting Christianity, I had rejected the Judeo-Christian view of man as a fallen being. Instead, I believed that we could create a utopia through politics. I felt contempt for conservative Christians who stood in the way of progress, who did not realize that man was fundamentally good and perfectible. We didn’t need God; we only needed the right laws, the right people in office, and the right social conditions, and then everything would be perfect—all the world’s problems would be solved.

I pretended to be an intellectual atheist, but really I had adopted this worldview because it allowed me to live a life unencumbered by morality, to sleep with a different woman every night, and not to feel bad about it—or so I thought. What really happened was that treading the path of militant liberal atheism made me an angrier and angrier person—the sort of person, in fact, who would compare a talk show host to a serial killer.

That is why I am writing to you today. I know that you have been spending a lot of time on left-wing websites like the Daily Kos and Media Matters, the latter of which is run by billionaire communist George Soros. I have also noticed that you have been increasingly virulent in your attacks on Republican politicians such as George W Bush and Sarah Palin. Your demeanor is increasingly hostile and arrogant. It reminds me of a time in my own life when I thought I was being clever and cynical and wise.

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