Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Dr. Michael Rectenwald to the newsmakers line who is the author of 11 books, including Thought Criminal and Google Archipelago to discuss his new venture as chief academic officer of americanscholars.com that provides pro-America education and a place for parents and educators to congregate in the battle against woke education indoctrination.
Leahy: We are delighted to be joined on our newsmaker line by Dr. Michael Rectenwald. Former Professor of Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon and is the author of Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, The Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and Its Postmodern Parentage.
Now, if that’s not enough he is now the chief academic officer for a new organization called American Scholars. On the web at americanscholars.com. Good morning, Dr. Rectenwald.
Rectenwald: Good morning. Great to be here. How are you, Mike?
Leahy: I am so glad to have you on. Once again, I’ll just say this for our listening audience. You are one of the bravest members of academia in modern American history. And I salute you for all that you’ve done to advance the cause of intellectual honesty.
Rectenwald: Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I’m fine. I’m doing my best.
Leahy: (Laughs) I can relate. We’re all just doing our best. Michael, American Scholars on the web at americanscholars.com is described as a pro-American education platform. Members will learn American constitutional values at any time.
Lessons and informed discussions led by top university professors. You’re the chief academic officer. When did this start? And how can people participate in americanscholars.com?
Rectenwald: We started putting together the whole platform and hiring the faculty about four months ago, and we’re ready to launch on July 4. We’re launching on Independence Day.
Leahy: I love that!
Rectenwald: It’s time to claim your academic and educational independence.
Leahy: Now, if you go to americanscholas.com today, you just see the one Web page. But I guess on the fourth, which is just three days from today, the fourth of July, you’ll have a more robust site.
Rectenwald: You’ll be able to sign up and you’ll go into a forum where people are discussing all these issues of relevance today, like Critical Race Theory. And people will be able to organize, congregate and then also talk with top professors on all the issues that are plaguing us today.
Critical Race Theory, Big Tech censorship, socialism, and the way the free market is being run down and overcome by socialism. All of that will have top professors there talking with you about all those issues and giving you expert advice.
And also soon, anytime lessons in various areas like American history, constitutional principles, Big Tech censorship, Critical Race Theory. You name it.
Leahy: Whose idea was American Scholars? Who are the founders of it? And what’s the form of organization?
Rectenwald: It’s a partnership, and it was founded by Matt Pohl. He’s a former academic advisor and admissions officer at the University of Penn. And then we have a technology person who wants to remain anonymous because he’s still involved in Big Tech, and he’s afraid of being canceled.
And he’s another principle. And then myself. We’re the three principles. And we’ve hired faculty members and we have a board of directors. And so we’re a partnership. And we’re launching on the fourth to bring all this to people and to bring non-indoctrinating education to people.
Plus, giving parents who are dealing with Critical Race Theory in the schools a place to congregate, to organize, to get completely up to speed, and how to counter all this.
Leahy: And are you able to finance this all from your own investments? Is it a nonprofit? How do people support this financially?
Rectenwald: You’ll be able to sign up for as little as $5 you can be on the platform, and then you have an opportunity to donate additional money at the same time to help support us. Because basically, we’re bootstrapping this entirely on our own.
Leahy: I can relate.
Rectenwald: Yeah.
Leahy: We’re going to help you. And we’ll talk offline. We’ll do some banner ads and maybe some other advertisements to support your great efforts at americanscholars.com. When we come back, we’ll have more with Professor Michael Rectenwald.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Michael Rectenwald” by Michael Rectenwald.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Dr. Michael Rectenwald to the newsmakers line who is the author of 11 books, including Thought Criminal and Google Archipelago outlines how corporations are positioning themselves in ideological favor due to China’s influence in state economics in order to survive.
Leahy: We are joined by our good friend again, former Professor at NYU Michael Rectenwald who is actually an academic who thinks independently and has written some great books published by Nashville’s own New English Review Press. Professor Rectenwald welcome again back to The Tennessee Star Report.
Rectenwald: Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Leahy: So woke capitalism. You warned us about this for some time. We’ve seen it now going crazy with the actions by Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. He is a Harvard Law School graduate with no common sense that has decided to punish the citizens of Georgia because their legislature passed common sense, election integrity reform laws. The way to punish them? Move the All-Star Game from the Truist Park in Cobb County Metro Atlanta which is 50 percent black to 9 percent Black in Denver, Colorado, home of the Colorado Rockies.
Here’s what bothers me, Professor Rectenwald, to me that these four 500 executives and Major League Baseball Commissioner talking about the head of Delta Airlines ahead of Coca-Cola, they aren’t even looking at the facts of these bills. They are just kind of responding to political pressure and then trying to force the duly elected state legislatures in these sovereign states to change their policies. What do you make of all this?
Rectenwald: These corporations are actually, they’re not even caving to pressure they are the pressure at this point. And ironically, the laws that they’re moving the game over are more restrictive in Colorado than they are in Georgia. And furthermore, how outrageous it is that Major League Baseball is willing to play games in China where China keeps people in concentration camps and forced labor and brainwashing techniques are underway constantly. So they’re complete hypocrites. It’s outrageous. And they’re completely not paying attention to reality in terms of where the real oppression is taking place.
Leahy: You said something very important there. They’re not paying attention to reality. They’re not recognizing reality. How is it that leaders of many Fortune 500 companies and the commissioner of baseball are so disconnected from reality? How did that happen?
Rectenwald: Ideology, ideology creates a worldview that blocks out a lot of information and a lot of facts. It just shapes the world view, such that you see the world in a certain restricted way, and you don’t have a wider lens to be able to see other factors of reality. They’re under this word ideology, which is a form of socialism and socialist ideology and that’s what they’re looking at the world through this lens, which makes invisible certain elements that are there.
Leahy: Of the leadership, the top management of Fortune 500 companies in America today, what would be your guess as to the percentage of them that have this woke ideology?
Rectenwald: I’m going to say it’s about 95 to 99 percent at this point.
Leahy: I think you’re right. If we went back 20 years ago, what would that number have been?
Rectenwald: Probably zero to one.
Leahy: So it’s been a 20-year change, right?
Rectenwald: Right. A huge, massive shift that’s taking place ideologically in this country from what I would call American values. I don’t know what to say, to socialist ideology. Really it’s an incredible ideological paradigm shift that’s taken place.
Leahy: How did that happen?
Rectenwald: What’s happening is we’ve had tremendous pressure through academia and this ongoing indoctrination and academia which I’d say it has been going on for 30 years or 50 years even. But more intensely in the last 10 to 20 years. And I think also, frankly, I’m not sure to the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party is behind some of this.
And in other words, the pressure they’re exerting ideologically thanks to their foothold in our economy. So that’s what they do. They ingratiate everyone to them by virtue of getting an economic stronghold, and then they start to perpetuate their ideology on the rest of the world. This is what they’re doing with their One Belt One Road Initiative. And they’re doing it in the United States vis a vis economic ties.
Leahy: Your suspicion is one I share. Getting the evidence for it, of course, will take a little bit of time. But I share that suspicion about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the thoughts of leadership and America’s Fortune 500 companies. What is to be done? How do we move that number from 95 to 99 percent woke among America’s Fortune 500 executives back down towards something manageable?
Rectenwald: I tell you what, I’m not sure it will work through some sort of reverse ideological indoctrination. What’s going to happen is the economy is going to suffer tremendously because this is all based on bad economics first of all. And we’re going to undergo this continues some serious cataclysms economically, and this could wake people up. Sometimes it takes some sort of a catastrophe for people to wake up because they can’t see outside of their blinders. So I’m afraid if it’s not going to be through reverse engineering, the ideological indoctrination, it may have to come through some economic problems.
Leahy: So what would be the economic problems resulting from the woke ideology of Fortune 500 executives?
Rectenwald: Well, what it is is it is a state-enforced. What they’re doing is they’re ingratiating themselves to the state because they believe the state will be the main means by which they’re going to make it economically, only those favored corporations. So as long as the state is dishing out all the money, which is what’s happening, then you’re going to have these companies beholden to the state in terms of their beliefs so that they’re in accord with what’s happening. And since we have a fully Democratic-run government, this is what afoot.
They’re providing all this money by printing it endlessly. What will happen is we’ll get into severe inflation at some point. And, you know, the Chinese economy is only functioning because we had a U.S. market to buy their goods. And if they make this such that so this could never really work long term. You can’t have the state being the main source of economic growth. It won’t work. What will happen is the economy will crash, and then you have to see that the market itself has to be the main driver. And that’s what we’re going to get into.
Leahy: When you see the economy crash, though, won’t the Fortune 500 companies be in a stronger position than, say, mid-size companies and small businesses?
Rectenwald: Absolutely. And that’s part of the whole, unfortunately, I don’t want to call the plan, but that’s the setup. This favors large-scale corporations over small businesses that are being as we’ve seen through the Coronavirus response have been obliterated. We’ve lost maybe 50 percent of small businesses over this crisis.
And it’s favoring these large corporations. And unfortunately, they may see the solution as more bailouts from the government. But at some point, this money is not going to mean anything, because if you keep printing money, the greater the supply, the cheaper it is, the less it’s worth. And so likewise, it’s inflationary. There’s no way around it.
Leahy: Professor Rectenwald, what you’re saying makes common sense. Last question for you. I appreciate your time this morning. How has your message been received?
Rectenwald: Well, outside of I would say, alternate type sources of news it’s not being received at all. I can’t get it across because you can’t break into the mainstream legacy media with this kind of message. They’re all down with this new monetary policy that you can just print money endlessly and suppose that things are going to work out when the facts of economics just tell you that’s not true and ideologically. You just can’t get across because they just peg you as some sort of a right-wing nut case instead of paying attention to what you’re saying. We’re in precarious conditions, and they’re on shaky ground.
Leahy: Well, our listeners, I can tell you this Professor Rectenwald are glad to hear your message and come back again and give more details on it as this continues. Thanks for joining us today.
Rectenwald: Thanks for having me. My pleasure.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Michael Rectenwald” by Michael Rectenwald.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Dr. Michael Rectenwald to the newsmakers line who is the author of 11 books, including Thought Criminal and Google Archipelago.
During the third hour, Rectenwald gave a synopsis of his new thriller Thought Criminal and his experience as a conservative professor. He explained how he was dismissed by NYU for being a free thinker and exposing social justice agendas on college campuses as it is now entirely impossible to be in academia unless you are a leftist.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by Dr. Professor Michael Rectenwald. He was formerly a professor of global liberal studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. You can find him on Twitter at theAntiPCProf. He’s the author of Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke and Google Archipelago. Welcome, Dr. Rectenwald to the Tennessee Star Report.
Rectenwald: Thank you, Michael. Good to be here.
Leahy: So we have something in common. You are a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh Pitt panther. You got a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I went to high school in Jamestown, New York just about 100 miles north of Pittsburgh. And you probably spent a few summers up I’m guessing at the Chautauqua Institute or know of it, which was near my hometown.
Rectenwald: I’ve absolutely been there.
Leahy: Yep. Great place, although they are so PC these days it’s just unbelievable. You have done some great work. Tell us about your new book Thought Criminal.
Rectenwald: Well, Thought Criminal is a science fiction thriller set in the not-so-distant future in which there is a database called the collective mind and there is a virus that’s been released, the protagonist thinks directly by the state. And the nanobots and then our robot that connects the neurons of the neocortex to the collective mind done controls inputs and outputs therefore of thinking in general. So the idea is to stay free of the virus because we connect you to this database that controls your thoughts. And the hero is attempting to stay disconnected and to retain his own individuality.
Leahy: It sounds like it’s a continuation of your work on what’s really been happening. And it’s nonfiction. Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom. And then I love this one. Springtime for Snowflakes. ‘Social Justice’ and Its Postmodern Parentage. Springtime for Snowflakes, was that a take on the musical play The Producers?
Rectenwald: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, Springtime for Hitler is exactly where it came from. And I’m trying to talk about the totalitarian nature of the left and I think that’s become evident by now to just about everybody.
Carmichael: Who do you include on the left?
Rectenwald: Well, ironically I include of course the Democratic Party today who are basically overtly socialist, but also Big Tech ironically, and most of the political establishment in general. But also ironically a lot of corporations are now considered part of the left. And of course, the deep state, or if you will, the intelligence community and the major bureaucracy. So basically it’s the entire social and political establishment at this point.
Carmichael: Now, why do you think that Big Tech and big companies are members of the left?
Rectenwald: Well, I think it’s pretty obvious what they’re trying to do is establish a kind of oligarchy on top with the monopolies basically and nothing else in between monopolies. And the rest of the people effectively are under ‘socialism.’ So it’s a kind of corporate socialism that’s being established.
Carmichael: Well, let me approach it a little differently. Let me use Warren Buffett because Warren Buffett for years has said that he should pay more taxes.
Rectenwald: Right.
Carmichael: That’s what he said. And then when he has the right the opportunity to ride a large check and send it to the treasury he demurs. So why do you think Warren Buffett for years has said he wants to pay more taxes, but then never has? Why do you think he has said it for years?
Rectenwald: Well, he’s trying to suggest that the oligarchy is benevolent in that they are willing to extend their largesse to the public. But I don’t think that’s really the case. I think they’re very much set on establishing and keeping their oligarchical position and then effectively dueling out whatever they will to the state and then the state to the people.
So really there’s an ongoing concerted effort to destroy the middle class. There’s no question about it. This is why you have all this socialist ideology coming out of every institution. All of Academia. Almost the entire Democratic Party and Big Tech actually promoting socialism. It’s a very ironic circumstance.
Carmichael: I’m going to tell you what I think it is. I think it’s the multi-billionaires trying to protect their multi-billions, and they don’t see the Republican Party as the threat to taxing their wealth. They do see the Democrat Party as a threat so they’re going to throw in with the Democrat Party to help the Democrat Party do what you say and that is destroying the middle class and set themselves up to be on the inner circle of what then becomes a fascist form of government.
Rectenwald: That’s right. It’s fascism but to the extent that it’s the collusion between the state and these corporations or oligarchs. But international fascism if you will. The only difference is it’s not nationalists, it’s globalists.
Leahy: Professor Michael Rectenwald this is Michael Patrick Leahy again, of course, earlier was Crom Carmichael who’s in here as a co-host every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I want to follow up with your own career. You’ve got a fantastic academic background. You left NYU, New York University in 2019. Is it difficult now to continue in the academic world and exercise free thought?
Rectenwald: It’s absolutely impossible. You must be a leftist. There’s no way around it. You have to be a leftist and if you’re not a leftist and you come out basically like I did by criticizing social justice and wokeness, then you’re in trouble. And that’s exactly what happened to me. It’s almost impossible to be in Academia otherwise, you have to hide it. You’d have to completely defect and be a complete socially isolated person and never speak your views once.
Leahy: What’s your plan to combat that personally?
Carmichael: Let’s ask him what happened.
Leahy: What happened to you?
Rectenwald: Well, what happened to me is I started a Twitter account called @TheAntiPCProf and started tweeting criticisms of social justice. And then I was interviewed by the student newspaper where I came out publicly as myself. The Twitter account had been anonymous, and then within two days, I was forced into a paid leave of absence and condemned by a committee called the diversity equity and inclusion group.
Carmichael: Whoa.
Rectenwald: Yeah. And they basically totally trashed my academic career just for making criticisms of what was going on at campuses.
Leahy: So what’s your plan going forward to be an academic public intellectual and make a living in this very different and weird world we live in?
Rectenwald: I’ve created a situation in which I’m basically uncancellable. I write for the Mises Institute and I write books and I live as a public intellectual at this point. I am a completely intellectual entrepreneur. So I don’t rely on any of these institutions for my income because it’s impossible to be a freethinker within these institutions.
Carmichael: I would encourage you that if you are paid to do public speeches that you come up with a number of pseudonyms. (Laughter) You can become an army of 20. They can cancel one speaker and poop you could pop up as another one. (Laughs)
Leahy: Hey, here’s an open invitation when the coronavirus situation improves come on down to Nashville. We will welcome you with open arms and give you an opportunity to speak. And our listeners here on the Tennessee Star Report would be delighted to hear your argument.
Carmichael: And you’ll like Nashville a lot better than wherever you are.
Rectenwald: I like Nashville. My publisher is located in Nashville.
Leahy: Is that Post Hill Press?
Rectenwald: The New English Review Press.
Leahy: I didn’t know about them. We want to meet them. So thanks for letting us know that.
Rectenwald: Great.
Leahy: Professor Michael Rectenwald, thanks so much for joining us and we look forward to talking with you more.
Carmichael: And meeting him.
Leahy: And meeting you in person.
Rectenwald: Sounds great to me guys. That’s fantastic.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Dr. Michael Rectenwald” by Dr. Michael Rectenwald.
