How Ohio State University is marketing evil

Many people are asking why virtually the entire faculty of a midwest university would support two openly homosexual professors in their outrageous effort to brand a librarian a "sexual harasser" solely because he recommended my book, "The Marketing of Evil," as required reading for freshmen.

Most people, when they first hear this story, assume something else must have happened to instigate a formal sexual harassment investigation. Surely, they think, the librarian must have groped a colleague or made a lewd comment to a student. But no, he was accused of being a sexual harasser just because he did what librarians do - they recommend books, in this case mine. And for that, his persecution was ratified by a 21-0 faculty vote.

There is a real reason for this near-unanimous faculty support for such an obviously indefensible and hurtful action, and we'll get to that in a minute.

But first, for those who missed it, here's the story in a nutshell:

Scott Savage is a sincere and devout Christian - a Quaker to be precise - who works as head research librarian at the Ohio State University's Mansfield, Ohio, campus. As a member of the "First Year Reading Experience Committee," Scott suggested four books be considered as required reading for incoming freshmen: The Marketing of Evil by yours truly, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye'or, and It Takes a Family" by Sen. Rick Santorum.

However, three faculty members - including two openly homosexual English profs - viciously attacked The Marketing of Evil as "hate literature," "homophobic tripe" and other bad words. Fine, names don't bother me.

But then they did the unthinkable: They brought a sexual harassment complaint against Scott Savage, insisting his suggestion that freshmen read my book was an act of "harassment due to sexual orientation."

Professor J.F. Buckley, one of the gay profs agitated by my book, wrote in a March 9 inter-faculty e-mail that he was "deeply saddened - and THREATENED (sic) - that such mindless folks" as Savage existed "on this great campus." Then he set up his intended harassment complaint: "You have made me fearful and uneasy being a gay man on this campus. I am, in fact, notifying the OSU-M campus, and Ohio State University in general, that I no longer feel safe doing my job. I am being harassed."

"Harassed" - by a book? And in a modern university environment that daily trumpets "academic freedom," "free speech" and "tolerance" from the rooftops?

Last week, facing not only legal pressure from the Alliance Defense Fund, but also the bright light of national media exposure (after WorldNetDaily broke the story, Sean Hannity, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Post, Human Events, and dozens of bloggers and talk hosts picked up on the story), the university caved in and dropped the charges. The struggle may not be over, however, as Savage and his ADF attorneys are seriously considering a lawsuit against the university.

But now, the question: Why would a modern university faculty join in an obvious witch burning? After all, there are few things worse, in today's climate, than being branded a "sexual harasser."

I'll tell you why I think some faculty members are afraid of a book. If you just crack open The Marketing of Evil and read the very first chapter, you'll encounter a vivid and detailed exposé of exactly the sort of "evil marketing" that is occurring at Ohio State University.

Ready to take a "marketing of evil" tour?

Big 'jam' on campus

OSU Mansfield, a small campus within the entire Ohio State University system, is a typical secular college environment. But peer just beneath the surface, past all the hustle and bustle of university life, and a powerful climate of indoctrination and manipulation comes into view.

But first, just what do I mean by the "marketing of evil?"

The hated book of that name explains exactly how America has been transformed over the last few decades from a beautiful, unified, Judeo-Christian culture into a divided, confused and contentious society increasingly hostile to its own core values. It shows how millions of Americans have been induced to accept beliefs and behaviors that would have horrified our parents and grandparents, and to call it progress. And it documents how this profound change has been accomplished, through a series of brilliant marketing campaigns - programs of persuasion and manipulation calculated to radically alter the way we think and feel about many of life's jugular issues like abortion, homosexuality, the Constitution, divorce, the news media, church, sex, and so on - often using the very words of the "marketers" themselves.

Today, nowhere is this marketing juggernaut more brazen than on our nation's college campuses.

To prepare you for what we'll encounter at OSU - and at most any other school today - let me introduce you to two experts on the selling of homosexuality to America; in fact, they wrote the book. Harvard-educated marketing professionals Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen authored the acknowledged PR bible of the gay-rights movement, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s.

The sophisticated strategy Kirk and Madsen lay out for changing the way Americans think about homosexuality boasts three phases: "Desensitization," "Jamming" and "Conversion."

"Desensitization," these two gay marketing gurus tell us, consists of inundating the public in a "continuous flood of gay-related advertising, presented in the least offensive fashion possible. If straights can't shut off the shower, they may at least eventually get used to being wet."

"The main thing," they confide, "is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome," adding: "[S]eek desensitization and nothing more. - If you can get [straights] to think [homosexuality] is just another thing - meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders - then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won."

So, let's say you're a freshman at OSU-Mansfield. It's probably the first time you've left your parents' nest for an extended period. You're excited. You want to do well in college. You want, as Ferris Bueller told his parents, to "have a fruitful life." And you want to have fun, to be accepted, even loved.

Now it just so happens that during the first quarter of your freshman year, you are required - yep, it's mandatory - to attend a "diversity seminar." If you've somehow made it to college without already having swallowed the secular culture's "celebrate diversity" Kool-Aid, you are about to be force-fed. Basically, "diversity seminars" are "re-education" events wherein attendees are manipulated, guilt-tripped and - let's just say it, brainwashed - into accepting the belief that homosexuality is a minority characteristic, exactly the same as being Jewish or black, and that thinking or feeling otherwise means you're bigoted, judgmental and hateful.

Before seminar day, students are invited to search online a "dictionary of terms related to diversity [www.osu.edu/diversity/dictionary.shtml, (page no longer available)]," to "Test your knowledge of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT)" and to "Take a test at Project Implicit’s website."

You'll never guess what "bias" this test is designed to unearth and to make you feel guilty about.

I won't go into all the powerfully manipulative and psychologically abusive "exercises" these kids are put through during the two-to-three-hour seminar, but you can read about them here. Let's just say the sophisticated use of group pressure, and "exercises" like "Crossing the Line" - where people are forced to "out" themselves publicly by answering progressively more personal and invasive questions - are classic mass manipulation techniques. In fact, as World magazine's Lynn Vincent writes in her report on such campus "orientation" events, the strategy of forcing kids to expose publicly their beliefs and "biases" to strangers is not new: "Mao Tse-Tung used it 're-educate' Chinese university students and pry them loose from their parents' political moorings."

OK, so first they desensitize these youngsters in highly manipulative re-education sessions. Then what?

Specifically, what if someone on campus just doesn't "get the message" and dares to challenge the pro-gay orthodoxy? That's where phase two steamrolls into action: Dissenters are subjected to merciless "jamming" - otherwise known as intimidation, threats and worse - which is exactly what they've been doing to Scott Savage.

"Jamming," explains marketing expert Paul E. Rondeau of Regent University, in his comprehensive study "Selling Homosexuality to America," "is psychological terrorism meant to silence expression of or even support for dissenting opinion." Radio counselor and psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger experienced big-time jamming during the run-up to her planned television show. Outraged over a single comment critical of homosexuals she had made on her radio program, activists launched a massive intimidation campaign against the television program's advertisers. As a result, the new show was stillborn.

"After the Ball" tries to inspire potential jammers by providing a juicy list of negative associations with which opponents, usually Christians, are to be smeared. They include: "Klansmen demanding that gays be slaughtered or castrated," "hysterical backwoods preachers, drooling with hate," "menacing punks, thugs and convicts who speak coolly about the 'fags' they have bashed," and a "tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed."

In my case, the jamming professors got so colorful I actually learned a few new words. Professor Buckley, for example, assessed my credentials this way:

Rather than waste your time with the paucity of intellectual rigor that Kupelian brings to the table, I encourage you to visit his website, and see for yourself his unmitigated homophobia and xenophobia. In short, he is a pontificating, phobic, cultural atavism bemoaning the loss of an (Anglo) America that only existed on such shows as "The Lone Ranger."

Question: If I'm a "pontificating, phobic, cultural atavism" for writing The Marketing of Evil, what do you call an English professor like J.F. Buckley who writes The Social Critic: The Rise of Queer Performance Within the Demise of Transcendentalism?

On a more serious note, I'm not the least disturbed or surprised that a homosexual activist professor doesn't like my book. But what is tremendously disturbing - and the reason this situation became a national story - is the near-unanimous faculty support for such a frivolous and mean-spirited attack on a librarian just for recommending good books.

Obviously, all 21 of the faculty "yes" votes either agreed with the harassment charge, or they were afraid to oppose it. But what about the nine faculty members who abstained from voting? Let me make an educated guess: They had to know the charges of sexual harassment against this poor librarian were ridiculous and that they couldn't vote yes. But they also didn't want to be accused by the rest of the faculty of being homophobes and bigots, so they couldn't vote no. So they didn't vote. The entire faculty - those who voted yes, and those who abstained from voting - wanted to be certain they were not tarred as haters, Neanderthals or "pontificating, phobic, cultural atavisms." In other words, they didn't want to be "jammed."

Those nine abstentions are just one more proof that the OSU Mansfield campus is a place of fear and intimidation, not one of openness, robust inquiry and free speech as the faculty members imagine.

By the way, you'll be interested in knowing, now that the charges against Savage have been dropped, it's time for some good old-fashioned "re-education."

Indeed, the letter Savage received from the university, informing him the charges had been dropped, included several "Recommendations," including this one:

Promote frank, open and respectful discussion among faculty and library staff, in particular and among all staff in general. Dr. Jones had indicated that maybe he could be a liaison person to spearhead this effort.

And who is this "Dr. Jones"? That would be Assistant English Professor Norman Jones - the other gay prof who had just gotten through falsely accusing Savage of sexual harassment and had strongly attacked my book. And now the powers-that-be are floating him as the point man responsible for leading the faculty in "open and respectful discussion" of differences? Is that upside-down or what? I think I'll make a book suggestion myself: "Alice in Wonderland."

Conversion

If these 18-year-old kids are "desensitized," confused and peer-pressured into going along with the "gay-is-good" orthodoxy at the diversity seminar; and if trouble-makers like Scott Savage and me are intimidated and "jammed" for daring to suggest that millennia of Western Judeo-Christian civilization might actually be right on this homosexuality issue; then what about "conversion"? How does that fit in to all of this?

For the inside scoop on the meaning of conversion, let's check in with our gay brainwashing experts, Kirk and Madsen:

We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media. We mean "subverting" the mechanism of prejudice to our own ends - using the very processes that made America hate us to turn their hatred into warm regard - whether they like it or not.

Wow, that's hardcore. And here's something else I'll bet you didn't know: Transforming another person’s hatred into love ("warm regard") is precisely the object of classic brainwashing. As Kirk and Madsen themselves explain:

In Conversion, we mimic the natural process of stereotype-learning, with the following effect: We take the bigot's good feelings about all-right guys, and attach them to the label "gay," either weakening or, eventually, replacing his bad feelings toward the label and the prior stereotype. - Whereas in Jamming the target is shown a bigot being rejected by his crowd for his prejudice against gays, in Conversion the target is shown his crowd actually associating with gays in good fellowship. Once again, it's very difficult for the average person, who, by nature and training, almost invariably feels what he sees his fellows feeling, not to respond in this knee-jerk fashion to a sufficiently calculated advertisement.

This last paragraph describes chillingly what goes on not only at OSU - which is on the hot seat right now only because of the Savage case - but throughout America in colleges and universities large and small. OSU is neither better nor worse in this regard than many other schools. If desensitization softens you up, and jamming shows you by example what happens to dissenters, conversion results when all of your old, negative associations toward homosexuality have been successfully replaced with positive associations.

For young, college-age adults - smart, energetic, idealistic, but also inexperienced, immature and insecure, and with a powerful emotional need for acceptance - this is so very easy to accomplish. As a student, once you've spent a few months watching dissenting Christians portrayed as maniacal skinheads or drooling extra-X-chromosome fundamentalists, after you've been assailed with in-your-face appeals to "fairness" and "tolerance" toward behavior you once knew was wrong, and upon realizing that you too will be reviled and persecuted - and made to fail in class, and thus in life - if you dare utter the moral convictions you once held, you change. You could call it adaptation for the purpose of survival, and it's usually unconscious, because you rationalize your conversion as "the right thing to do."

You develop a new, more "tolerant" identity, one for which you are rewarded and loved. You're no longer in danger of being called "homophobic" or "judgmental." You find yourself looking down on those still clinging to traditional, biblical values as ignorant at best, dangerous or evil at worst. You've been brainwashed - and your parents have paid tens of thousands of hard-earned, after-tax dollars for this "service" of turning you against them.

Before we end our "marketing of evil" tour at OSU, let's look at one more powerful manipulation technique that's very evident in the Savage case: "Accuse Others of the Evil You Do."

The OSU profs complained that the librarian made the Mansfield campus "threatening" and "unsafe" by recommending a few bestselling books. In reality, it is no one but they themselves that made the campus "threatening" and "unsafe" - and not just for Scott Savage. What about the other librarians on the Mansfield campus? Do you think they will ever dare speak their mind on this subject if their views tend toward the traditional? What about the other faculty, and the students? What about librarians at other universities? One veteran librarian wrote last week: "I've asked my colleagues in the Virginia Tech library whether they have become fearful of actually purchasing books for the Tech libraries, given what happened to Mr. Savage for merely recommending a book for a reading list." The answer, obviously, is yes.

The truth is, Scott Savage didn't harass anyone. But it is the faux victims, those who would, if they could, silence everyone who champions the Judeo-Christian moral values that America is founded upon - they are the ones who have made OSU and most of America's college campuses "unsafe" and "threatening." But then, this is exactly the desired effect of desensitization and jamming. After all, the "marketers of evil" will convert as many people as they can. But if they can't convert you - the next best thing is to shut you up.