Parents of Teens Should Read “Letters to a Young Progressive”
It seems that working, career-minded parents have less time than ever to spend with teens these days. This is not good in an ambient social world that is militantly secular and liberal, preying upon a young person’s “natural” desire to be independent of parental control (and values).
Now Regnery Publishing has weighed in with some much needed help for parents: Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand. Amazon says that the book is really about “How to Rescue Young Minds from the Liberal World”:
Presented as a series of letters between Adams and his former student, Zach, Letters to a Young Progressive reveals how the “education” of college kids across the country is producing a generation of unhappy, unimaginative, and unproductive adults. The perfect book to help parents prevent–or undo–the ubiquitous liberal brainwashing of their children before it is too late.
In his Amazon review, Paul Tognetti says the book is “A great way to engage that ‘progressive’ young person you really care about”:
Mike S. Adams has been there. In his own words the author “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.” Eventually Mike emerged from his funk and these days he is a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, a nationally syndicated columnist and a highly successful author. The man who once counted himself an angry young “progressive” has undergone a metamorphosis and is now a happy conservative Christian. During his tenure as an educator Mike has seen firsthand the devastating consequences that unchallenged progressive ideas can have on impressionable young minds. As an exercise he decided to write a series of short and very personal letters to a student named Zach. Zach was sort of a composite of so many of the students that he had encountered along the way. Before long his idea morphed into a book. “Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand” is a heartfelt appeal to these young people to consider a very different set of ideas. If you know a naïve young person who you believe is being led down the primrose path then offering him/her a copy of this book would be a great way to engage them and perhaps even help to instigate some serious discussion. It is certainly worth a shot!
In “Letters to a Young Progressive” Mike Adams leaves no stone unturned in challenging the full gamut of progressive thinking. In his letters, Adams addresses issues ranging from institutional racism, speech codes on college campuses, feminism, redistribution of wealth, same-sex marriage, cultural relativism, abortion rights, gun control and progressives’ theories on crime and delinquency to name but a few. In each case Adams wastes little time in pointing out the flaws in the progressive argument and offers up what he considers to be common sense alternatives. In my view it proves to be a very effective technique. He makes his case in a powerful yet easy-to-comprehend way. Sadly, it would appear that all too many of his students have either never been exposed to many of these ideas or have turned their back on them as a result of the indoctrination that they have received at school. I have witnessed this personally on a number of occasions and it is a very sad thing to see. Life is too short to spend years harboring irrational anger about things and ideas you really don’t understand in the first place. One has to wonder what parents are really paying for when they pack their kids off to college these days.
In these turbulent times that find Obamacare, so-called immigration reform and gun control being shoved down our collective throats, the lessons learned in “Letters to a Young Progressive” could go a long way towards changing the perspective of that young person that you care so much about. There is so much at stake here. As Mike Adams points out in his book “Thinking about these issues will actually help you navigate the current political climate. Our politicians are increasingly asking us to trust the government with ever-greater involvement in our affairs. However badly government messes things up, the solution is always more government.” Amen! And so if you are a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, or friend of one of these young whippersnappers I would urge you to consider sending them a copy of Professor Adams’ book. Your thoughtful gift just might help to turn that student around and spare him/her a whole lot of grief. Life is too short. We need to encourage these young people to think for themselves and not just accept at face value all of the nonsense that they are being taught. An ambitious idea well executed. Highly recommended!
