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The Devil’s Pleasure Palace
- The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West
- Narrated by: Michael Walsh
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
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The Devil’s Pleasure Palace
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Publisher's Summary
In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world's premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, burgeoning transnational elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war's refugees but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of "critical theory". At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, critical theory - like Pandora's box - released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a Central European nihilism celebrated on college campuses across the United States. In The Devil's Pleasure Palace, Michael Walsh looks at how critical theory took root in America and came to affect nearly every aspect of American life and society - and what can be done to stop it.
What listeners say about The Devil’s Pleasure Palace
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- HRPuff&Stuff
- 2021-05-21
Pedantic, snobby and clearly uncritically right
As a centrist politically, I like to read things from the left and right but from commentators who are self-critical as well as critical of others. Mikey is clearly has a blind spot for some of the crazy right sided policies, but does make some interesting arguments about the impact of the Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) - a form of demographic Marxism that criticizes everything that is good within tradition and Liberal democracy. Fair points, but made with excessive descriptions in high art including Goethe, Wagner, etc. which gets lost in translation down several tangential stories.
This is not so much the problem but the uncritical view of his own political and world views. It has been stated in articles and rightly so, then Mikey is terribly wrong to suggest that "National Socialism" is socialism or something from the left. It is a form of national populism infused with Fascism supporting big business (IG Farben and the work of mass murder) that is on the extreme right and neo-Nazis would not consider themselves Antifa (the neo-Anarchists evolving from Stasi kulture). He then talks about abortion as all bad with no nuance, and then he lost me.
I tried listening to this three times over 6 months (I hate to waste a good audiobook) but finally gave up today. He has some good points that get undermined by his similarly intolerance of anything on the left in the way the Critical Theorists and Wokesters do to everyone right of extreme left. Takes one to know one?
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