Jack Cashill is a bit full of himself — so committed to the idea that he’s right about everything that he can’t be bothered to admit that a large number of his pet conspiracy theories have, shall we say, not held up, let alone apologize to his readers for getting things so wrong.
Cashill has a new book out, which he’s portraying as a book for young men. He began his March 4 WorldNetDaily column with a rant about what he thinks is the current state of YA literature:
The betrayal begins with the books teachers assign in high school and college. These books are routinely effete, feminist, anti-Christian, socialistic and often gay.
Collectively, they do better a job of teaching a young male to be a metrosexual than to be an a man.
I do not exaggerate the problem facing young men in school. To see what educators would like our young people to read, I chose an article titled “20 Contemporary Books for Your High School Reading List” from a random Google search.
Here are some samples. In “Bless Me, Ultima,” described as “a classic piece of Chicano literature,” the protagonist learns a new kind of spirituality from a faith healer.
“The Hate U Give” tackles “themes of racism, police brutality, and societal injustice.”
[…]The one worthy book, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” may be the single bleakest book I have ever read. Even by post-apocalyptic standards, it is a total downer. The movie version makes “The Walking Dead” look like “Hello, Dolly.”
Given the books young people are assigned, It should not surprise that girls are an incredible 10 times more likely than boys to pick up a book and read it on their own.
By contrast, Cashill claims that preparing to write his new book, “I harkened back to the books I was assigned to read in high school. I still remember them: ‘Call of the Wild,’ ‘Red Badge of Courage,’ ‘Annapurna,’ ‘Kon-Tiki,’ ‘Mutiny on the Bounty,’ ‘Men Against the Sea,’ ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Lord of the Flies.’ These books not only captured our attention and held it, but they also helped us boys envision our lives as men. We saw how courage, perseverance and self-reliance worked in the real world and why they remain essential virtues.”
Cashill found a co-writer and claims they wrote “an action adventure novel that young men – men of any age – would actually want to read”:
The result is “The Hunt.” In the book we tell the story of a recently widowed Army veteran who takes his adolescent sons on a character-building elk hunt to Colorado only to discover they are the ones being hunted.
The hunters are leftist anarchists in league with Muslim terrorists hell-bent on shooting the president’s plane out of the sky. The incorrectness of the bad guys assures that no public high school anywhere will put the book on its reading list.
“Leftist anarchists in league with Muslim terrorists” as the villain? Sounds exactly like the kind of book Cashill would write. But wait … that premise — and that title — sound familiar. Is Cashill trying to confuse people by suggesting his book inspired a certain controversial, recently released film with the same basic plot? Wouldn’t put it past him.
Cashill didn’t remark on this amazing coincidence, of course — that would be too obvious (not to mention making the inevitable copyright infringement lawsuit happen a bit sooner than he’s planning). Instead, he cited a couple anonymous glowing reviews, then exhorts his reader to “talk to your school board” about adding it to their school curriculum.
We suspect that no school board would want any book with such a blatant partisan agenda, almost assuredly filled with stiffly drawn heroes and cardboard villains, to be inflicted on their students.