Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In the first chapter, Murray describes his experience attending the screening of a movie protested by gay rights activists. He says "None of the press which had sought to silence Voices of the Silenced had shown that Davidson or his colleagues were forcing unwilling participants to submit to a regime of heterosexual conversion," but a few pages before that, he says "Dr. Joseph Nicolosi—one of the stars of the film—offers up the idea that many of his 'patients' actually hate their mothers, don't know how to deal with men and thus develop certain fantasies as a result." Murray somehow avoids mentioning that Nicolosi (who died a couple years ago) not only was the creator of conversion therapy but also sued the State of California to protect what he believed to be his right to do conversion therapy on gay minors, which strongly implies that there WAS an element of coercion in Nicolosi's practice. In fact, many of the people he mentions who were involved in the filming of the movie were either directly involved in that case (Pickup v. Brown) or are otherwise active members of the brainwashing-gay-kids community. For example, in his muddled synopsis of the movie, he says: "The second film consists of some very specific testimony from doctors and patients talking about being gay and then not being gay anymore. As well as Dr. Davidson there is Dr. Stephen Baskerville and an expert from Texas named (I cannot stifle an audible laugh) David Pickup." David Pickup is actually the named plaintiff in the aforementioned court case—i.e., he's one of the people who sued the State of California for banning conversion therapy for minors. The reason he now lives in Texas is because California's ban killed his business, and he stated this explicitly in a May 2019 article in The Dallas Morning News: "David Pickup says moving to Texas was a no-brainer. A few years ago, he shuttered his family therapy practice in California and came home. Here, he says 'business is booming.' Here, it's so busy he's hired an intern. Because here in Texas, conversion therapy is still legal." Mind you, nowhere in the United States is it illegal for quacks like Nicolosi and Pickup to practice conversion therapy on ADULTS. What they want is for conservative Christian parents to be able to bring their gay kids to some quack psychologist who claims to be able to turn them straight. We're expected to believe that progressives are like an angry mob because they'll gleefully denounce such people. Murray then pretends not to have understood the movie and, instead of seeking clarification from the creator when he had the opportunity to do so in person, he speculates: "So each time there is something in the film on the loss of the Temple in AD 70 and the Arch of Titus, and then it cuts to the gays again. Or the ex-gays. We are told that 'the new state orthodoxy celebrates homosexuality'. Then, along with a range of 'experts'—mainly from the United States—we get the testimonies. What any of these have to do with the Arch of Titus is never fully made clear. Perhaps homosexuality is causing the collapse of civilization? If so the accusation is never quite made." That's literally what they believe. Perhaps Murray should've done his research? In one of Baskerville's books, "The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government," he promulgates his view that all us gays who, y'know, want to have rights and stuff, are basically among the harbingers of the apocalypse (along with the feminists of course). On the first page of the second chapter, Baskerville writes: "The decline of the family is the most urgent crisis of our age," and "Some of the most eminent sociological minds have suggested that sexual decadence and family decline threaten civilizational survival." A little later in the chapter, he writes: "Despite disclaimers similar to the feminists', there can be no doubt that the homosexualist agenda remains fundamentally hostile to the family, to heterosexuality in general, and above all to traditional masculinity." By the way, as you might guess, Baskerville also isn't a medical doctor, but the way Murray introduces him above makes it seem like he IS. (He's actually a political scientist and raging homophobe apparently.) I think all of this really undermines Murray's point, whatever it is. Here are some more examples of how The Madness of Crowds is a bad book. In the first several pages of the book, Murray writes: "A decade ago almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage." That's false. The Pew Research Center's data for 2009 indicates that roughly forty percent of the U.S. supported same-sex marriage. Murray misrepresents the content of a New York Times article on gay men in Japan in his attempt to make some sort of point about gay overrepresentation in the media. He writes, "So The New York Times had chosen to splash a story over two pages, as their lead Business feature, about how a man had come out in a company with no negative consequences in a country that had no special problem with gays." Actually, (1) it is not true that there is no homophobia in Japan; the point was that it manifests differently (i.e., people are pressured to stay in the closet but not actively hunted the way they were in the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century, for example), and (2) the article was about a broader trend of Japanese companies becoming more gay-friendly by extending family benefits to same-sex partners and being a bit more explicitly pro-LGBT in their recruiting. One might be surprised by how many Westerners who know Japanese (like me and many other translators I know) are gay and might be at least a tiny bit interested in this aspect of Japan's corporate culture. Plus, he specifically said it was in the International New York Times, so it shouldn't be surprising to see international news. Murray writes: "In 2018 the MSNBC host Joy Reid was publicly shamed and made to apologize after historic comments from a decade earlier were found in which she had been critical of gay marriage—at a time when almost everybody else was unsupportive of gay marriage as well." First of all, the last bit is simply false, as I've already explained. Secondly, she wasn't merely "critical of gay marriage"; what she said was pretty nasty. I could probably write a book about why this book is bad, but as you can see, there's a pattern of cherry-picking, misrepresenting facts, etc. Also, the book is just kinda boring; there are tons of books on cancel culture, social justice warriors, etc., and this is just as bad as all of those, so don't buy it unless you simply can't get enough of this kind of poop.