Watchman on the Wall

Host (Male): Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and swrc.com. God is still on the throne and prayer changes things. Today, historian Bill Federer will share how you and I can brainwash a nation.

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Can an entire nation be conditioned to think a certain way? Throughout history, leaders and movements have used powerful tools to shape public opinion and influence entire cultures. In this timely message from our 2025 Prophecy in the News conference, historian Bill Federer examines how nations can be influenced, manipulated, and transformed, and why understanding these tactics matters today. Here's Bill Federer with How to Brainwash a Nation.

Bill Federer: I'm honored to be here. This is tremendous. Well, one of the chapters in my book called *Socialism: The Real History from Plato to the Present* is on how to brainwash a nation. It goes back to the spirit, mind, and body, like the old YMCA logo. You're a spirit, you live in a body, you possess a mind. Your mind is actually the switch, the decider, because your flesh leans away from God, your spirit is drawn to God, and your mind decides which one wins.

The question is, who gets to load the software on the next generation's brains? The little children are in the schools and they're having teachers teaching them stuff. If you think of it as spirit, mind, and body, your mind is like a computer. It's more than that, but at least that for the sake of illustration. Your body is like the computer case, which makes it silly for people to argue over what color the computer case is.

Imagine if I were to say green computers are better than blue computers. It doesn't matter what color the computer is; what matters is what software's on it. It doesn't matter what color somebody's skin is; it's what behavioral software is running on their brain. The other side wants to put malware, viruses, and corrupted files on these little kids' brains, and it's our job to put God's word on there.

It's called psychological warfare, or PSYOPs. Carl von Clausewitz was a 19th-century military strategist and he gave the classic purpose of war: to force your opponent to submit to your will. You're going through all this battle strategy and weapons, but the goal is to get your opponent to submit to your will. What if you could get them to submit without a fight?

That's Sun Tzu's *Art of War*, fifth century BC. Supreme excellence in a commander consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. You make them demoralized; you make them think you're more powerful than you are. It's a mental game. Now it's called fifth-generation warfare, where you get your enemy to surrender without them even being aware there is a fight. Why even wake them up and let them know there's a war going on if you can get them to submit to your will all the better?

The psychological warfare during World War II, where we dropped pamphlets on German villages saying, "Your side has already lost, your commander just hasn't told you," and it would mess with their minds. They're out there fighting, and they read they already lost. The Japanese did it to us. Tokyo Rose had the radio waves going across the Pacific to the ships, and she would say, "You Americans are doing terrible stuff," and it would demoralize our guys.

It's in the Bible. Twelve spies go into the Promised Land; ten come back with a negative, demoralizing report. They said, "We are not able to go up, they are too strong for us. The land devours its inhabitants, the people are of great stature. We were like grasshoppers. If only we had died in the land of Egypt. Let's make a captain and return to Egypt." They hadn't even fought yet, and they had surrendered. They lost the battle in their mind.

In reverse, Gideon did psychological warfare. There is a hundred thousand Midianites. That's a lot. Rather than fight them, he gets 300 to stand around with trumpets, torches, and clay pots. They just smash the pots and blow the trumpets, and these Midianites get up in the dark and start running into each other, pulling out their swords and fighting each other. That was a psychological operation.

The Bible over and over again says, "Fear not, fear ye not, fear him not, fear thou not." God is saying don't subject yourself to psychological warfare. The enemy wants to come in to get you into fear, discourage you, demoralize, disorient, distract, divide. Usually a demonic attack, the Bible says we have the shield of faith. Usually, it comes overwhelming, that when you first get the thought, it looks hopeless. It's shock and awe; it's like there's no way out. It looks so totally overwhelming that you're this close to giving up.

But if you just ignore what your senses are telling you and remind yourself to trust in the Lord, you get past the first minute, the first hour, the first day. Before you know it, a couple of days go by, a couple of weeks go by, and before you know it, you survived without caving. But if at that one moment you could cave, well then it's over. God is saying don't cave. When all of it feels overwhelming, don't surrender.

When the children of Israel are going into the Promised Land, they're winning. They defeat King Og of Bashan and Sihon of the Amorites. They're defeating them. But the devil says, "Well, if you can't beat them, join them." What's that? That's Balaam. Balaam is this prophet, and King Balak says, "Come and curse the children of Israel." He says you can't curse what God has blessed.

He does it three times, but then Balaam gives Balak some advice. If you lure the Moabite men into sin, then God will not be with them in battle and you can defeat them. Remember Achan? He's the guy when they destroyed Jericho and Joshua said, "Burn everything and don't take any gold," and he took some Babylonian garments and some gold and snuck them back to his tent and buried them under the tent. The next battle, they say, "We don't have to send the whole army up, just 3,000," and they get defeated.

Joshua's on his face saying, "God, what happened?" God says, "Get up, there's sin in the camp." This idea that if there's sin in the camp, God cannot dwell with sin. God stands back and says, "Make your choice, the sin or me." Balaam says, "If we can lure the young men into sin, then you can defeat them." God was so upset at Balaam that even the book of Revelation talks about Balaam. To the angel of the church at Pergamos: "I have a few things against you because you have there those that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and commit sexual immorality."

In other words, in the last days, there will be those going into churches saying it's okay to commit sexual immorality. They'll have their rainbow flags and they're like, "We'll affirm you no matter what sex you want to do." It infiltrates in and it steals the power out of the church. It's the same way with the nation. It's called fifth-column warfare.

The ancient Greeks had two columns and two flanks. What's the fifth? That's your enemy in the camp demoralizing the opponent. The classic was Alexander the Great's dad, Philip of Macedon. He conquered some gold mines in Greece, Amphipolis, and then he takes the gold and bribes some citizens of Athens to betray their city from the inside. When the rest of the Greeks are saying, "We've got to get our army," these paid liars would say, "Wait a second, I hear Philip's not such a bad guy. I hear he's not conquering cities, he's liberating them."

These paid propagandists would gather around themselves what Lenin later called useful idiots, college students that believed the lies. They're out there protesting and it so disunified the city of Athens that Philip marched up to the walls with his army and they threw the doors open and he marched in and took over. The people of Athens did not get a chance to rule themselves again for over 2,000 years because after Philip came his son, Alexander the Great. Then you had the Greek kings and then the Roman emperors and then the Ottoman sultans. They got shortly free after World War I, but then they ended up getting in debt; now they don't control themselves.

Cicero wrote about this fifth-column infiltration. "A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers heard in the very halls of government. He works secretly to undermine the pillars of society; he infects the whole body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." He's warning that if you can't defeat America from the outside, their goal is to infiltrate and corrupt it and weaken it from the inside. That's what the socialists have done after World War II.

Book of Thessalonians warns about working of Satan, signs, lying wonders, all deceivableness, strong delusion, they should believe a lie. During World War II, you had all these magazines talking about fifth-column warfare and the dangers to our country. Roosevelt said, "We have seen the treacherous use of the fifth column by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation." Maybe some illegal immigrants. I got a text from somebody in Texas and they said the Muslims are coming in and they're setting up their East Plano Islamic community. FDR: "Our enemies have spread falsehoods and terror, they have started fifth columns everywhere, duped the innocent, fomented suspicion and hate between neighbors."

FDR, May 26, 1940: "Today's threat to our national security is the Trojan horse, the fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Now you know what the Trojan horse is. You had the Greeks coming into what is the Byzantine Empire, and they acted like they retreated, but they left a horse. Inside of the horse were some soldiers. All the ships left and the Byzantine city said, "We won, they left and let's bring in this horse. They must have given it as a little present to us." Once they bring it in, the soldiers late at night climb out, kill the guards, open the gates, the ships come back and they come in and take over.

You had World War I and then the 1930s with socialism right before World War II. Lenin takes over in Russia with the Soviet Union, then it's taken over by Stalin. One of the socialists during this time is Antonio Gramsci. He's the one that says you can't defeat the West with tanks; you have to rot it from within. It's going to take a long time, it's called the long march through the institutions. He even says this: "Socialism is precisely the religion which must overwhelm Christianity."

Christianity as well as the Old Testament has this concept of the individual: that you have a worth because you are individually made in the image of God. This God is not a respecter of persons. Every other group, civilization, government structure, your worth is dependent on your identity with a group. Whether it's a Muslim male group or a Hindu Brahmin group or a communist CCP member group or the royalties of Europe or the intersectionality that they're introducing into America. If you're a black trans female, the more minority groups you can identify with, your worth goes up. Socialism wants you to identify with the group rather than as an individual.

James Wardner explained Gramsci's views: "In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media, transforming the consciousness of society." Lance Wallnau is well-known for coming up with these seven pillars of society: church, business, education, family, government, media, religion. We forgot that Christians controlled all those all the way up until the 1960s.

I was with Ted Baehr with Movieguide.org and he said the Baptists had an organization in Hollywood that would review all the movies. If they didn't give their stamp of approval, nobody would see the movie. Cecil B. DeMille would have a representative of this Baptist movie review organization on the set with him. They would have the actresses and if they acted a little risque, Cecil B. DeMille would look over at him and he would say no. They'd say, "Okay, do the scene over." They were doing such a good job that they shut that down and moved out of Hollywood, and within ten years, you had all the wickedness come in.

Albert Herlong was a congressman from Florida and in 1963, he read into the Congressional Record the 45 tactics or goals that the communists had. It was infiltrate the press, infiltrate the churches, replace revealed religion with social religion, social justice. Forget we're sinners, Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins. No, it's social justice, which turned into liberation theology, which turned into it's okay to kill people if your goal is to set up what you believe is utopia.

Get control of teachers' associations. That's why I would never put my kid in a public school because they basically won that battle. Put the party line in textbooks. Get control of schools, use them as transmission belts for socialism and communist propaganda. Use student riots to foment public protests. Then they do something in schools called deconstruction, where you portray the past negatively so the students are repulsed by it. Then you get the kids into a neutral where they don't remember where they came from, and then you brainwash them into the future you have planned for them.

It's a drive-neutral-reverse; it's actually a sales technique. If I was a toothpaste salesman, the first thing I'd do is tell you negative things about the toothpaste you're currently using. "You're still brushing with that stuff? Haven't you read the article? It'll eat the enamel off your teeth." You're repulsed by it. Now I have you in a neutral, you're open-minded. "What are all the toothpastes out there?" Then I give you my pitch for this brand-new tartar-control breath-freshener toothpaste. The first thing to do is they go into the schools and they tell the kids negative things about the Founding Fathers. "They took land from Indians, they sold people into slavery, they were chauvinists, they were bad, bad, bad."

The kids say, "Oh, they were bad, bad, bad." Forget the fact they gave you a country where you get to be in charge of your life and all of us together are in charge of the country. It's like, "Yeah, forget that, they're all bad." Now the kids are in a neutral and you say, "Hey, let's have a comparative religion class and let's go through all these beliefs. We just don't have time to get around to Christianity, we'll just let you look at that on your own." Then they give their pitch for socialism, LGBT transgenderism, Islamism. Europe went through this. It went from a Judeo-Christian Europe with a thousand years of Catholic cathedrals, Protestant Reformation, and Jewish neighborhoods to a secular free-sex-anything-goes Europe.

John Lennon's song *Imagine* sort of embodies that: "Imagine there's no heaven and no religion too." "Okay, we have no guidelines and no borders, you can do whatever you want," and in comes Islam. They come in and they have their four wives, and the wives go down to the welfare office and sign up for money saying, "My husband's not around." The guy goes and visits his wives and the more children they have, the larger the welfare checks get, and he is living like a king with his harem and all of his children and the state is paying for it.

They asked the one Muslim, Anjem Choudary in Islam4UK, "Don't you feel bad that you're living off the British when your goal is to take over?" He goes, "No, Allah allowed us to live off the infidel while we are subduing them." It's sort of like a parasite, you can suck the blood until you kill the host victim. This idea of Judeo-Christian, secular free sex, now Sharia socialist Europe. The big change happened with the French Revolution in France.

Part of this deconstruction is they said everybody in France that came earlier was bad. They tore down the statue of good King Henry IV. He lived in the 1500s and tried to patch up Protestants and Catholics. Here they are, 1789, Reign of Terror, they're tearing down this guy's statue that lived in the 1500s. Then they dug up the bones of Saint Genevieve and trashed them. Who was Saint Genevieve? When Attila the Hun was scourging Europe in 451 AD with an army of a half a million men wiping out cities, Genevieve got all of Paris to fast and pray. For some reason, Attila skipped sacking Paris, so she's the patron saint of Paris. Here she lived in the 450s. In 1789, they dig up the bone of Saint Genevieve and trash them. Why would you want to do that?

Deconstruction. You want to erase the past so there's no memory of the past, then you get the whole population into this neutral where they don't remember where they came from, and then you can brainwash them into the future you have planned for them. China did this. Second century BC, you had the warring states period and a half a dozen kingdoms fighting. One guy wins, his name is Qin Shi Huangdi. He was doing things differently than they had been done for centuries before, and so people were criticizing Qin Shi Huangdi. He decided to destroy all records of how things were done before so nobody could criticize him. He burned tens of thousands of bamboo annal books. They wrote on strips of bamboo from top to bottom and they'd weave them together with string. They're burning it all.

His chancellor was Li Si, 213 BC: "Basic annals of the first emperor Qin, I your servant propose that all historian records other than those of Qin be burned. If anyone under heaven has copies of the classics of history, they shall deliver them to the governor for burning. Anyone who dares to discuss the classics of history shall be publicly executed. Anyone who uses history to criticize the present shall have his family executed. Anyone who has failed to burn the books after 30 days of this announcement shall be sent to build the Great Wall."

Mao Zedong copied Qin Shi Huangdi in the 1960s. It's called the Cultural Revolution. It's not just a revolution in overthrowing a leader; it's destroying all culture. He destroys the oldest Buddhist temple in China. He destroys the great gates of Beijing. He wants to erase this history and he kills 80 million people. They shame people publicly; it's an honor-shame culture over there, so to be made fun of publicly was like the worst than death. Then they would destroy all their history. They're still doing it.

France was going to have an exhibition on Genghis Khan. But Genghis Khan is Mongolian who had conquered China for a century, the 1200s. For the pure Chinese, Genghis Khan was an embarrassment because he was not actually Chinese, he was Mongolian. Xi Jinping calls Paris and says, "Cancel it." They go, "Okay, okay, we'll cancel it." They're still canceling history. Pol Pot does the same thing in Cambodia. He decides that 1975 should be the new year zero. Anything prior to that was irrelevant, and he killed anybody that wore glasses. If you wore glasses, you could read; if you read, you knew the history and he wanted to get rid of the history. He killed a third of his country. It's called the killing fields, the Khmer Rouge.

But the Muslims did it. Wherever they'd come into a place, they would destroy history. The oldest library in the world was in Alexandria, Egypt. When 'Amr ibn al-'As comes in there, they ask him what to do with all these books in this library. He said, "Every book that does not agree with the Quran destroy, and every book that does agree with the Quran is redundant because we have the Quran, so destroy them all." It took six months to burn them all. This idea that you go into a country and you destroy the history, the DNA, you take out the old DNA and you put in the new.

There is a hadith attributed to Muhammad: "Do not leave an image without obliterating it, or a high grave without leveling it." ISIS would go in, this is the statues of Assyria. This was 700 BC and they're smashing it with hammers. Then there was this big Buddha statue in the mountain sides in the Taliban blow it up. Carl Sandburg said, "When a nation goes down, one condition may always be found: they forgot where they came from." You destroy the corporate memory of a people until they're totally disoriented and then you can reprogram them.

George Orwell wrote the book *1984* in the year 1948; he flipped the numbers. There is a character in the book named Winston and he works for the government's Ministry of Truth, but all it does is lies.

Host (Male): Can a nation be persuaded to surrender its freedoms without ever realizing what's happening? In the powerful two-DVD set, *How to Brainwash a Nation*, historian and bestselling author Bill Federer examines the methods used throughout history to shape public opinion, influence cultures, and transform nations. Through compelling historical examples and a biblical worldview, Federer reveals how propaganda, fear, repetition, and crisis can be used to change the way people think, and why Christians must be discerning in our day.

This special conference presentation includes over two hours of insightful teaching, plus a bonus message titled *Silence Equals Consent*, exploring why the voices of informed and engaged citizens are vital to preserving liberty. If you're concerned about the future of America and want to better understand the forces shaping our culture, this presentation is a must-watch.

Order your copy of *How to Brainwash a Nation* today. Call 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144, or visit swrc.com. That's swrc.com. Understanding the past may be the key to protecting the future.

Well, that's all the time we have for today. We hope you've enjoyed this eye-opening presentation from Bill Federer on how to brainwash a nation. But we're just getting started. Tomorrow, we'll bring you part two as Bill continues his fascinating look at how ideas are shaped, cultures are influenced, and why understanding these tactics are so important for Christians today.

Be sure to join us tomorrow for another edition of Watchman on the Wall. Until then, keep your eyes on the skies and your heart in God's word. And if you'd like to learn more about our ministry, please visit swrc.com.