Watchman on the Wall

Southwest Radio Ministries: 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, we bring you part two of Bill Federer's presentation, How to Brainwash a Nation. Bill continues his fascinating look at how ideas are shaped, cultures are influenced, and why understanding these tactics is so important for Christians today.

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Yesterday, Bill Federer began his eye-opening message, How to Brainwash a Nation. Today, in part two, he'll continue exploring how nations are influenced, cultures are transformed, and why discernment is more important than ever. Here's Bill Federer with part two of How to Brainwash a Nation.

Bill Federer: If there's no God and there's no absolute truth, what's wrong with twisting the history stories if it can help you to achieve your agenda? And so there's no sacredness to history. In Islam, if they find an artifact that shows the Jews had a temple in Jerusalem, what's their response? Destroy the artifact. They're not interested in real history; they're interested in advancing the Islamic cause. George Orwell said, "Those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past." So if you can control the present, you decide what's going to be in the history books about the past. Then the next generation draws their identity of who they are and their purpose in life from the past, and they get on a different trajectory.

It's sort of like a study was done of prisons, and most of the men in prisons do not know who their father is. And so they have no family identity, and they're out on the street, and a gang comes and says, "We'll be your new identity," and they're sucked into it. I was with Allen West years ago, and he was a former military man and congressman, and he's African American. His grandfather served in World War I, and his father served in World War II, and he has this heritage of a family. And what does he do? He ends up becoming a patriotic American and he serves in the military. So when you know where you came from, it gives you a trajectory. But if you don't know who your dad is or your granddad or any of that, you're just an undifferentiated stem cell.

That's what James Dobson used that terminology for. What's an undifferentiated stem cell? Your body creates new cells all the time, and the very fraction of the moment that it creates a new cell, it's not decided if it's going to be a muscle cell or an eye cell. Then it gets bathed with hormones that activate different parts of the DNA that turns it into an eye cell or a cartilage cell for your knees. But it's undifferentiated for that fraction of a moment so they can isolate it.

Children are undifferentiated stem cells, is what Dobson was saying. And if they can get them in the classroom and bathe them with their trans agenda or their activist stuff, like Albert Hurlong was saying, you teach these kids the transmission belt for socialism. And then once they get bathed with it, they'll turn into little activists. But it's our job to teach them the Bible so they turn into good godly citizens. So this idea of changing the past is called the 1619 Project. And it says all the founding fathers were all slave owners, which they weren't. I mean, they forget the whole Civil War where you had half the country fighting to free the slaves. And then there's a book called Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. And all it is is a book to say everybody that founded America was bad.

So this is probably one of the more interesting parts of my talk. This infiltration that we're talking about, it's actually marketing. So what's marketing? You're influencing behavior to buy a product. In the 1800s, marketing was Wells Fargo wagons and Sears catalogs. And they would list everything about a Singer sewing machine, and you would make an informed purchase. But in the early 1900s, they invented magazine ads where they would say nothing about the product, just make it look like everybody's using it and they're happy.

And so the idea was Crisco. Nobody knew what was in Crisco. But they marketed it so well that it put out of business the lard industry. And they even made up a term, vegetable-based, but nobody knew what it was. Do you know what's in Crisco? It's cottonseed oil. In the Deep South, they would harvest cotton, and they would have these mountains of black seeds that they would mush into black mucky oil that they would use in factories and machinery. It's called industrial seed oil. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one that says this is very bad for you and causes all kinds of health problems. But they would put it in these containers and bleach it, and we all ate it.

So you go from knowing everything about a product to nothing about a product, and you're ingesting it, maybe even injected. It's the keeping up with the Joneses. It's this discovery that people will buy what they see other people buying. Actually, the person that invented this is Edward Bernays. He's the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst that discovered that we are social creatures, that we want to be accepted, we do not want to be rejected. Simple, powerful. And so he writes a book called Propaganda in 1928, and he talks about the fashion industry and women's shoes.

He says women go into a department store and think they're picking out shoes. They're not. The shoes were picked out for them by the marketing executive that paid the actress to put them on, that paid the photographer to take the pictures, that paid the magazines to print them, and the ladies see it and want it. He said a larger manufacturer of women's shoes has a popular actress wear the shoes. The fashion spreads. The man who injected this idea into the shoe industry was ruling women in one department of their social lives. Today, the minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing the majority to mold the minds of the masses. They find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful regimenting the public mind.

Marketing of products was adapted to marketing of ideologies, and you buy a product because you see everybody wearing the tennis shoes or the clothes, and you'll adopt an ideology if you think everybody else is going along with it. And so Edward Bernays pushed smoking cigarettes. He changed the name of propaganda to public relations, a little bit easier to swallow. And in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics, business, social conduct, or ethical thinking, we're dominated by a relatively small number of persons. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. Marketing of products adapted to marketing of politics. So we're a government from the consent of the governed.

But what if you could engineer the consent of the governed? And so he writes a book called The Engineering of Consent. Manipulation of the opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of the country. And he writes a book, Crystallizing Public Opinion. Another guy writes a book, Manufacturing Consent.

You know, a water molecule is individual, but you put it with other water molecules, and it operates as a group, a wave or a cloud. A fish in a bowl, but you put it with other fish, and they operate as a group. A bird in a cage, but you put it with other birds, and they operate in a group. Guess what? We're individuals, but you put us with other individuals, and we operate as a group. We are always giving and receiving feedback: Are we being accepted? Are we being rejected?

And so kids in school, they all want to be invited to the party, and nobody wants to be left off the team. And so at this vulnerable age where it's important for them to get these relationships to have psychological development, and you threaten to ostracize them and embarrass them in front of their kids and then celebrate them, and so this is called weaponization of loneliness. It's called social-emotional learning, it's called behavior modification, and they've weaponized the child's desire to be accepted in a group.

Now this is normal; most of the world is called honor-shame cultures. In Islam, if your group called the Umma, the community, honors you, your worth as a person goes up. But if your daughter embarrasses you in front of your community because she's dating a non-Muslim, they will kill their own daughter to regain their honor. It's a religion of pride; pride's the sin of Satan. Right? It was Cain, when his offering was rejected, it says his countenance fell. What was that? His pride was hurt. I mean, there's only the mom, dad, and brother, but he was embarrassed, and so he gets filled with hatred and wants to murder his brother. But this idea of caring about this group.

So this study was done in the 1960s and '70s called the Solomon Asch conformity experiment. And they're trying to find out the power of being accepted or rejected by a group. And they did it on college campuses, and they would pull eight students into a classroom. Seven had been paid ahead of time to be actors, and one was a naive participant. And the teacher put two cards on the front desk. One card had one line, the other three lines: one shorter, one longer, one the same. And beginning with the paid actors, one by one, they would go around the room and convincingly say that the shorter line was equal to the first line.

And the eighth naive participant would see them all saying, "Well, yeah, I think that this A is equal..." By the time it got around to the eighth naive participant, 30 percent of them would deny their own eyes to fit in with the group. They're looking at the lines; they are not equal, but they would doubt their perception, they would question themselves, they would think, "Well, these other people must know something that I don't." They're looking at the lines, but they will deny their eyes to fit in with a group of strangers. Now, if only one of the other seven says they disagree, then it goes from 30 percent down to five percent. So if you say, "Hey, I'm not going to go along with the group," you'll have a bunch of people saying, "I was thinking the same thing."

At the time of the country's founding, the group was Christian. And so there was a positive peer pressure. At the time of the founding, 98 percent of the country was Protestant—three million people. One percent Catholic—30,000 Catholics in a country of three million people. One-tenth of a percent Jewish—only seven synagogues in the whole country. But it was 100 percent Judeo-Christian. And so you would have some non-Christians living in America, but they would adopt Christian behavior. Why? Because they want to be accepted in a predominantly Christian country. And so you would have this idea that it would have a social preserving effect, called political religion, even though they may not have had a personal experience with Jesus.

But now the public opinion influencers are anti-Christian. Think of Disney. They push billions of dollars worth of products. And it's all based on what? Getting a child to want something. I mean, they have all of these products and all these employees and all this business and everything, and all billions of dollars worth of business, and it's all based on what? Getting a child to want something. The little kids see everybody with the Frozen T-shirts and the Frozen Band-Aids and the Frozen pajamas and the Frozen backpacks, and they all say, "I want a Frozen thing." And then they get it, they go to school, "Oh, cool, you got a Frozen thing."

And they've manipulated this child everywhere they look. They see everybody has this product, and so I want the product, and then they get the product and they be celebrated with it. And they've taken this billion-dollar machinery and put it into the classroom. And it's called the pyramid of oppression. At the top of the pyramid are the cisgendered. Now, that's their term for somebody who believes there is a male and a female. And so they're at the top of the pyramid; they are the oppressors. Everybody else down the pyramid—asexual, bisexual, homosexual, pansexual, transsexual—they're all being oppressed by the oppressors.

Once they teach this to the kids, they ask them, "Which one are you?" None of them are going to pick the oppressor, so they'll pick any of these other ones. It works. Here's Montgomery school, public school, says Maryland's largest school district saw a 500 percent increase in non-binary trans students in just the last five years. Here's trans-identifying students increased 991 percent over two years in wealthy D.C. suburbs. Here's 1,800 students at UC Davis identified as trans-non-binary, 25 percent of all students at LGBTQ. And here's another; it says unprecedented 5,000 percent surge in trans teens. Do you think that all of a sudden there's 5,000 percent? No. They've got this marketing that they use in the classroom that is very effective.

There is no way—it's hard enough for an adult to stand up when people are saying bad things about you—but a little innocent child that's at a developmental stage where their peer support is important to their development. And here's another study called the spiral of silence. People will self-censor their views if they think they are in the minority. And so this fear of being rejected, the fear of being in the minority. Saul Alinsky says, "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." And the ancient kings would do honor-shame.

But Chuck Colson wrote about a wine-tasting experiment. And they had all these couples in there, and they poured vinegar in the wine. And all the couples were in on the experiment except one naive couple. And this couple writes on their little card, "This tastes terrible." But one by one, the other couples would say, "Oh, this was delicious. It had character. It was robust." And by the time it got around to that naive couple, they scratched out what they wrote, and they agreed with the group. "Oh, yeah, it was really good."

And then, when somebody said all they did was pour vinegar in the wine, the couple that changed their views criticized the person for saying they poured vinegar in the wine. And it's a phenomenon called false enforcement. Once people buy into the lie, they will help enforce that other people buy into the lie. It's like the little magnet with the metal filings, and once the little filings line up, what are they going to do? They're going to attract another little metal filing and another and another, and they pass it—they're going to help enforce this ideology.

So this weaponization of wanting to be in a group appears with prisoners of war. In World War II, the prisoners had the support of their group. Remember Hogan's Heroes and The Great Escape, and they're in the barracks, and yeah, they're prisoners, but they got their buddies supporting them. Korean War, they isolated prisoners for days, weeks, months, until they got into this vulnerable position of just craving another human interaction.

And here's the historical marker. "Freedom is not free," and it talks about the memorial, but it says "solitary confinement, brainwashing." They found out that if you put somebody in a cell and isolate them for months, and they crave a human interaction, they would bring them into a room of guys who had already caved. And it comes from this Buddhist concept of cleansing the mind, meditating and blanking out your mind. Well, they wanted to emotionally have this reset. So they get them into this vulnerable spot; they bring them into a room with guys who had already caved. And before they could get the pat on the back and the brotherly hug and "you're one of us," they had to reject America.

"Okay, okay, America's bad and terrible." "All right, you're one of us." When they got rescued, they still hated America. We rescued the World War II guys, and they kissed the ground. "We love America." You rescue the Korean War guys, they hate—what happened to them? They went through this psychological operation of weaponizing loneliness. Now, they did find there was successful resistance if somebody had a sense of humor. That's a nice thing to know in case you were in a situation like that.

So and then they would enforce trivial demands that changed all the time. So they would say, "Pick up these rocks and move them from over here to over here." And then the next day, "Move them back to where you got them." And the next day, "You move them halfway and then half back." And the next way, "You move them, and you keep them here." And it got to the place where there was—because your brain wants to know, "Why am I doing something?" And when you finally get to the place where there's no reasoning behind any of it, you just say, "Okay, I'm a zombie, just tell me what you want me to do."

Every time I go through the airport, I feel this way. "Okay, now you've got to take this out of the bag and put it into this plastic bin. No, no, don't put it in the plastic bin. No, now you've got to take something out of your bag. No, now you don't have to; you don't have to take it out anymore. Now take off your belt. Now you don't have to take off—" I mean, and it's like so trivial. Every different airport's different. And so this honor-shame culture, caring what other people think, is the fear of man, it's pride, it's the religion of Satan, and it's Cain.

Cain had his works rejected, his countenance fell, he was embarrassed in front of his group—the mom, dad, and brother. And Abel only cared about acceptance of God. Exodus 23: "Neither shall you follow the multitude in doing evil." There it is. There will be a multitude. They will be doing evil, and you're supposed to be the stick in the mud. Another translation says, "Do not follow the crowd when it does what is wrong, and don't allow the popular view to sway you into offering testimony to pervert justice." Another translation: "Don't do something just because everybody else is doing it. If you see a group of people doing wrong, don't join them. You must not let them persuade you; you must do what is right."

A little more history. You had kings; that's the norm for world government. But Athens did not have a king. It had 6,000 citizens. Well, if you have an agenda and you want to pitch it to 6,000 people, it would take a long time to go talk to each one individually. And so how do you push your agenda in a democracy? The Greeks invented theater. You get the whole city together in a theater, and you would put on plays: comedies, tragedies, satires, where you would ridicule and buffoon certain points of view and embarrass people in front of the whole crowd.

Or you'd have these tragedies where they'd honor and extol people. "Oh, they died doing something," and "I want to be remembered like that person." And they would leave the auditorium there saying, "I want to avoid that poor politician." If you read Aristophanes, it was like Saturday Night Live. They would literally make fun of living politicians and just make them look so stupid and like fools. And when they'd all leave the theater, "I'm so embarrassed for that person," you would avoid them and avoid everything they stood for.

And then the others in the tragedy at honor and extol somebody died doing something noble. And so you would sway. And from that time till now, theater is always political in a country where the citizens decide what happens. So think of your favorite sitcom or movie or show. There's a character you like. They're cute, they're funny, they're the hero. And as the series goes on, the character that you like begins to make morally compromising decisions. A little lust here, a little cheating there, a little revenge, a little—and you find yourself apologizing and defending them.

"Yeah, I know James Bond is with a woman that he's not married to, but he's about to save the world, so can we get on with—it's not that bad." And then they portray people that have old traditional values as backwards and bumpkins and simpletons and idiots, and even hateful. And you turn off the show, "Yeah, that person really is old-fashioned," and you feel this pressure to modify your behavior to fit in with what you just viewed.

And so when you can look at the dominoes, the country's controlled by laws. Laws are controlled by politicians. Politicians are controlled by voters. Voters are controlled by public opinion. You don't vote for somebody unless you read something about them, but all you know about them is what's told on the TV and the print. And so public opinion is controlled by media in the short run, education in the long run, the church, and the internet.

So whoever controls the internet—all three of those use the internet—and so you can censor voices. You can have shadow banning. You can have where you think you're forwarding it to lots of people and it's not going anywhere. And then they want to infiltrate the church with that social justice religion, make it woke, and then infiltrate the education and then infiltrate the media. And if you can do that, then you can influence public opinion, influence the voter, influence who gets elected, influence the laws, and control the country.

If I can figure it out, they certainly have. Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1942: "The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far-spread magazine rules the country." Llewellyn Rockwell: "Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule, but rule by the well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority." Will and Ariel Durant: "Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government since it requires the widest spread of intelligence. Ignorance lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion."

One of the steps of media learning about its own power was the Spanish-American War. Cuba wanted to be free, and Spain said no and sent over a general, Valeriano Weyler. And he ordered all law-abiding Cubans to go to concentration camps. So all the law-abiding ones went to the concentration camps, and he said anybody that refuses to go into the concentration camps is considered immediately guilty and going to be shot on sight. And so now they have hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps, and they don't have proper sewage, they have unsanitary conditions, and nearly 400,000 die in Cuba. And word of this horrible tragedy comes across to America. And we don't want to get involved in a war; we just got done with the Civil War. And William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer—Pulitzer Prize—New York World, they began to print stories about the tragedy going on in Cuba.

Southwest Radio Ministries: Can a nation be persuaded to surrender its freedoms without ever realizing what's happening? In the powerful DVD 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, Bill 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 or visit swrc.com. Understanding the past may be the key to protecting the future. Call today, 1-800-652-1144.

Josh Davis has the latest headlines from the EnTimes coming up on tomorrow's Watchman on the Wall program. Be sure to tune in by downloading our free SWRC mobile app or by subscribing to our daily Watchman on the Wall podcast. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by faithful listeners like you. To learn more, visit swrc.com.