Good night dear Readers…
2024 Election Year and Cults…
It was 1981, and I had stopped by a relative’s house and they were watching TV that evening that was a short Afterschool Special on called “The Wave” in Prime Time.
To say it was very disturbing was an understatement to us that evening that left us kinda nauseated and flashing back to high school…
It’s a fictionalized short movie based on a very real social engineering experiment done by a young inexperienced teacher in 1967 with a class of sophomores at a high school in upper middle class Palo Alto, in California.
A very preppy place and essentially after class discussions on Hitler and the Nazi Third Reich, the young teacher decided to do a class interactive experiment and created in effect a real NeoNazi fascist movement in the high school that got quickly out of hand and he had to figure out HOW to cancel it.
So here’s the original 1981 movie around 44 minutes Must See and put YOURSELF in the place of the students and remember Yourself at that age and Your own life then around 15-16.
Many years later a reunion film was made that had original participants in the film decades later with the teacher Ron Jones and they recall the experience that changed their lives dramatically in the 1967 Counterculture time and Vietnam War happening.
There were several questionable mind control experiments with test subject people the Milgram and Stanford experiments.
But The Wave had the youngest and most vulnerable subjects.
The 1981 ABC-TV movie “The Wave” was produced by Norman Lear and Virginia Carter. It was originally to be part of the “ABC AfterSchool Specials” series for children, but was premiered instead on a Sunday night in prime time, on October 4, 1981 (and had a reported viewership of 17 million)
There are six films and series on Netflix extent on the social experiment in mind control:
https://www.thewavehome.com/film/
So WHY am I writing on this in 2024?
Because from late 2015 to now the United States was bombarded with false narratives and the rise of a nationwide cult like the Nazis with Adolf Hitler that The Wave used as a model to show the students firsthand HOW they all could be converted to True Believers and fanatics like countless people in Germany from the 1920’s Weimar Republic.
This gives insight into HOW Donald Trump and media like fraud FOX News and Newsmax that use real Nazi Ministry of Propaganda techniques and Neuro Linguistic Programming to hook and get people addicted to their digital crack that is NOT news but instead greasy dirty entertainment that pretends its news…
https://www.lessonplanmovie.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(1981_film)
The Wave (German: Die Welle) is a 2008 German socio-political thriller film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Jones_(teacher)
https://www.thewavehome.com/theater/
In spring 1967, in Palo Alto, California, high school history teacher Ron Jones conducted a social experiment in fascism with his class of 10th-grade 15-year-olds, to sample the experience of the attraction and rise of the Nazis in Germany before World War II. In a matter of days the experiment began to spin out of control, as those attracted to the movement became aggressive zealots and the rigid rules invited confusion and chaos. This story has attracted considerable attention over the years through films, books, plays and musicals, and verges on urban legend. It serves as a teaching tool, to facilitate discussion of those uncomfortable topics of history, human nature, psychology, charismatic leaders, group behavior, intolerance and hate.
The primary purpose of this website is to document and share with teachers, students and media both the original experiment and the variations on the Wave story over the years. As the story is told and re-told, reported and fictionalized, carried in the news and blogged on the internet, it is becoming more difficult to learn what really happened. There has also been more information available recently from the original students, and that has been very helpful in sorting things out. This is intended to be a comprehensive and current collection of material and news, mostly from original primary sources. Student names are generally left out to protect their privacy.
It is also the purpose here to support the discussion of this dark and never-ending side of human nature. In today’s confused and chaotic world, it seems that polarization, persecution, political and religious extremism, cults, gangs and bullying are as prevalent as ever. The risks and stakes have never been higher, and this lesson is needed now more than ever.
This website is overseen and managed by original participants in The Third Wave experiment, and will contain the latest news of our activities, along with the most complete and accurate information about our experience. We hope you find it helpful in your research and studies, and please feel free to reach out to us via the Contact page. We also travel when possible to support schools using the story, and for presentations at film festivals and to community organizations.
Another 1970s sci-fi cult movie was, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with a few survivors remaining who had their minds intact.