‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’ and ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’
June 11th, 2023
In 2016, I co-wrote ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’, a political documentary about the corruption of our mainstream media and how the government essentially handed over our media system to Big Corporations and the billionaire elite. In 2022, I wrote ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’, a political documentary on the corrupt corporate capture of our health agencies in government.
‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’ delves into the history and psychological warfare against the public in the realm of media. ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ film delves into the history and psychological warfare against the public in the health sector. The former highlights the political-right as the guilty culprit. The latter is more bipartisan unveiling that the corruption is a deeply embedded joint effort across both political parties.
My personal process in the making of these two films was the realization that it’s not about left or right - it’s simply Big Corporations against We the People.
‘THE BRAINWASHING OF MY DAD’ (THE 2016 DOCU MOVIE)
In 2020, I was finishing up ‘Mandrake the Magician’, a documentary-fairytale on my grandfather. I was only keeping one ear to the news on the pandemic. Mostly a circulation of independent news sources. But I couldn’t help but notice they were all echoing each other. Amidst a world pandemic and an upcoming U.S. presidential election, everyone was in lockstep. There was no variation, only one perspective across all channels. During this time, of course, I thought a lot about ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’.
Starting in 2013, I worked with award-winning indie director Jen Senko on award-winning documentary called ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’. As Jen describes it, her father went from a “non-political Kennedy Democrat” to an angry far-right Republican by listening to a constant stream of right-wing media.
Matthew Modine: “But this isn’t a story about just one man. It’s a story about a media phenomenon that changed a father and divided a nation”.
With ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’, I was editing, researching, and co-writing the script with Jen Senko. The movie was produced and narrated by actor Matthew Modine and the interviews included media experts such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, political consultants and commentators such as David Brock, Frank Luntz, and many others. It was a comprehensive account of the history of how our current media system was built.
MEDIA HISTORY (MOVIE EXCERPTS)
There’s a great quote that director Jen Senko often cites - “Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second, because without change in the media, progress in your primary area is far less likely.”
I love that quote and it holds strong today because I knew back then while working on ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’ that the media is owned by a handful of corporations. And since that’s the case, then those corporations have a say in what the news reports and therefore it will always be propaganda.
Edward Hermann: “The media system is really a powerful set of structures. Most people don’t have a choice. They don’t have a spectrum of available choices that they can look at and say, ‘Oh, I like this or that.’ So you have a very limited constrained set of options to begin with. So, that’s a bias that’s built into the structure of the system.”
Noam Chomsky: “They were in fact manufacturing consent for a somewhat hidden agenda. The mainstream media are elite institutions. The ownership of the media is concentrated in the hands of very wealthy individuals.”
Jeff Cohen: “One of the biggest steps forward to handing our whole media system to a handful of corporations was completely bipartisan. It was the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act. And I put “reform” in quotes. Consumer rights advocates were calling it the Time Warner Enrichment Act. But President Bill Clinton and the Democrats were getting huge soft money donations from the big media and telecommunications companies, and so was the Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and together behind closed doors, they developed this Telecommunications Act which gave away the media to these few big companies. These few fat companies got even fatter. Mainstream media didn’t scrutinize it because they were getting rich at the top. And when you have that kind of bipartisan corruption corrupting our media system, it explains why we ended up with the media system we have.”
Rick Perlstein: “In the late 1960s, TV had finally become a mass medium. And yet, there really weren’t people who had decoded the medium. Roger told Nixon that to appeal to the audience, he needed to use short, snappy one-liners that can stick in the audience’s mind. (NIXON: ‘A great philosophy is never one without defeat. It is always one without fear.) And so really, Roger Ailes was a pioneer in the whole art of the soundbite. He told Nixon that America is dumb. So give them something simple, boil it down, and they’ll get it.”
Jeff Cohen: “When I was at Fox News, I can remember sitting in the green room before a show was taped. A purported news report is on the air and a particularly biased segment comes on and then someone in the green room (these include Fox News producers, Fox News staff, Fox News contributors) someone will say, “Wow, that was really fair and balanced” and the whole place erupts in laughter. So, I mean, there is a certain understanding that a lot of it is posturing....
So the concentration is on the history of the media and tactics that are used to lure in audiences and get them hooked.
NEUROSCIENCE OF BRAINWASHING (MOVIE EXCERPTS)
Jen Senko: “My dad and many others got swept up in that tide. I didn’t think he was actually brainwashed. Didn’t you need brainwashing camps where someone is locked away with constant words and images coming at them in their every waking hour? But I wanted to explore that notion...”
Dr. Kathleen Taylor : “You can only understand what the neural circuits of your brain allow you to understand. Any fact that doesn’t fit that will be ignored or re rejected as ridiculous and so on. They don’t know their brains are being changed. They don’t know this mechanism. They’re just there. They listen to it. It slides in and you barely notice. We have very good psychological mechanisms for not even hearing, not even perceiving information.”
“OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD” (MOVIE EXCERPTS)
Bill Mahar: “Frank [Lunz] is the genius right-wing wordsmith who taught Republicans to, instead of saying “estate tax”, say “death tax”. Instead of saying “poor people”, say “the takers”.
Frank Lunz: “So I asked them, “Which frightens you more, “government control” or “government takeover?” Oh, clearly “government takeover”... I think it was 27 out of 30. That’s it.”
Bill Mahar: “Once the word is decided on, every single Republican from the Presidential contenders on down to the feces throwers on hate radio, all chant it like rainman over and over until it’s beaten into our skull.”
DIVIDE AND CONQUER (MOVIE EXCERPT)
Rick Perlstein: “If you look at a map of who votes for Republicans and who votes for Democrats now, it kind of looks like the map of who fought whom in the Civil War.”
This movie was released during Trump’s first win as the United States President. The media was working overtime to solidify the “divide and conquer” theme. And so after working on ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’, I didn’t exactly get more into politics because in fact the movie emphasized and highlighted the separateness which is what had turned me off to politics, and the news, in the first place.
Today, I call the media two sides of the same coin. Since 2020, I dared to flip the coin and take a peek on the other side. Heads or tails, it really didn’t matter. They’re both the same coin. Regarding taking the vaccine for coronavirus in 2021, both Democrats and Republicans were chanting the exact words - parroting each other, word for word. same terms, word for word. My thought was, why and how would the indie media sources that I turned to in order to get away from the manipulative corporate mainstream media, how even they were saying the same words? It was very suspicious. YouTube and Twitter and Instagram were all heavily censoring and shadow-banning anyone who did not play along. And so I started looking at everyone whose voices were being suppressed. And that led me for the first time to alternative video streaming platforms. These were outlets that were a safe haven for the free speech outlaws. In ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’, we quoted Hillary Clinton saying that there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against the Democratic Party and specifically against the Clintons, against Bill Clinton. Today, I say the vast conspiracy is big corporations against the people, against both Democrats and Republicans, independents, libertarians, anything and everything. And specifically since 2020, Big Pharma has taken over everything including our government agencies. So what was extraordinarily powerful about the year 2020 and Covid coming to town, was that I woke up to the fact that there really is no Left and Right. There really is no right-wing media and left-wing. There’s just the Big Corporations against We the People.
‘THE REAL ANTHONY FAUCI’ BOOK (CORBETT REPORT INTERVIEW EXCERPT)
James Corbett: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has just written ‘The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.’ Let’s start by talking about the cultural moment that we’re in, in which I note as we’re recording this conversation. It’s the 18th of November there in the United States. This book, ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’, is currently the number three bestseller on Amazon right now... obviously something is happening in the zeitgeist right now, where this information using Fauci as a hub from which we can explore many spokes of the crisis that we’re living through right now, obviously, people are hungry for this information. Can you just speak to why you decided to write this book specifically about Fauci?”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “We’ve seen over the past 20 months of medical bureaucracies, the social media titans, and the mainstream media are all kind of wrapped up in the obliteration of constitutional rights globally. And one of the ways they’ve been able to get rid of it is this avuncular, steady, authoritative, medical figure Anthony Fauci, who has been the trusted advisor for six Presidents and is a person who is widely applauded and his opinions are treated literally as gospel by the mainstream press, by social media, globally.”
(THE 2021 BOOK & 2022 DOCU MOVIE)
Bobby did a masterful job in covering not only Anthony Fauci’s corrupt background and his rise to his current stardom, but also covering all of the players surrounding him. If Anthony Fauci wants to be a true leader, he has to be open to new possibilities, especially in science.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “This book is a product of my own struggle to understand how the idealistic institutions our country built to safeguard both public health and democracy suddenly turned against our citizens and our values with such violence. The industry supposedly being regulated used its indentured servants on Capitol Hill and its financial clout to systematically hollow out those agencies beginning in the 1980s, disabling their regulatory function and transforming them into sock puppets with the very industry Congress charged them with regulating. I explore the carefully planned militarization and monetization of medicine that has left American health ailing and our democracy shattered. I chronicle the troubling role of the big tech Robber Barons, the military and industrial agencies, their deep historical alliance with Big Pharma and the public health agencies.”
At this point in time, Anthony Fauci made the statement, “what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people and there was pushback against me. So if you are trying to get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science. And anybody that looks at what’s going on clearly sees that. You have to be asleep not to see that.”
One has to be able to question what one “knows,” to re-evaluate, to go deeper. A leader with integrity will constantly push himself to be better.
Love, Käla