Bowers said the communist’s goal #17, “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks,” has largely been achieved and has created many of the problems Americans face today.
“Fifty years ago they say we’ve got to get the children, because we know if we have the children, we have everything, and we’re going to teach them socialist ideas,” Bowers said.
“One day you‘ll awake and you will have a people that not only want what you’re selling, but they’ll also need it because the moral fiber will [have] broken down the character so much. They need big government; they literally can’t take care of themselves. They have not the character or the virtue to do that and so that’s what has happened.”
Communist leader Karl Marx said the first battlefield is the rewriting of history, because if people don’t know where they came from, they don’t know where they’re going to be going.
Bowers also discussed how communists have been pushing the feminist movement to make women unhappy with marriage and motherhood in their goal to break down the family.
The filmmaker said he heard about the 45 goals for the first time when attended a Communist Party USA meeting in Berkley, California, in 1992, where party leaders laid out their plans.
The communist’s goal #40 “Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce,” and goal #41 “Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents” directly feed into getting children away from their parents and breaking up the stable family structure.
In 1969, then-Governor Ronald Reagan of California signed the no-fault divorce bill, and in the decade and a half that followed, almost all states followed California’s lead and enacted a law resembling California’s. The no-fault divorce bill made it easier to dissolve a marriage because neither side had to show any wrongdoing.
In addition to destabilizing the family and getting control of educational institutions, Bowers said the communists used the strategy of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist philosopher and politician, to infiltrate other major institutions of influence and use those to change the people from within. “Overtime through education, through media through entertainment, you are slowly changing the people themselves.”