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The basic thesis of Curtis Bowers and his documentary film Agenda: Grinding America Down is as follows: All liberal political thought and policy and all secularizing social change in America is not driven by people's good intentions or wisdom (however foolish that "wisdom" may be) but by deliberate manipulation by actual Communist agents. Therefore, everyone who doesn't want the U.S. and the rest of the world to end up under a totalitarian Communist government should promote (1) traditional morality and (2) ultraconservative politics, in order to save America. In this DVD Communist agents are said to have quite literal direct or indirect control of the following: 1. President Obama 2. Public teacher training colleges/universities and teacher unions, and through them, all public schools. No exceptions are mentioned--no Christian or conservative teachers or school administrators, and no majority-Christian school boards. 3. The environmental movement, which according to this DVD exists not to protect the environment, but entirely for the purpose of destroying free markets and all capitalist economies. 4. Any person or idea thought of as "progressive". 5. Any initiative to take from the wealthier and give to the poorer. 6. Any promotion of "social justice". 7. The feminist movement, and any lessening of male hierarchical leadership of families. 8. The Civil Rights Movement. Note: some comments on this review have complained about its length. If you don't want detailed information about what's in Agenda: Grinding America Down (and you won't find those details in any of the favorable reviews, which I find very interesting), YOU MAY WISH TO SKIP DOWN TO MY CONCLUSIONS AT THE END OF THE REVIEW. Mr. Bowers' evidence for his thesis [with my comments evaluating his evidence in brackets like these]: * A meeting of Communists at Berkeley in 1992 that Mr. Bowers attended advocated an agenda of social/cultural change and the promotion of environmentalism. Based on the advance of social change and environmentalism since that time, Bowers concluded that it must have been the Communists who were driving those trends rather than other forces. [Actually, both of those trends--social/cultural change and environmentalism--were already pretty advanced even before 1992. There may have been Communists delighted by the trends, and who desired for them to continue, but it's a long stretch from what Bowers claims to have witnessed in 1992 to his conclusion that Communists CAUSED the trends.] * A 1958 book titled The Naked Communist, written not by a Communist but by an anti-Communist FBI agent, listed 40 alleged goals of the Communist movement including eliminating prayer in schools; discrediting the family; encouraging promiscuity and easy divorce; getting control of the schools, curriculum, and teacher associations; eliminating obscenity laws; promoting pornography; presenting homosexuality and other perversions as "normal, natural, and healthy"; controlling the press and other media; and infiltrating churches and replacing Biblical religion with "social religion". [There have in fact been very disturbing (to me) changes in many of these areas since 1958. However, even at that time there was great concern among many conservatives and Christians for all of these same issues, and it did not take any secret knowledge of the Communist agenda in 1950s society to make predictions about the future trends that would develop between that time and this. Those trends likely resulted not from Communism but from people's natural desire to turn away from God and His truth. Blaming the Communists for those trends did little, and does little, to counteract the trends.] * Both the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted leftward in recent years from their formerly centrist positions on the political continuum. [HAS this shift really occurred? I believe that it has definitely happened in the area of social issues (for example, openness to gay marriage), but I question how much of a shift there has been in Democrat/Republican positions on economics or government programs. Bowers didn't give any evidence of the shift, just declared without evidence that the shift happened.] * A case is made that worldwide Communism is alive and well, since 1.8 billion people worldwide live under it, and since some additional nations have moved towards Communism. in Africa (Zimbabwe and South Africa) and Latin America (Venezuela, El Salvador, and Bolivia). [Though Bowers' details are correct (examples of Communist-influenced governments are Zimbabwe, South Africa, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Bolivia), his generalization is faulty. There is nothing like an effective cohesive worldwide Communist movement anymore, as there was in the days of the USSR-dominated Comintern. A great variety of mutually opposed forms of Communism exist such as capitalistic but oppressive China, strongly anti-American regimes in Latin America, and the openly anti-equality personality cult in North Korea. Any coordinated Communist influence is not significantly due to the power of those governments, but would have to have a non-governmental source, presumably vastly well-funded. Bowers didn't present ANY non-circumstantial evidence of the existence of any such present-day organization.] * The Fabian Socialist Society founded in the 1800s is a group that has been dedicated since its inception to achieving a Socialist World by evolution rather than by Communist revolution, and is obviously succeeding. [No one disputes that this group existed and was influential in its day, but Bowers can only presume that similar-minded groups exist today and are functioning secretly and with incredible effectiveness, since he has no direct non-inferential evidence of their doing so.] * Barack Obama [Bowers asserts] is friends with some radical figures, including Bill Ayers (co-founder and key figure in the violent radical group of the 60s and 70s known as the Weather Underground). [It remains unclear to what extent Obama's relationship with Ayers has ever been more than casual, as Bowers presents no evidence of anything more than that.] Frank Marshall Davis, a multi-faceted and Communist-influenced black radical and porn author who died in 1987, is characterized by Bowers as a key Obama mentor. [The evidence for this seems sketchy, though they were undoubtedly acquaintances--Davis WAS a good friend of Obama's grandfather.] Jim Wallis, an Obama spiritual adviser and consultant to the Obama administration, was an activist and leader in the anti-Vietnam War group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) before founding the leftist-evangelical magazine and group, Sojourners. [Wallis IS a significant influence on the President, apparently mostly in spiritual matters. Wallis's having had a history with the SDS falls short of establishing that he is currently a Communist agent. Wallis has explicitly identified with Biblical evangelicalism, though his political views continue to be leftist, arguing from Biblical texts about justice towards the poor (we should not forget that there ARE many such texts). I personally would wish and pray for MORE, not less, spiritual influence by Jim Wallis on the President.] * Antonio Gramsci, an influential Italian Communist who died in 1937 and never visited the U. S., was a key advocate of working for Communism through cultural transformation. He is quoted in the DVD saying, "Destroy the West by destroying their culture." Gramsci especially advocated using liberalized churches as tools of Communism. American 60s radical Saul Alinsky (died in 1972), author of the influential book Rules for Radicals, was particularly influenced by Gramsci and did his best to spread Gramsci's influence hugely throughout the American left. [Alinsky is said by sources other than Agenda to be an influence on Barack Obama because Obama received training in community activism through the Industrial Areas Foundation that Alinsky founded, but Bowers never connected those dots in this video. In the U.S. we DO have morally decaying culture and we DO have liberal churches preaching anti-Biblical teachings. It's good to be aware of these trends and not be taken in by them, but no real evidence is given in Agenda that the Communists have caused the trends.] * The "Cloward-Piven strategy" advocated by Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in an article in The Nation in 1966 advocated intentionally overloading the U. S. welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to the replacement of the existing welfare system with a more radical system guaranteeing a certain level of annual income to all Americans [that's a true historical fact--Cloward and Piven DID advocate that strategy in The Nation]. Bowers concludes that this actually is the real reason why government social programs are being advanced, to intentionally cause the collapse of our government as we know it. [Bowers here repeats an argument more strongly associated with Glenn Beck, who does not appear and is not mentioned in Agenda. It's unclear to me that overloading to the point of governmental COLLAPSE (as opposed to merely weakening our economy) is happening, let alone that it's being done intentionally.] * Bowers asserts that Wade Rathke of ACORN is a recent practitioner of the Cloward-Piven strategy. [Bowers didn't make a case for a strong Obama connection with ACORN, as other commentators have done, since Obama did provide them with legal aid in two cases in the 1990s. Certainly Rathke has never admitted to being a Cloward-Piven strategy practitioner, but claims to be a sincere straightforward advocate for the poor. Most conservatives would reasonably say that Rathke is misguided, but few would agree that his primary goal is attempting to intentionally collapse the social welfare system. No EVIDENCE is given by Bowers of Rathke's having a Cloward-Piven intention, such as a Rathke quote where he stated such an intention.] * The book Towards Soviet America, written by American Communist leader William Z. Foster around 1930, and now re-printed by conservative publishers, has some correspondence with historical events which have transpired since that time. The assertions of this book are not treated in detail by Bowers except for Foster's chapter on influencing education. Bowers then shows how John Dewey, starting about the time of William Z. Foster's book, and allegedly influenced by European socialism/Communism, had a tremendous impact on American education. [John Dewey really did have a pervasive and sad influence on American education up to the present day. However, Dewey, also known as the Father of American Humanism, had been developing his atheistic relativistic man-is-the-best-god-we've-got ideas in great detail since long before Foster's book and since well before the Russian revolution. I abhor Dewey's ideas and the trends he stimulated, but I strongly doubt that his work can be explained as essentially a manipulation by the then-united Communist movement. In fact he vehemently criticized the rule of Josef Stalin, who was the dominant leader during that era of what was then a very united Communist movement, so different than the diverse, leaderless Communism of today.] * Bowers claims that the change in the American electorate from Ronald Reagan's 1980 landslide election to Obama's victory in 2008 is due to liberal (Communist) influence through education in the intervening years. [I think the causes for this change are probably more complex than that, though as a former public school teacher I don't deny that public education has been a significant contributor to liberalization especially in social-cultural issues, though once again I doubt that it's because of the Communists. Besides education, other liberalizing factors not mentioned by Bowers are the increasingly pervasive effects of electronic media and by the leftist-dominated entertainment industry.] Here are some other things I was struck by in watching Agenda: * Early in the film, a brief sequence with little comment is shown of the anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s and the U. S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Joseph McCarthy. Is Bowers suggesting a renewal of the McCarthy hearings that have been criticized by many liberal historians but vigorously defended by M. Stanton Evans and some others? If not, why did he include this sequence but not explicitly advocate a revival of McCarthy's crusade? He just showed the sequence, without explicitly praising McCarthy or justifying him against his discreditors. [The truth is that Joe McCarthy was a notoriously flawed person, a severe alcoholic and promiscuous womanizer with an insufficient regard for the truth. He was also right on target, quite a few times, with his accusations. There actually were many penetrations into the U.S. government by REAL Communist agents spying for Russia and, worse yet, influencing government policy during the WWII period of military alliance with Russia and for awhile afterwards (recommended reading: Stalin's Secret Agents, the Subversion of Roosevelt's Government). Some of these penetrations were trivial, but others were appallingly effective, like the way real Communist agent Alger Hiss influenced the Yalta conference, strengthening world Communism after WWII. There was serious naivete by many American leaders during the eras of Roosevelt (shockingly) - Truman (a little better) - Eisenhower (getting back on track) about the insidiousness of Communist goals and about the brutality of Communist governments. McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and others, to their credit, helped prevent additional Communist successes. The key error of McCarthy and others down the present day such as Bowers, is that they overreached reality and made some assertions beyond what they had real evidence for. But listen to this, Bowers fans: not even McCarthy, in an era of greater Communist cohesiveness, expansion, influence, and actual documented (quite a few even confessed) AGENTS, went as far as Bowers in warning of an impending literal takeover of the U.S. by a Communist government! In reality, such a Communist takeover of the U.S. has NEVER been a serious threat, not even during the heyday of Eugene Victor Debs (Google him) or during the alliance years of WWII, let alone during the Eisenhower 50's or the present era.] * Bowers equates two different meanings for "socialism", (1) totalitarian governmental control of the economy claiming to eliminate poverty, and (2) any government program to help the poor. These two meanings are then interchanged and condemned as one and the same thing, for example by then displaying Lenin's quote, "The goal of socialism is communism." Likewise, "big government" per se and the Democratic party are equated with Nazism and Communism. Bowers frequently shows photos or videos of Obama and Franklin Roosevelt together with photos or videos of Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin, and then all of the above are all characterized together as "the Left." [This sort of unjustified lumping-together is a standard technique of manipulative propaganda. FDR and Obama have espoused terrible ideas and policies, but it is beyond reasonable (to put it mildly) to equate them with murderers-of-millions like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. The one exception to the previous sentence, and I believe this was ignored by Bowers, is the terrible holocaust of abortion, which under the Obama presidency has continued to snuff out over a million American lives every year, just as it has done for decades. If you want a political cause to be reasonably passionate about, in my opinion you should crusade against abortion, not against Communism.] MY CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE AGENDA DOCUMENTARY: 1. Bowers doesn't present nearly enough conclusive evidence for a thesis as immense as his. There are way too many arguments from innuendo, faulty reasoning, and flimsy circumstantial/inferential evidence. It's somewhat analogous to evaluating Harold Camping's nutty 2011 rapture thesis based on the evidence Camping gave at the time and which he now admits to have been faulty. Another example of inadequate evidence was the case made by the Bush administration that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before launching Desert Storm. To believe a thesis with such profound implications, a reasonable person would demand really conclusive, hard evidence like the evidence we had against Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden being responsible for 9-11. To justify war, or to justify a crusade against liberalism that would potentially include a renewal of something like the 1950s McCarthy hearings, reasonable people need better evidence than Bowers has given us. Positive reviewers of Agenda give Bowers WAY too much credit for his allegedly incontrovertible evidence. On the amount and quality of hard, legally admissible evidence provided by Bowers in this DVD, it would be difficult to get a court conviction of a criminal for even a minor crime. 2. I think it's unlikely that many liberal minds will be changed by the film. Some (hopefully not very many) who already hold conservative opinions and who already believe in the evil nature of American secular-humanist liberalism (I actually count myself among this group) will end up joining the extremists who share the Communist-conspiracy belief (I am NOT in that group). To put it another way, almost no Democrats will be convinced, but a few already-conservative Republicans may move toward the extreme right. Mostly, the effect will be to give more fuel to the zeal of those who already hold views similar to Bowers. 3. Some Bowers-skeptical conservatives and Christians will find themselves alienated from the Bowers-convinced, sadly weakening some conservative efforts, tragically dividing some churches (hopefully not very many). Those churches who en masse embrace the Bowers mission will be discredited, and rightly so, in the eyes of their communities. 4. People will rightly think, there goes another crackpot Christian idea like Harold Camping's prediction that the rapture would occur in 2011, and be further hardened against the true gospel of Jesus Christ. We need less of this nonsense and more winsome, eminently reasonable witness like that in Tim Keller's The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Keller's book would be a wiser purchase for most people considering the purchase of this DVD. 5. People and our society ARE turning away from God and many truths about reality and morality, and this is a colossal tragedy, but it's not because of the Communists. It's because of people's rebellious hearts, that they have believed a lie ABOUT GOD, that He doesn't exist or doesn't care or doesn't matter. Don't devote your life to a misguided crusade to try and rescue America from Communism but to discovering and vigorously living out God's real love and truth. THAT is your best real hope for saving America.