Ron Jones and The Third Wave Ruined Two Whole Generations of Conservatives

They saw kids being respectful, and were made to be suspectful, by a movie made in Hollywood.

According to its opening slide, The Wave is based on the real experience of a high school class in Palo Alto CA (USA), in April 1967. History teacher Ron Jones attempted to teach his pupils the realities of fascism by encouraging them to form a kind of classroom Hitler Youth. The movie was released straight to TV on ABC in October 1981. This would imply that production of the film began almost immediately after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

If you’re from California, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida, or New York, you’ve probably seen The Wave. I can’t remember when I first watched it. It was early high school, either in AP World History class during the unit on the interwar period, or in AP Psychology, during a unit on conformity. It’s entirely possible I saw it during both. If you haven’t, here is a link to the full movie on YouTube.

I don’t know whether the story told in the wave actually approximates true events, as is claimed. My pattern recognition abilities tell me that the story is communist propaganda, faker than a $3 bill. I do not use the phrase “communist propaganda” lightly, as Ron Jones was a proud member of the Students for s Democratic Society.¹ A more plausible explanation is that Ron Jones, with the cooperation of his students, pretended to have been overcome with mass fascist conversion for the sake of telling a morality play, and that the only acts of brainwashing and mob psychology that Jones ever successfully carried out was in convincing America that he was able, in April 1967, to turn an entire classroom of 15- year old American students (predominantly white, of course) into proto-Nazis and back in a single week at the end(!) of a year having a far-left activist as a teacher.²

But maybe the story isn’t fake. Maybe it really did happen, and the following story only seems ridiculous when you say it out loud because truth is stranger than fiction, a curious platitude that my pattern recognition tells me people often repeat when they are lying to me. Regardless of what actually happened during what was apparently the second most eventful week in 1967, the movie has been out for forty years. The movie postures as being based on true events, and people believe that they are true events, with lessons for their personal and political lives. Today, I’m going to explore what those lessons are.

PRELUDE

The Wave begins with an introductory slide, over the sound of heartbeats, before shifting to a voice over by Mr. Benjamin Ross, played by Bruce Davison³.

“Yes, I remember The Wave. It was one of the most frightening classroom experiences I ever had. It all started when we were studying Nazi Germany.”

This comment naturally begs the question of what other frightening classroom experiences Mr. Ross has had, such that The Wave is only a contender for the top spot. Mr. Ross seems quite young in the movie, which takes place in the late sixties. Perhaps in ensuing years the school would experience an influx of drug use or gang violence. Real gangs, of course, that would not be disbanded by sanctimonious lectures about the dangers of conformity.

The first scene of the movie is Mr. Ross giving his students, and therefore the audience, a 90 second crash course on Nazism.

“The people selected for extermination by the Nazis were herded into concentration camps located all over Eastern Europe. The life expectancy for prisoners in the camps was only two hundred and seventy days. They were worked, starved, tortured; and when they couldn’t work anymore, they were exterminated in gas chambers, and their remains were disposed of in ovens. In all, the Nazis exterminated over ten million men, women, and children in these concentration camps. What you just saw took place in Germany between 1934 and 1945. The situation grew out of the aftermath of WWI. Germany had been defeated. Leadership was at a low ebb. Inflation was high, and thousands were homeless, hungry, and jobless. Hitler took advantage of the situation to establish himself and his Third Reich. We all know the rest: camps, killings. What resulted was the most efficient death machinery ever devised.”

The monologue is accompanied with footage of men in striped uniforms, emaciated bodies, rows of ovens, and piles of corpses, to drive home the message.

A student, Laurie, asks how the Germans could “sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all around them and say that they didn’t know anything about it? How could they do that? How could they say that?” Mr. Ross’s attempt to compose a plausible answer to the question drives the plot of the film. After spending the rest of the day, and most of the night, reading stacks of books on the rise of the Third Reich, he decides on his experiment.

MONDAY

The next day, he introduces the children to the First Precept of The Wave.

“Today I’m going to talk to you about Discipline. Hear me out, this can be exciting. Now, I’m talking to you about power. Power through Discipline. Success. Success through Discipline. Nobody here wants a taste of power and success? Here we go. David, Eric, you play football? You know it takes Discipline to win. What about ballet dancing, Andrea? You know it takes long, hard hours of work for them to develop their skill. Same goes with painters working at their craft. Scientists. It is all Discipline. Control. The Strength of the Will. There’s something we can do to experience power through Discipline right now. Shall we try?”

He then instructs the children on proper seating posture and procedure, and lays down three rules. First, the students must have pencils and paper. Second, students must stand at the side of their desk when asking and answering questions. Third, students must begin their questions and answers with the words “Mr. Ross.” While having students demonstrate the procedure, he also adds that answers given must be short and precise.

The students are dismissed from class, having found the whole exercise fun, and we are fully introduced to the de-facto villain of the piece. Robert Walkins, we see, is a loser. “The Class Creep,” according to the movie’s lead female protagonist. He falls asleep in class, and girls get up from their seats when he sits next to them. He is never shown to be bullied or even insulted by anyone. He is a little on the overweight side, by the standards of the 1980s anyway.

Earlier, we were also introduced to the heroes of the piece. David, who plays for the football team, and his girlfriend Laurie, who writes for the paper. The two are model students who enjoy each other’s company. Humorously, one student tells them if they “keep acting like hermits” by sitting only with each other at lunch and focusing on their extracurricular activities instead of going to parties, they’ll “end up like Robert over there.”

After the first class, Robert is seen in the bathroom, lacing up his sneakers. He approaches the mirrors and, in a scene that sums up the entirety of the movie in the span of five seconds, fixes up his hair and stands up straight as ominous music plays, complete with a screeching violin.

TUESDAY

The next day, Mr. Ross is taken aback to discover his students quietly sitting in their seats on time when he arrives in class, complete with an ominous piano note so we know that we are seeing something unusual and creepy. He then informs them of the second precept of Fascism with Rossist Characteristics: Community.

“Community is that bond between people who work and struggle together. It’s building a barn with your neighbors. It’s feeling you’re a part of something that’s more important than yourself. A movement. A team, a cause. And like Discipline, to fully understand Community, you have to experience it and participate in it.”

He introduces them to the new symbol for their community: The Wave.

“It’s a pattern of change. It has movement, direction, and impact.”

He also introduces a salute.

He then, and here I emphasize that this is on only the second day of the experiment, during the section on Imperial Japan, the previous week’s unit having been dedicated to Nazi Germany, instructs the students, beginning with Robert, to stand up, form a salute that he just invented, and repeatedly chant the slogan: “Strength Through Discipline. Strength Through Community.” Once more, ominous music, to make sure that we understand that something bad is happening.

Now, those of you who are on the left tail of the bell curve might think that there’s nothing at all unrealistic about that.

For those of you who with the brainpower to see the scene as self-evidently absurd, let’s think for a moment. Why do we think that? Why, because only a complete moron could sit through a week of lessons on Fascism, then happily go around standing up and making salutes and chanting slogans without feeling so much as a sense of irony over the whole situation! But why do you think that those slogans, “Strength Through Discipline, Strength Through Community,” are “obviously” fascist?

You think this because you were raised in America. You think this because you consume American media. You think this because you were brainwashed until this was your default way of thinking by a constant barrage of propaganda.

Propaganda like The Wave.

When Laurie’s mother hears her daughter gushing about her Tuesday, she is suspicious. “You’re supposed to be learning history, not how to be part of a group!” The idea that civic engagement has no place in a class on social studies is meant to be the heroic perspective.

On the other hand, the perspective of the fascist fellow traveler is given by Laurie’s father:

“This country was built by people who were part of a group. The Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers.”

To which Laurie’s mother retorts that that while that may be true, the country nonetheless “owes its greatness to those who weren’t afraid to be individuals.” Here I ask you to question Laurie’s mother, and by proxy the writers of this movie: Who exactly made this country great, if it was not the Founding Fathers?⁴

WEDNESDAY

The next day, Wednesday morning, Laurie is relaying the conversation to David, who defends the integrity of a cult that is not even 48 hours old. I am going to emphasize points like this because, again, this movie is allegedly based on true events.

“She can’t possibly know what The Wave is about unless she’s been there to see it work.”

As they approach the school, they are saluted by a student who isn’t even in their history class. During class, on the third day of the wave, Mr. Ross hands out membership cards,⁵ some of which are marked with red Xs, marking the holder as a “monitor” who is to report to Mr. Ross any members who do not obey the rules of The Wave.

To refresh, the rules of The Wave up to this point are:

1. Sit up straight.

2. Have a pencil and paper when you show up to class.

3. Stand at the side of your desk when you ask and answer questions in class.

4. Begin all in-class statements with “Mr. Ross.”

5. Answer questions clearly and concisely.

Regardless, hearing this makes Laurie feel visibly uneasy. Mr. Ross then elaborates on the third precept of Rossist Thought.

“Discipline and Community are meaningless without Action. Now, Discipline gives you the right to Action. A disciplined group with a goal can take Action like a well oiled machine. Through hard work and allegiance to each other, you will learn faster and accomplish more. But only if you support one another, and only if you work together and obey the rules can you ensure the success of The Wave. You are all to actively recruit new members. Each new member must demonstrate knowledge of our rules, and pledge strict obedience to them.”

Robert stands up:

“Mr. Ross, for the first time I feel like I’m part of something great.”

Other students speak up.

“Mr. Ross, this is like being born again.”
“Mr. Ross, I feel the same way.”
“Mr. Ross, I’m proud of The Wave.”

If hearing that students would be enforcing rules made Laurie uneasy, hearing them say that they feel good about themselves because of their membership in a group that they can take pride in has her nearly on the verge of tears.

Mr. Ross initiates another chant of the now completed Wave Motto.

“Strength Through Discipline. Strength Through Community. Strength Through Action.”

As the chants reach a crescendo, the camera is sure to focus in on Robert, giving the audience a close up view of the face of the Awakened Saxon.

After class, the other students spend the rest of the day handing out flyers for The Wave and, by the looks of it, offering to test people’s Thetan Levels. Meanwhile, Robert approaches Mr. Ross.

“I want to be your bodyguard. You see Mr. Ross, for the first time in my life, I feel… well nobody makes jokes about me anymore. I’m part of something special. I just don’t want anything to ever happen to you. Mr. Ross, please let me be your bodyguard.”

Laurie, on the other hand, spends the day working tirelessly to undermine the Wave in the minds of literally anybody who will listen to her. First her boyfriend, who wants his popular, well-respected girlfriend to come to a meeting later with all of the new members and lend her prestige to the Wave. “Let them make up their own minds,” Laurie says, “they’re individuals.” Obviously this standard would preclude Laurie from endorsing literally any organization whatsoever under her own name, since she believes that to be seen doing such would constitute an overriding of the free will of others. She then says that she “can’t believe how crazy everybody has gotten! The Wave has taken over everything!”

Her boyfriend David retorts that this is because The Wave works. “Everybody’s on the same team, everybody’s equal.” Almost all of David’s defenses for The Wave follow a leftist argumentation pattern like this. He doubles down:

“You know, you’re against this thing because you’re not special anymore, because you’re not the best student in the class now. I think it is true. Now you know how the rest of us felt listening to you and Amy always give the right answers.”

Laurie says that David is being stupid, prompting him to dump her.

Later that day, Laurie writes a scathing condemnation of The Wave. Despite spending literally 100% of her spare time complaining about the Wave in speech and print, she asserts: “The Wave has become an obsession. No one's is thinking for themselves anymore. The Wave is hurting people. Everyone’s going along with it like a flock of sheep.”

Again, what is “it” that people are “going along with?”

It is politeness, preparedness, and punctuality. It is being nice to the class creep. It is handing out flyers. It is helping classmates with assignments. It is a school that is no longer a daily nightmare for certain students, which manifests as a nightmare for Laurie.

Her friend Amy asks her not to publish, pointing out that she is still upset about breaking up with David. Laurie, being editor in chief of the school paper, needs no permission, and publishes her hitpiece on the front page of the Gordon Grapevine.

THURSDAY

On Thursday morning, Robert is reading the school newspaper. Headline: THE WAVE DROWNS GORDON HIGH. He, and all of his new friends, agree that these are lies, and that Laurie’s smear campaign needs to stop. David and his friend from the football team agree to talk to her.

On Thursday evening, well after sunset, Laurie is leaving the Gordon Grapevine office. Having by implication been hard at work writing even more denunciations of The Wave for hours after school ended, Laurie is frightened to see that the word “enemy” has been spray-painted onto her locker. Her fear is understandable, of course, her school not yet being the kind of place where vandalism of school property is seen as endemic and unpreventable. She is further frightened by the sight of somebody else in the hallway approaching her without saying a word, and the sound of piano chase music on the movie soundtrack.

Outside, she is greeted by David, who greets her politely, but is brushed off and is asked to leave her alone. He abandons the pleasantries and makes his intent clear in an exchange that may well have inspired Anakin Skywalker’s dialogue on Mustafar.

“Laurie, you’ve got to stop writing that stuff against The Wave. You’re causing all kinds of problems.”
“The Wave is causing the problems, David.”
“It is not. Look, Laurie, we want you with us, not against us.”
“Well count me out, I told you I quit. This is not a game anymore, people are beginning to get hurt.”
“Alright, so a few people are getting hurt along the way. But it’s for the good of the whole. Why can’t you see that? Look, it’s a new system, we can make it work!”

Notice again that David talks like a leftist. This is of course because David is misguided, but fundamentally a good person, and is meant to be interpreted as such by the audience. Nevertheless, Laurie persists, and tries to walk away from the conversation, but David grabs her arm, insisting that she “stop writing those articles and keep [her] mouth shut about The Wave.” Laurie struggles to escape his grasp and becomes increasingly hysterical.

“I will write, and I will say anything that I want to and you can’t stop me.”
“We can and we will.”
“I hate you, I hate The Wave, I hate all of you!”

David shoves her to the ground, and Laurie begins crying her journalist crocodile tears. David has a Pauline change of heart and embraces her, realizing that what began as an exercise in sitting up straight in class has turned out to be a gateway drug to the telltale fascist pastime of abusing women.

The two of them now reconciled, Laurie and David show up at Mr. Ross’s house. If they can’t persuade their fellow students via their control of the press, they will have to go above their heads and have an authority figure terminate the project against everybody’s wishes.

David explains how The Wave has gone too far. “It’s taken over, Mr. Ross. There’s no room to be yourself or say what you really believe.” What one believes about what, exactly? Bringing pencils to class? The goofy salute?

Laurie follows up. “And all the kids are scared, they’re really scared. Not only to say anything against The Wave, but of what might happen to them if they don’t go along with it.” This is actually a statistical error. The average student seems to be having a perfectly good time. Laurie, who runs the school newspaper and has spent the last 48 hours gripped by a histrionic fit of terror, was an outlier and should not have been counted.

“Kids are actually spying on each other.” David says, “Some of them are even using The Wave as an excuse to beat up on other kids.”

“Yes,” Mr. Ross replies, “the principal told me about that this afternoon…”

In fact the previous day, we did see a fight break out between a Wave member and a non-Wave member, which the audience is meant, for literally no reason, to assume is the fault of The Wave. I’m not joking here. If you look at the fight (24:17), you will see that it is the larger boy who throws the first punch, though a crowd has already gathered and both boys are stanced up. After the fight, it is the smaller boy who initiates the chant of Strength Through Discipline.

Perhaps the smaller boy initiated a one-on-one fight with another boy half a foot taller than himself in front of over a dozen witnesses for daring to speak ill of The Wave. But another interpretation presents itself as immediately more plausible, given what we had literally just heard Robert say less than sixty seconds earlier: The traditional victims of 80’s movie school bullying at Gordon High School, now surrounded by friendly crowds instead of being socially isolated, are willing to physically confront their tormentors instead of quietly accepting their humiliation. Suffering in silence is much less of a hassle for school administrators than open brawls that require paperwork to be filled out, and so the Wave is framed as the problem, and not the solution, in the eyes of the school’s principal.

Laurie moves the conversation away from any allegations of real violence and wrongdoing and returns the topic to what is really important: her anxieties. “Well, it’s true. You can’t carry on a conversation without worrying about who’s listening. We’re really scared Mr. Ross.”

David continues. “Laurie and I haven’t talked for days because of The Wave. And tonight, I lost control and almost hurt her.” David of course demonstrates the logic of the domestic abuser here. His relationship troubles are not because of Laurie’s behavior or personality, nor his own, but because of The Wave, which has all of the agency here. Further, the idea that those who abuse their partners “lose control” is a misconception advanced by abusers and those trapped in abusive dynamics to excuse their actions.⁶

Laurie begs Mr. Ross to “stop this nightmare.” Mr. Ross agrees to take care of it the next day. His way.

FRIDAY

Friday morning, Mr. Ross announces that “The Wave Is Upon Us.”

“Class, there’s something very important that I have to tell you about the Wave. At five o’clock, there will be a rally in the auditorium for Wave members only. Now, the wave is not just a classroom experiment. No, it’s much more than that. Across the country, teachers like myself have been recruiting and training a youth brigade to show the rest of the nation how to achieve a better society through Discipline, Community, Action, and Pride. Now look what we’ve accomplished in two short weeks⁷, in this school alone. If we can change things here, we can change things everywhere. Factories. Stores. Universities. All the institutions. During the rally, a prominent political figure will reveal himself to all of you as our national leader. He will appear on television, and he will announce a nationwide Wave Youth program.”

The students applaud, and David desperately stands up and begs them not to listen to Mr. Ross, who he says is lying, while Laurie begs them to “see what he’s doing” and “think for yourselves.” Mr. Ross orders them escorted from the room by three other students, including Robert.

Now, obviously, Mr. Ross is lying, and there is no movement. But David and Laurie seem to think that Mr. Ross is betraying them. To what end is unclear. What did they think Mr. Ross was “really” going to have the students do at the rally? A mass-poisoning? A coup against the principal? Against city hall? Whatever they thought, they decide that Mr. Ross will not be able to help them, and refuse to answer his calls. Instead, they resolve to “make them listen” by infiltrating the rally and delivering a no doubt incredibly compelling speech on the virtues of individualism and the Western Liberal tradition and not a hysterical rant about “thinking for yourself SHEEPLE.”

How they plan to sway a large crowd composed exclusively of loyal Wave members when they couldn’t even sway their own classroom is unclear. Regardless, they rush to the school in order to get into the rally before it’s too late. Too late for what? Again, who knows?

At the rally, hundreds of students, now wearing armbands, are led in a recitation of the Wave Motto by Mr. Ross, flanked by Reichsleiter Robert.

Mr. Ross instructs Robert to turn on the TVs, for in a moment, the national leader will address them all. The screens remain blank for nearly two full minutes, and the students grow increasingly impatient, before one student finally stands up.

“There is no leader, is there?” one student demands, and we see two Wave guards beginning to approach him, presumably intending to silence his outburst or escort him from the assembly. He is correct, of course. Apparently, Mr. Ross managed to create a fascist movement without a real leader, that spun out of his control by feeding entirely off of its own energy. Applying this moral allegory to the Nazi regime itself has very interesting implications for moral culpability.

“Yes there is,” Mr. Ross declares, pointing to wall behind him, “that’s your leader!”

That national leader’s name? Those with an IQ above 85 know the answer.

That’s right.

Oh, snap, it’s fuckin Hitler.

The large projector screen is taken up with Der Fuehrer’s Face, in all of his Teutonic Terror.⁸

Mr. Ross lays out the situation.

“Now listen carefully. There is no national youth movement. You thought you were so special. Better than everyone outside this room. You traded your freedom for the luxury of feeling superior. You accepted the group’s will over your own convictions no matter who you hurt. You thought you were just going along for the ride, that you could walk away at any moment. But where were you heading? How far would you have gone?” ((At this point a girl, Andrea, begins to cry.)) “Take a look at your future!”

Again, Hitler speaks, over the backdrop this time of rows of Hitlerjugend.⁹ The screen hangs on one of the Brownshirt Boy Scouts brandishing a torch, before fading into the face of Robert, standing there menacingly.

Mr. Ross twists the knife.

“Yes, you would have all made good Nazis. You would have put on the uniforms. Turned your heads, and allowed your friends and neighbors to be persecuted and destroyed. Fascism isn’t something those other people did. It’s right here in all of us. You asked: ‘How could the German people do nothing as millions of innocent people were murdered? How could they claim they weren’t involved? What causes people to deny their own history?’ Well if history repeats itself, you’ll all want to deny what has happened to you in The Wave. But if our experiment is successful, you will have learned that we are all responsible for our own actions. And that you must question what you do, rather than blindly follow a leader. And for the rest of your lives, never allow a group’s will to usurp your individual rights. Now I know this has been painful for you, it certainly has for me. But it’s a lesson we’ll all share for the rest of our lives.”

You would have all made good Nazis. Indeed. Discipline is the hop, Community the skip, Action the jump between you and the Third Reich.

What is the Fascism that is “right here in all of us?” It is sitting up straight. It is coming prepared to class. It is showing respect to teachers, and answering questions without equivocating. Fascism is when you get into fights at school, the more fights you get into, the more fascist you are. Fascism is when students help each other with homework, and take pride in themselves, their appearance, and the groups to which they belong.

It’s self-evidently absurd to be proud of being straight, white, or male, because you didn’t choose it, it’s a mere accident of birth that says nothing of your character. Simultaneously, it is bad to be proud of being in The Wave despite membership being a conscious choice. Why? Because it imposes standards of behavior for its members and excludes those who cannot abide by them! According to Mr. Ross, this is “trading your freedom for the luxury of feeling superior!”

Any organization that demands any form of virtue from its members is going to have members aware of superior virtue. Unless virtue is pre-defined as your rejection of organizations that demand virtue.

When journalists smear you and your friends in the press and you demand that they stop instead of passively accepting the insults? That’s just what the Nazis did. Presumably the Wave should have published articles contesting the charges on the pages of the Gordon Grapevine. And if the editors of the school paper refused to publish those defenses, what then?

Join the club en masse and vote themselves to leadership positions, replacing Laurie as editor? And if they ceased to publish Laurie’s smears, no doubt those fascists would be accused of abridging her free speech. If they privately discouraged her? Fascist intimidation tactics. Drown her out by publishing five pro-Wave editorials in the paper for every anti-Wave piece of hers? Laurie complains to school administration that fully half of the school paper is dedicated to editorializing about The Wave instead of directing effort towards writing about “real stories.”

Perhaps they should “just start their own newspaper?” The Wave already has access to printing facilities if they made all of those fliers, armbands, posters, and signs. Most certainly they would have been capable of rising to the challenge in short order, but that too would have been treated as “proof” that the Wave was “getting out of hand” and creating an echo chamber on par with Der Sturmer. A charge they could only evade by, you guessed it, allowing Laurie to publish her smears in their paper, where even more Wave members would read it.

Notice also that denying complicity in, or knowledge of, the Holocaust, it treated as tantamount to denying the Holocaust itself on the part of the German people. For Laurie, for Mr. Ross, and by extension for the movie itself, the Holocaust is not just Zyklon B and Krema III. Germans are not just guilty of the Holocaust. German popular complicity is the Holocaust.

Lesson learned, the students cover their faces in shame, throwing their armbands to the ground as they file out of the assembly hall. David and Laurie smile at Mr. Ross, The Wave having disbanded and their previous social statuses restored.

Meanwhile, Robert, the class creep, is crying in a corner, having been stripped of what was by his own admission the only great thing he’s ever been a part of. Having tasted social acceptance, it has been taken from him. He is united with his classmates only in his new opportunity to commiserate over the trauma of being in The Wave, the painful lesson that Mr. Ross has instructed them all to share for the rest of their lives. Undoubtedly, to dissent from Mr. Ross’s condemnation of the exercise will only lead to his being further ostracized as an unrepentant fascist.¹⁰

Did Robert participate in any of the violence allegedly caused by The Wave? For most of The Wave’s duration, he spent his time as Mr. Ross’s self-appointed bodyguard. He took no part in any fights, nor was he shown to have spied on anybody’s conversations. But his crimes were greater than any mere violence against persons or property. He insulted the dignity of the journalistic profession. In his own words, when Laurie’s article was published:

“These are all lies. She can’t be allowed to say these things.”
”Anybody who reads this will get the wrong idea about The Wave.”
”Laurie Saunders is a threat. She must be stopped.”

These statements were not backed up by any action on his part. In fact, it was Laurie’s own boyfriend David that confronted her and by his own admission “lost control and almost hurt her.” Nonetheless, Robert is the face of Wave Terror, despite victimizing a grand total of zero people.

To observe the irony that now his speech is constrained by social pressure, of course, will be met with fluoride stares and insinuations that he deserves it. To effectively defend himself would require him to abandon the liberal urge to defend his right to support The Wave, and affirmatively defend The Wave as such, extricating himself from Karl Popper’s Kafka Trap.

Not that doing so would win him many friends.

Mr. Ross places a comforting hand on his shoulder, and the two walk out, and the movie ends, reminds us once more that we are meant to believe that this is based on the real experience of a high school class in Palo Alto, California.

DISCIPLINE IS FASCISM. COMMUNITY IS FASCISM. ACTION IS FASCISM.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the object level rules of The Wave revolve around acting like a virtuous student, and treating your teachers, classmates, and school facilities with pride and respect. There were second-order complaints about how the Wave enforced compliance, but it is important to be clear what was meant to be complied with.

It is also important to remember that this movie claims to be based on true events. It is one thing to handwave Laurie or David saying something silly, because the dialogue is dramatized for a movie. But the descriptions and depictions of The Wave, and its effects on the school and its students, are meant to be taken as real. It cannot have “plot holes” in this sense, because real life does not have “plot holes.”

Real events should not require willing suspension of disbelief, because real events are not made up stories for entertainment consumption.

If The Wave truly describes real events, then there is a real philosopher whose worldview is completely validated by Ron Jones’s experiment. If the Wave was a lie peddled by a teacher with an agenda, we know where he pulled his material. He was not, as his movie counterpart was depicted, reading William Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.

Those of you who have not heard the name Theodor Adorno may have heard of the Frankfurt School or the term “Critical Theory,” sometimes incorrectly referred to as “Post-Modern NeoMarxism.”¹¹ Adorno was a German sociologist associated with the Frankfurt School, one of its most prominent members after Horkheimer himself. One of Theodore Adorno’s more popular works was The Authoritarian Personality.

Published in 1950 as part of a "Studies in Prejudice" series¹², the purpose of the book was to determine what personality traits, or clusters of traits, make someone sympathetic to, or susceptible to recruitment by, fascist and/or antisemitic movements. The book took a Freudian perspective, arguing that when children are subjected to harsh discipline and deprived of affection, he grows up to see the world as one revolving around the exercise of power, and becomes willing to outsource moral judgement to authority figures, beginning with his parents. He becomes emotionally stunted, and develops an Authoritarian Personality.

What were the elements of The Authoritarian Personality, according to Adorno?

1. Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.

2. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitudes toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group.

3. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.

4. Anti-Intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.

5. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate, the disposition to think in rigid categories.

6. Power and “Toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figured, overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributed of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.

7. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.

8. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world, the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.

9. Sexual Moralism: Exaggerated concern with sexual goings on.

Adorno went so far as to design an F-Scale test, which can be taken here.¹³ Feel free to. I would be shocked if anybody reading this article scores below 50%. I scored a 55%, making me 16.6% more authoritarian than the average person. My highest score was in Power-Toughness (71%) and my lowest scores were in Authoritarian Submission (29%) and Superstition (31%).¹⁴ As a matter of fact, yes, I do feel that leadership is a trait that some have and others don’t, but I do not easily put my trust into authority figures.¹⁵ This test was used by employers, mainly government agencies, and particularly law enforcement agencies, on their own prospective employees.

The fact that adherence to middle-class values is taken as a pillar of authoritarian personalities should make clear exactly the sort of person who would write, publish, favorably cite, or teach this book. And we can begin to see how every element of the story of The Wave evokes some element of The Authoritarian Personality in the exact same order.

The first day of The Wave experiment (“Strength Through Discipline”) was an exercise in Conventionalism. Sitting up straight, showing up to class on time, being prepared. Even the directive to answer questions concisely and “simply” was an exercise in Anti-Intraception. The Second Day, (“Strength Through Community”) of The Wave was an exercise in Authoritarian Submission and Aggression. Students were given membership cards, and designated as monitors with orders to track rulebreakers. The third day (“Strength Through Action”) was about power and toughness. Said Mr. Ross, “Discipline gives you the right to Action. A disciplined group with a goal can take Action like a well oiled machine.”

In Ron Jones’s personal account of The Wave (here)¹⁶, he says that Thursday was Strength Through Pride. In the movie, Thursday’s class is not shown, focusing instead on the reaction to Laurie’s front-page article denouncing The Wave. I do not think it is much of a stretch to infer that whatever “Strength Through Pride” was involved school spirit, and as such likely fit the themes of Stereotypy, and likely Projectivity.

That puts us at 5 for 9 with certainty, and another 2 can be reasonably inferred. “Destructiveness and Cynicism” and “Sexual Moralism” likely could not have been fit into a classroom exercise in any plausible way, to the extent that there was anything plausible about this classroom exercise. I personally think that the only thing stopping someone like Ron Jones from putting weird sexual stuff into his lesson was that school boards weren’t yet capable of having objectors rounded up and arrested if they dared to speak up at meetings.

As early as 1967, at least one high school teacher was teaching Critical Theory to his sophomore students. Whether the narrative Ron Jones tells about the results is true or not, that is what he was doing. Anyone who hears the narrative of The Wave and accept it as fact is accepting the conceptual empirical validity of a key export of Frankfurt School critical theorists.

In 1981, a movie was made that uncritically represented Jones’ “experiment” as factual and predictive, uncritically affirming each and every one of his moral premises. That movie was then presented to generations of students year upon year for decades, informing their views on discipline, community, action, and pride.

The Wave is propaganda, and it has been taught to tens of thousands of students for the past forty years as a fact, teaching them that they are fascist for being normal. Fascist for in-group loyalty. Fascist for having standards. Already someone is scoffing and shaking their head. “Nice strawman!” they say “Being normal, being loyal to their ingroups, and having standards, just puts them highly at risk of succumbing to fascism!”

We know that this nuance is fake, because we know how people talk about Jordan “Clean Your Room+Lobster Hierarchy” Peterson.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSERVATIVES

My first time watching The Wave was when I was in high school a decade ago, and I re-watched the movie on a pure whim in March of 2021. Obviously, the country has changed a lot since then.

One of the major developments in that time has been the proliferation of the Anti-Fascist Mob: a veritable legion of nerds, geeks, creeps, and babies given social license to assault, vandalize, riot, loot, and otherwise torment normal people in the name of fighting racism, fascism, and white supremacy. Racism is when you don’t want the supermarket burned down. Fascism is when you adhere to middle class values. And the footsoldiers of white supremacy are the police officers and district attorneys who literally kneel in the face of the mob and maliciously prosecute anybody who attempts to defend themselves from it.

Conservatives lack the vocabulary to discuss this nightmare in anything but the language of anti-fascism. Thus, we are subjected to the absurd spectacle of the continually repeated slogan “Antifa are the real fascists.” Like a Lawful Neutral cleric with a Chaotic Evil deity, conservatives try and fail to channel this spellphrase to no effect over and over again, hoping against reason that perhaps this will be the time that the force of their moral condemnation will make their political abuse end. It doesn’t work and will never work, but they will die before they stop saying it.

What makes Antifa the real fascists, exactly? Well, they don’t allow internal dissent! And they beat up anybody who disagrees with them! And they all dress the same! Members can’t be peeled off by arguments from obvious members of the outgroup!

When I watched the movie again after all those years, one joke leapt to mind, especially whenever David spoke about how The Wave made everybody equal and had never been tried before: “Wow, these guys are just like Antifa.”

I’m no ordinary conservative and I still thought that. And countless conservatives think the same thing uncritically. Even if they have not seen The Wave, its premises are pounded into them at every level of social education. Antifa acts like the Wave. The Wave are Nazis. Therefore Antifa are Nazis.

But this is the real truth: The Wave is just a functional organization. Antifa is a functional organization. Conservatives have been psyopped into thinking that functional organization is fascist. Leftists believe that they are categorically not fascist, and so do not fear to create functional organizations.

This is the lesson that we should carry with us for the rest of our lives. If we don’t, this probably isn’t going to go so well for us.

1. Other renditions of this story make Jones’ political sympathies more explicit. In the 2008 German-language remake Die Welle, history teacher Rainer Wegner draws a bureaucratic short straw and is made to teach a class on Autocracy, despite originally wanting to teach the class about his own self-avowed ideology, some form of anarcho-syndicalism. He actually objects to the anarchism course being assigned to a different teacher (who actually completed his syllabus on time) on the grounds that the other teacher is not “an expert” who has “squatted in Kreuzberg for five years” or participated in May Day demonstrations the way he has. Interestingly, when Wegner approaches him to offer a trade, the other teacher responds that despite classes being held on multiple alternative systems, “Project Week is for showing the students the virtues of democracy.”

2. Those more interested in Jones himself can watch this interview in which he lengthily discusses his early life and how it impacted his views on belonging to groups, as well as a few techniques that he uses to give children practical demonstrations of such topics as apartheid (“You’re not allowed to go to the bathroom anymore”), capitalism (“sell your lunch”), and McCarthyism (“You, I know you cheated! Get up here and confess!”).

3. After portraying a teacher who (allegedly) brainwashed his students into fascism, Davison would go on to a successful career as a film actor. In the 1990s, he would play in three different movies about AIDS, and is a board member of the AIDS awareness charity “Hollywood Supports.” He would also go on to play the anti-mutant bigot Senator Robert Kelly (R-NY) in the X-Men films and the anti-witch bigot Reverend Samuel Parris in The Crucible.

4. I myself could easily answer that America was made great by a small minority of pioneering entrepreneurs, not by the great mass of the public or visionary ideologues. But the “individuality” exercised by great men like Henry Ford involved imposing his superior vision and will over others, and expressly ignoring the things people claimed to want. (“Faster Horses,” “Any color, as long as it’s black.”) Henry Ford was part of a group, one owned by, managed by, and named after himself. Hardly the answer Laurie’s mother would endorse. This is not an Objectivist movie and you are not obliged to charitably pretend that it is.

5. We do not see the cards, and so cannot rule out whether Mr. Ross started membership numbers at #501 to make The Wave seem bigger than it actually was.

6. For more, read Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft. A relevant excerpts can be found here.

7. Despite Mr. Ross’s comment here, the “real” Wave experiment took place over only a single week, not two. That this change for the movie makes the events described seem even marginally more plausible speaks to the absurdity of the original story. Five days of The Wave are depicted in the film, and I will interpret them as being consecutive, regardless of a single line by Mr. Ross in the last ten minutes.

8. As is universally the case, Hitler’s remarks are not translated in the movie. He says: “Und ihnen wird mehr gefordert, als von den Millionen der übrigen Volksgenossen. Für sie genügt nicht die blosse Ablegung des Bekenntnisses: Ich glaube, sondern der Schwur: Ich kämpfe!” which translates to “And of them, more is asked than of the millions of other compatriots. For them it's not enough to merely declare ‘I believe’, but rather to vow ‘I fight!’”

9. Hitler’s words here are more difficult to make out over the cheers of the recorded crowd, but a few phrases can be picked out: “Gebot des Herzens [...] Gebot der Treue” that is, "Command of the Heart […] Command of Loyalty” The lack of translation is interesting, considering that both quotes are somewhat relevant to the movie itself.

10. In Die Welle, Robert’s counterpart Tim takes this opportunity to shoot another student in the chest before blowing his own brains out. “Follow Your Leader” indeed.

11. Those of you who have not heard of the Frankfurt School at all should listen to Paul Gottfried explain it on Tom Woods #1164.

12. The press release announcing the book can be read here.

13. The F-scale test is not used in actual social science anymore, for a few reasons. First: questions are phrased in such a way that “agreement” indicated an authoritarian response, which is problematic when gathering survey data due to variations in people’s response styles. Some people’s default inclination is to “slightly agree” to questions asked of them, which itself says something about their “vulnerability” to fascism, but not in the way intended by the test. Second: The phrasing of the questions makes it increasingly obvious what is being tested for, inherently spoiling results if prospective fascists intend to evade detection. Third: the test was found to negatively correlate with IQ. I can’t say why that would be problematic. However, IDRLabs states that “the authors of the test did not control for socioeconomic differences or other demographic factors.” Whatever that means. Finally, the test’s obvious bias against the right was a feature, and not a bug, and should not be taken seriously as an explanation for its abandonment.

14. I took the test a second time, attempting to give more “extreme” answers in either direction, and my score actually dropped to 53%. Conventionalism AND Authoritarian Submission dipped slightly, and my new highest metric was Power-Toughness at 65%.

15. “Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.” —Benito Mussolini

16. Jones’s own account is wondrous indeed, and more wondrous still is the thought that we are meant to take it seriously. Highlights include the acknowledgement of Robert as having apparently been a real person, whose name was not changed for the film in any way.

Another is the idea that by Thursday he was beginning to go native. In his words: “I was in pretty bad shape myself. I was now acting instinctively as a dictator. Oh I was benevolent. And I daily argued to myself on the benefits of the learning experience. By this, the fourth day of the experiment I was beginning to lose my own arguments. As I spent more time playing the role I had less time to remember its rational origins and purpose. I found myself sliding into the role even when it wasn’t necessary.”

Finally, in a case of absurd melodrama that even the filmmakers could not possibly pass off if they didn’t want the audience to break their willing suspension of disbelief: “Wednesday evening someone had broken into the room and ransacked the place. (I later found out it was the father of one of the students. He was a retired air force colonel who had spent time in a German prisoner of war camp. Upon hearing of our activity he simply lost control Late in the evening he broke into the room and tore it apart. I found him that morning propped up against the classroom door. He told me about his friends that had been killed in Germany. He was holding on to me and shaking. In staccato words he pleaded that I understand and help him get home. I called his wife and with the help of a neighbor walked him home.” And the whole room clapped and that veteran’s name was Albert Einstein, right?