At the meeting of the Lincoln Public Schools Board of Education on February 22, 2022, a few citizens participated in public comments on a variety of topics. During their remarks, several public commenters promoted “The Mind Polluters,” which they described as a powerful investigative documentary that outlines the harm happening to children in public schools. Commenters encouraged school board members to attend a screening of the film, suggesting that viewing it and listening to the ”three national experts” who participated in the documentary would open their eyes and persuade them to agree with the alarmist views being shared by these public commenters.
Since I had not heard of this documentary and was curious about who created it and who these “national experts” were, I decided to do a little research. I was also curious that even as the public commenters invited the school board to view the film at an upcoming screening, they gave no specific information as to the date, time, or place a screening would be held.
Below, I’ve shared what I’ve learned from spending a little time digging for information.
Who Created/Produced “The Mind Polluters?” Who funded it?
Mark and Amber Archer, through their “filmmaking ministry,” Fearless Features, were introduced as starting a new documentary film “to expose the perverted sexualization of children across American through the education system.” (Source: Purple Parents Indiana, a group “dedicated to exposing the indoctrination & sexualization of children in the public education system.” (Purple Parents Indiana, Facebook account)
“Mark and Amber Archer…have started a new documentary film, “The Mind Polluters”, to expose the perverted sexualization of children across America through the education system and they need our help! Be sure to visit www.themindpolluters.com to learn more about this powerful film and how you can be a force multiplier for TRUTH.”
From the Archers’ website, https://www.fearlessfeatures.org/ab
“ABOUT THE ARCHERS
We’re a husband and wife filmmaking team and founders of the filmmaking ministry, Fearless Features. With over 30 years of combined production experience we are on a mission to share hope in Christ around the world through feature films, documentaries, podcasting, books and more.
We’re sinners saved by grace, and we believe stories change stories. The Lord has uniquely equipped and called us to share the redeeming power of Christ, together, with the gifts and talents he’s given us as story tellers.
Our goal is to educate, motivate, and inspire others to get involved in their local communities to defend their families and biblical values!
As believers we are one body and many parts to Glorify God!!”
Fearless Features Presents:
The Mind Polluters
“From the creators of “Inwood Drive” comes a powerful new investigative documentary film about the graphic Comprehensive Sex Ed and Social Emotional Learning being forced on children of all ages through the education system. For Christian parents, public schools are not a safe or neutral venue for their children’s education. The Mind Polluters exposes the dark realities of the intentional grooming of children into a worldview at odds with the Christian faith, a worldview of rampant sexuality, homosexuality, and transgenderism normalized through the use of pornographic and pedophilic materials.
“The Mind Polluters” is a feature length investigative documentary film that follows the efforts of grass roots volunteers, legislators and Christian academics to expose and stop the efforts of corrupt organizations and groups to infiltrate the nation’s school systems with pornographic and pedo-sadist (pedophilia) materials. The film not only shows the brutal battle being waged right now to force both public and private school systems to indoctrinate children as young as pre-school age with materials so heinous that they are illegal everywhere else except in the classroom, it also explores the history of the pornography battle in the United States for the past 75 years.
The battle lines have been drawn. Will the Church stand for Truth, or will we falter?”
Their website has a searchable list of screening locations for the film. As of this date (February 23, 2022), the site shows the following information for a screening in Lincoln:
The promoters of the film brag about three “national experts” who are interviewed as part of the film. They name the “experts” as Alex Newman, Dr. Judith Reisman, and Ken Ham.
I was curious about these alleged “experts,” so I did a bit of research and found that the three “national experts” are largely experts in their own minds, with little actual credentials to suggest they possess any sort of unbiased expertise. Because the promoters of this film attempt to characterize this documentary as a credible source of information through citing these “experts” as participating in the film, I thought it important to determine just who those individuals are.
Alex Newman
From The Foundation for American Christian Education (https://face.net/alex-newman/), I found a biography of Alex Newman.
Notable first is to learn about the FACE mission and intent: “FACE is committed to a resurgence of Biblical Classical Education in America and around the world. We accomplish this through establishing Principle Approach schools, training teachers, and publishing books and curricula that realign the education of K-5 children with Biblical principles to form Christian character and to foster Christian self-government.
Raise an army of individual lives prepared to build the family, the church, and the nation through education in a Biblical-theistic worldview to glorify God above all and bless the people by applying wise principles to all areas of life.”
Also from the FACE website:
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who seeks to glorify God in everything he does. In addition to serving as president of the small media and information consulting firm Liberty Sentinel Media, Inc, he has written for a wide array of publications in the United States and abroad. He currently serves as a contributor to WND (World Net Daily), an education writer for FreedomProject Media, a foreign correspondent for The New American magazine, a contributor to the Law Enforcement Intelligence Brief, and more. He has also written for numerous newspapers and magazines such as the Gainesville Sun, Liberty magazine, The Diplomat magazine, Crisis magazine, Swiss News magazine, Sunshine State News, Campus Reform, Alachua County Today, and many more. His work has been featured at Drudge, Breitbart, Fox News, and many other outlets. And his writing has been published in major newspapers across America.
As a consultant, Alex has worked on a wide array of campaigns, ranging from political campaigns for Congress to marketing campaigns for non-profit groups and international businesses. He also spent time working in marketing and branding as Creative Director, Europe, for a leading international branding firm based in Miami. Alex has a B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Florida with an emphasis on economics and international relations, as well as an A.A. degree in foreign languages from Miami-Dade College.
Alex has lived in eight countries (US, Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Spain, Sweden) on four continents and speaks multiple languages fluently and more at varying degrees of proficiency. His work has been cited by governments and major media outlets around the world. Alex is a frequent guest on national and international radio and TV shows, and has been on many of America’s top programs including the Michael Savage show, the Janet Mefford show, the Phyllis Schlafly show, and many more. He is a weekly guest on the nationally syndicated Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagles program as well as the nationally syndicated Inside the News program with Paul Jensen. He is also a frequent speaker on TV programs and at conferences, all together reaching tens of millions of people with the message of faith, family and freedom.
Educator and award-winning international journalist Alex Newman, author of the best-selling book Crimes of the Educators, argued that the future of America and her liberties depends on this battle. “We recognize that calling for a mass exodus of children from government schools is still considered a radical proposal by some,” said Newman. “But as we show clearly in this Special Report, it is time for radical solutions to this existential crisis. Our country, our churches, our freedoms, and our families are all on the line. We must take urgent action—now.”
Dr. Judith Reisman
The Southern Poverty Law Center refers to Reisman as an “anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist.” The paragraphs below come from the SPLC (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/05/13/anti-lgbt-conspiracy-theorist-judith-reisman-tapped-expert-witness-jamaica)
She is also listed as a “visiting professor of law” at the right-wing Liberty University and has appeared as an “expert” on congressional panels and court cases over the years. That’s no small feat for someone with a Ph.D. in communications and no formal training, education or credentials in law or psychology.
Now they’re trying to bring Reisman into the fold, citing her background in the “fields of Science Fraud, Human Sexuality, Child Sexual Abuse, and Mass Media Effects.” However, Reisman has no formal training, background or credentials in these fields, with the exception of “mass media.” She wrote her dissertation, for her Ph.D. in communications, on pioneering TV anchorwoman Dorothy Fuldheim. Nonetheless, she’s made a career out of promoting sexual pseudoscience and conspiracy theories about the work and life of prominent sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
She is a supporter of the thoroughly discredited Holocaust revisionist work of notorious anti-LGBT hate group leader Scott Lively, who spuriously claims that gay men ran the Nazi Party and are thus responsible for the Holocaust.
Reisman kicked off her career in 1984 when she was awarded a huge grant – just over $700,000 – from the Reagan administration’s conservative Department of Justice to study thirty years of American pornography for evidence of child sexual assault.
Controversy followed, whether it was about the amount she was awarded, the process by which she got the money (awarded by right-wing publisher Alfred Regnery) or other matters.
…Regardless, the study went on, and when it was completed in 1986, it was panned as unscientific. American University refused to publish it. Loretta Haroian (now deceased), an actual expert on childhood and sexuality, called the report “vigilantism: paranoid, pseudoscientific hyperbole with a thinly veiled, hidden agenda.”
That didn’t stop Reisman, however. She published the study in 1989 through her own Institute of Media Education (an on-and-off think tank), of which she was the president.
It’s no surprise that Reisman would be held up by the far right as an “expert” in fields in which she has no standing or expertise. She provides an academic veneer and confirms their prejudices without letting facts get in the way.
Reisman also endorses a book called “The Pink Swastika,” which challenges the “myths” that gays were victimized in Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of “the German homosexual movement.” Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes. “Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’ ” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/06/why-know)
Reisman was also named as filing an amicus brief in an unsuccessful attempt to support the Gloucester County School District’s refusal to recognize the gender of Gavin Grimm. This is a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Refer to https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-allows-gavin-grimms-victory-stand if you’re not familiar with the Grimm case.) In the brief, Reisman uses a variety of “evidence” that is so full of bias it’s surprising it didn’t turn the courts into a comedy show.
Reisman (now deceased) was a founder of the “Child Protection Institute” and often cited credentials as a “research professor at Liberty University School of Law,” suggesting that she possesses formal education in the law (which she does not/did not). She also claimed to be a “principal investigator” for the U.S. Dept. of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice. However, so far, I have not found reliable sources to confirm a position of that magnitude. From what I’ve learned, this claim is built on a privately funded grant she received during the Reagan administration, somehow connected to the Dept. of Justice, to research decades of pornography to search for evidence of child sexual assault. As described in the information cited above, her study was panned as unscientific and the subject of harsh criticism from actual experts in the field.
Ken Ham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham
While I would not typically rely on Wikipedia as a research source (and certainly not as a sole source), by this time I had seen enough information to know about Mr. Ham’s “credentials” to dismiss him as any kind of unbiased expert, as has been attempted by the promoters of the film.
Kenneth Alfred Ham (born 20 October 1951) is an Australian Christian fundamentalist, young Earth creationist and apologist, living in the United States. He is the founder, CEO, and former president of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a Christian apologetics organization that operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.
Ham advocates biblical literalism, accepting the Book of Genesis creation narrative as historical fact and believing the universe and the Earth were created together approximately 6,000 years ago,[n 1] contrary to the scientific consensus that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.[2][3][4]
In 1979, he resigned his teaching position and, with his wife, founded Creation Science Supplies and Creation Science Educational Media Services, which provided resources for the teaching of creationism in the public schools of Queensland, a practice allowed at the time.[10] In 1980, the Hams and Mackay merged the two organizations with Carl Wieland‘s Creation Science Association to form the Creation Science Foundation (CSF).[11]
As CSF’s work expanded, Ham moved to the United States in January 1987 to engage in speaking tours with another young Earth creationist organization, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).[7][12] His “Back to Genesis” lecture series focused on three major themes – that evolutionary theory had led to cultural decay, that a literal reading of the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis contained the true origin of the universe and a pattern for society, and that Christians should engage in a culture war against atheism and humanism.[13] With his popularity growing in the United States, Ham left ICR in 1994 and, with colleagues Mark Looy and Mike Zovath, founded Creation Science Ministries with the assistance of what is now Creation Ministries International (Australia).[13][14][15] In 1997, Ham’s organization changed its name to Answers in Genesis.[13]
Ham believes that abortion, same-sex marriage, homosexuality, and being transgender “are all attacks on the true family God ordained in Scripture”.[49] He believes that Christians should “take back the rainbow”, a popular symbol for the LGBT movement.[50] As a condition for employment at the Ark Encounter, AiG, as directed by Ham, requires workers to sign a statement that they view homosexuality as a sin.[51][52]
While I was highly skeptical that I would find the content of “The Mind Polluters” or its creators to be a credible source of information, since the public commenters so heavily promoted it as such, I felt compelled to take a closer look. In full disclosure, I did not view the documentary. Had I found any suggestion that the documentary might contain information of value or that it was presented from a purely unbiased, scientific and/or educationally sound basis, I most certainly would have been willing to invest the time to view the film.
I would like to assume that this group of public commenters (many of whom we’ve heard from before, at both local and state school board meetings) is so “fringe” that they are not deserving of the time I spent assembling the information I share here. However, their agenda is a frightening one that most certainly will harm children, and they are but a small part of a national movement to evangelize all education, including our public schools. It is critical that we pay close attention and do all that we can to disrupt and dismantle this movement.
Rita G. Bennett
Retired Educator
