Exclusive Behind the Scenes: Curtis Bowers, Director of “Agenda: Grinding America Down”

In 1992 Curtis Bowers was a Graduate student at the Univ. of California Berkeley. After gaining an invitation at the Communist Party USA meeting and came back as a changed man. This was a 3-day meeting with Academics & scholars, and activists openly discussing in a State University about how to subvert American values in order to bring Communism to America.

In 1992 Curtis Bowers was a Graduate student at the University of California Berkeley. This was a three-day meeting with academics,  scholars, and activists openly discussing how to subvert American values in order to bring destructive Communism to America. At the request of his friend, Curtis attended the Communist Party USA meeting and came back as a changed man. 

Today the celebrated film director takes us behind the scenes of his award-winning documentary “Agenda: Grinding America Down“.

 

 

Q: Curtis, how did you come to be at that meeting?

Curtis Bower: Well, very interestingly, back in 1992 I was in graduate school in college and studying and an older man asked me to go to a meeting. He heard that the communist party USA was going to break off a new group, and he was just curious of what they were doing. He had studied communism his whole life and he was very interested.

But he told me, “I can’t go cause they might recognize me” because he had written a lot of books on the evils of communism over the years. I said, I’ll go for you.

So I went to this meeting. It was at the University of California Berkeley. And the new group they were starting was called The Committees of Correspondence, which is a very patriotic name in America because our Founding Fathers had a group called The Committee of Correspondence.

I went to the meeting and during that meeting for three days, these different Marxist and communist leaders laid out a plan of how they wanted to take America down from within.

They were disappointed with what had happened in the Soviet Union and that they just couldn’t keep up building military as fast as America was.

So they had to go to plan B to take over the world more through subversion. They just laid out this plan to take down our families, to take down our economic system system, and to take down our morality because they knew those were our strong points. And so for three days, all day long, they talked and talked. They were almost like preachers in the way they would pound on the pulpits and, and they talked about America.

It was hard for me as a young man to listen to as if it was so evil and so unfair, so unjust. And I was, I couldn’t even comprehend it.

I was thinking where are these people from that they don’t see America is doing a better job than anybody else in justice, and freedom, and opportunity. So anyway, it was a very interesting weekend and when I left there, I just thought to myself, “I don’t think they’re going to be able to do these things they’ve talked about.”

That was at 1992.

Q: What were some of the planning details that you heard?

Curtis Bowers: They’ve always known as everyone who wants to control the people knows: If you can take down the family structure in any country, the country will start to collapse. And the more the country collapses, the more it needs big government, so it’s easier for government to expand and control people because they need it to.

So that was their primary thing.

The family, they said that we have to continue to work at, and they’d already been doing it since the 1930, they said,
“We need to continue to work at getting the women out of the homes and away from those children so we can get them at a younger age.
And we need to keep pushing the idea that marriage between a man and a woman is old fashion, that people shouldn’t waste their time with that, that people should go do the things they want to do in life instead of getting married and having families.”

That’s what they wanted to continue to push to kind of help our families keep collapsing more and more. Economically, they said, “The only way we feel we can take America’s economy down, where it will collapse, is if we get behind the environmental movement.” Now, the environmental movement today is very big, but it wasn’t in 1992. In America, it was kind of thought of as just a bunch of crazy people chaining themselves to trees out in the forest and stuff. But they said, “If we get behind the environmental movement, I think we’re going to be able to create enough regulation and red tape so that the businesses can’t survive in American, they will have to leave the country. And so America will become poor and poor on the inside and eventually collapse.”

The last thing they said, and a lot of your listeners might know, America, even despite what everyone is saying today, was founded upon Bible, the principles from the Bible. Most of our Founding Fathers were Christian men. That stuff was important to them. And to be a society, and to be people that did what was right because God was watching, because God cares, made our country able to give so much freedom to the people. Because they [Founding Fathers] knew we don’t have to control the people–God will. God will look down and they were still convicted when they did what’s wrong in their conscience. And so we’re going to encourage them to be Christian families and to believe those things and trust in the Lord. And then we know we can get them all the freedom we want to and they’re not going to abuse that freedom because they feel responsible to God. And that’s what made America so wonderful.

Our enemies in the communist party realized that at this meeting and they said, “We’ve done a good job at turning people away from God, but we need to finally remove all the final little roots of morality. We want them to just do whatever they want to do and not to worry about what anybody thinks.” They said, we can uproot the traditional values of America if we can get Americans to accept homosexuality. I was just sitting there going, “What?!” They were saying if we were to accept homosexuality, we would accept that as equal to traditional marriage of a man and a woman, and families and things, that we just wouldn’t have any standards left.

That’s the three main things they talked on and on about. How they were going to do that through the school system, and through Hollywood, and through the media, and through the universities. You know, they’d been going into the universities, they’d been going into the seminaries and the churches since the 1930s and they said, we got to keep doing that. We want to be the ones teaching the teachers and the teachers at colleges. We want to be the ones teaching the preachers at the seminaries even though they don’t believe in God. They were saying, “We’ve got to get in there and be the professors at the seminaries so we can teach those preachers that Bible is no good. Just tell some good stories and things.” Anyway, it was just very interesting how they unfold all this strategies.

 

Q: And what were the kind of attendees that were actually there?

Yeah, I thought it was, since it was on a college campus, I thought, it’s probably going to be just a bunch of college kids that are all kind of, you know, stirred up. But it wasn’t. It was all 50, 60 and 70 year old ones with briefcases and suits on. I mean it was totally different. I had some radical tee shirt on, it said something whatever silly. But there was about 1300 or 1400 adults there and it was this serious meeting.

One point, we didn’t cover yet, but one thing that later in the 2008 when I started thinking about making a movie, one of the things that motivated to, as I went back and studied, who are the people at that meeting with me and who were they? I started to study The Committee of Correspondence and all that stuff. I realized, “Wait a minute!” Because I started to read through the names, as I couldn’t remember all the names, so I started look through who was at that meeting and I realized: Several of them were in President Obama’s cabinet! Those weren’t just some cuckoo people, those people are powerful and influential. And that’s when I realized when I looked through the list of the people that were at the meeting with me and then I look where they all were today, and many of them were either advisers to the President or in the White House with him. I realized this is a big thing! This is not some little thing.

 

Q: Curtis, how did you feel on that day?

The feeling that I had when I left the meeting was, “I don’t think they’re going to be able to do this.”

I wasn’t that worried about it. I thought even the environmental movement, I was 25 at the time and I remember thinking, “How in the world would you use the environmental movement to destroy our business?” I mean some of the stuff just didn’t make sense to me at that time. But of course 16 years later, when I was a representative, I started to realize, wait a minute, cause a legislation was coming across my desk and businessmen were calling me saying, “Please don’t pass this environmental thing. It’s not going to help the environment, but it’s going to destroy my business!” And all of a sudden I remembered that meeting. Because I hadn’t really thought about it much, I had gotten married, having children and I owned a restaurant and I was doing different things, I kind of forgotten about the meeting. Until all of a sudden I started to realize, wait a minute, the things that are happening now are the things they talked about. It made me realize, whether I want to believe it or not, those people have a lot more influence than I think they do. And maybe communism didn’t just die when the Berlin Wall came down and all that stuff, and so that’s what caused me to really start studying what was going on.

Q: What made you want to make a movie since you have never made one before?

That’s a good question! Well, I am a Christian as well, so that that has influence over me. I believe the Bible and I started to feel convicted that maybe God wanted me to expose this and so I started praying, what should I do with this stuff? And I kept feeling like I’m supposed to make a movie. And I’m like, I’ve never made a movie before. I don’t know how to do it.

I talked with my family. So we started studying cinematography. I homeschool my children. So we started studying the film, we started studying editing. We started studying all that as part of school and once we’ve studied enough, we started practicing with our cameras and lights. And one day we watched back all the interviews we had done that day just to each other in the home and they were pretty good. I said, I think we’re ready to go.

Then we started calling people to get interviews and everything. So it was a neat experience for the whole family to learn that one family can make a difference. If they work together, if they try to do something big that is hard to do. My children learned that you can make a difference, if you feel standing up for what’s right, if you educate others, and if you work hard at things. God will help with those efforts.

Q: Curtis, did it took two years to make this movie with your entire family?

Curtis Bowers: The representative thing ended and then I just said, okay, we’ll get to do this full time so we can get it done. I didn’t have a job or anything and we had to use our savings that we’d saved up, we had to use that to live on for two years. It took two full years to make the movie! Full-time working everyday, all day long, for two years. And then we finally finished.

 

Q:  How did your family react to your decision not to work during this time and how it affected them all?

Curtis Bowers:That’s a good question. My wife looked at me and said, “Sweetie, are you sure you’re supposed to make a movie?”

She is a Christian too, so we knew there’s things bigger than us. And I said, “Yes sweetie, I am. I know this is what we’re supposed to do.” So it was wonderful and they all just got behind me and we were totally focused on it. It was just a neat experience of just working through that and getting stuck in places where we’re realizing this is tough and haven’t done this before, but slowly we would just keep working hard and praying. All the details slowly just keep kept coming into place.

Q: How did your family helped you through the entire process and having no outside help?

Yes, we all, it was just us. Nobody else helped. My children, and my wife, and myself did all the filming, and the editing, and then the distribution of it. We traveled for years around America on a bus. We got a bus. We sold our home and got a bus and traveled, and had showings and meetings all over. We think there are at least 10 million people that have watched the first movie so far at free showings we’ve had. So we’re thankful that so many people were able to be informed by the film.

 

Q: How much time and effort it took to make the movie and tour the movie across the country, especially during the 2016 election year?

We got on a bus, we found a used tour bus that would work for us and we started traveling the country and then even, when we finished the second film in 2016, we actually then did sell our house and we went for the whole year. Last year we spent 10 months on the road in America. We were in 40 different states and had a different meeting almost every night, in a different town for the entire year because we knew it was an important year with the elections coming up. We wanted to educate people about what’s going on so they could be informed voters. We were thankful that there was a lot of people, when they saw the film, they said, “You know what, we’ve got to get a copy of that to share with our friends.” And a lot of people would buy five copies or 10 copies and they’d share it with their friends and family. So just slowly through the grassroots, we didn’t have the money to do big marketing and big advertisements and stuff, it just went person to person, but it spread all over the country.

I bump into people all the time in different states and airports, we start talking about things and when they ask me, “Oh, what do you do?” I say I made a film, I tell the name of the film and they go, “I’ve seen that! That was great!” So it’s really kind of neat. We drove 60,000 miles, that’s from California to Florida the equivalent is. Twelve different times, all the way across the country and back, we would have showings. So maybe 200-300 people would be there and I remember they’d sit through the film, especially that first film and at the end we turn on the lights when it’s over and I’d walk up there to talk to them. As I looked at people, a lot of them had tears coming down their face, they’re staring at the floor. They just can’t believe what had happened to our country. And so many of the older people would come up and say, “We knew something was happening in our whole life America has been changing, but now when we see your film, we understand why it was changing, what was going on.”

Thankfully too, we are so thankful, they don’t seem to be depressed about it as much as go, “Hey, we need to do something now!” And I’m like, “Yes, that’s the right!” That’s why I made that. I didn’t make the film to discourage people. I wanted them to understand our situation is serious.

The reason it’s serious is because we haven’t been responsible like we should to preserve our freedoms, to preserve our families, to preserve the American way of doing things, the kind of principles that made this country great. I love that they are motivated to start getting involved in what’s going on.

Anyone that disagrees with you, hates you, or you have a hard time talking with them because they just instantly fell you’re hateful or you’re just this or you’re just that. And I’m like, “No, I’m not. I want the best for everyone. But we have to start with the truth.” If we have a lie, what we believe in, that doesn’t benefit anybody. And so yes, some of that happened, but thankfully most everything was, has been so positive: Thousands and thousands of people emailing, thanking us for making the movie, thanking us for helping them to finally understand what’s going on. It’s 10,000 positive over one negative and we’re grateful for that.

 

Q: How did you line up the interviews for the movie?

Curtis Bowers: The people I interviewed, when I started really studied this subject, I kept all these articles from the Internet and books, and I started to realize, boy, there are some people who really understand what has happened. So I would call them or my wife would call them and say, “Hey, we read your book. Can we come in to interview you?” or “We’re making a movie about how there’s been a plan to grind America down in.” Most of them said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” That’s how I got it. I found the 25 sharpest, most educated people I could find that studied this issue of the Marxist and Communist influence in America on our culture and on our educational system. They knew so much.

In the film, you can only put so much in a film. It was so fun sitting there for an hour or so with each one of them and listening to all they’ve learned from studying for 50 years what’s happening and why it happened.

 

Q: And then came San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, which you ended up winning?

Curtis Bowers: We never made a film before. Before it happened, right when I was thinking we should make a film, but wasn’t sure, I went down to this film festival down in Texas. I just wanted to meet some other filmmakers and ask them questions and things. And so I went there and I just, they gave me so much knowledge of which cameras I should have and different things. So when I came home, I came home and told my family, okay, I think we’re supposed to make this film for sure.

Now I talked to a lot of guys, got some good advice and that night before we went to bed, my little boy who was only five years old, when he was set his prayers, he said, “Dear God, help Daddy’s film to win the festival.” Now, that was the festival I just attended. Well, that festival has $101,000 grand prize for the best of festival and I don’t know what, and we hadn’t even talked about that, but somehow he was praying that my film’s going to win that thing, even though I haven’t started the film yet, haven’t bought a camera yet. Well, it was cute and sweet. It’s good to think like that.

That Friday, my oldest daughter who was at the time 16 came to me and said, “Daddy, why don’t we fast and pray this Friday? As a family we don’t eat. We just pray that God will have your film win that festival.” And I thought, “Oh, okay sweetie, that’s a nice thing to do.” So we did it. The next Friday I came down for breakfast and there was no breakfast and I said, “Sweetie, where is the breakfast?” She said, “It’s Friday.”

And I said, “Oh, are we going to fast this Friday too?” And she said, “We’re fasting every Friday until it wins.” So to make a long story short, my wife and I, and my nine children fasted and prayed every Friday for almost two years that the very first film we ever made would win the largest single cash price film festival in America.

It made me thankful for those people I interviewed in that film, the first one, Agenda. A lot of them have already died since then because they were older. They had been studying this their whole life and it made me very thankful for them because even though no one seemed to listen, they had tried from the fifties and sixties to wake people up to how there was an agenda to corrupt us, and cripple us from within. I was very grateful to them.

But it also made me realize as they all pass off the scene, if I’m not going to step up in their place and educate others, and if my children aren’t going to do it, it’s not going to get done. So we all have a responsibility. We all love and enjoy this wonderful country, but very few of us do something for this country to help preserve it and to help protect it, help to continue help to pass down to our children why we believe the things we do.

I think that’s the number one reason America has so changed over the last 50-60 years, especially in the areas that has not changed for good is because parents didn’t spend enough time with their children teaching them the history of our country and why we do the things we do, and then comparing those to the way other places do things so that they know the differences.

And they know, “Oh, we do this for a reason” and I think we didn’t pass down enough to our children, so most of us, most of the people in America lost their children in the sixties and seventies as they went over to the radicals, the Marx’s movement to take down this country because they believed it was evil, because their parents hadn’t really taken enough time to teach them. No, no. It’s a wonderful country. It’s not perfect, but it’s wonderful and we can keep working to make it better, but we need to be thankful for it too.

 

Tabitha Smiles: Why is communism and the failure of communism not taught in our schools today? Why is it something that’s been omitted?

Curtis Bowers: That’s an important question! I truly believe the reason it’s not taught like it should be, this horrible evil, it has done so much damage and killed hundreds of millions of people, just see what’s going on in China now! I love China. I feel so sorry for these people that are being forced to do things and benefit the government instead of being free.

And we in America here think, “Oh it’s okay if they’re doing all the work for us, you know, we don’t have to see them in slavery.” It makes me, every time I have to buy something from China and I try not to, it makes me sick to my stomach because I know that man wasn’t free to make that product, or most of them, just are not being treated the way they should.

But I think the reason we haven’t been taught that in America is because our backyard in the 1920’s as you studied this, you realize that Marxists influence in the twenties and thirties started to enter into all of our universities and colleges. In the faculty and the people that were writing the curriculum for the schools, they were very friendly toward those Marx’s ideas.

They really thought, “Oh, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.” And in America, we never believed that! We believe each individual person is priceless. We don’t worry about the many. We worry about each individual. And because they’re made in the image of God and they’re priceless. But those ideas had been bought now.

I think if you did a survey of people in America 35 years of age and under, and you ask them, “Do you think America should pursue a course of action based on the idea that good of the many outweigh the good of the few?” I bet you 85% of them say yes. And they don’t know that this is Marxism. And when it’s implemented from the top down it slaughters and abuses the very people you were supposed to be blessing.

Those socialists Marxists ideas do not work! We’re going to see a Europe collapsed over the next two decades completely because they have a social system that does not work, because they have rejected the blessings of children and not having enough children even to sustain themselves, and then they’ve allowed people to come into their countries that do not believe like they do, and do not contribute the same way.

We’re going to see all of Europe collapse over the next 20 years. It’s going to be very sad. But that happens to any group of people when you do not pass down who you are, why you are who you are.

The Marxists knew if we get into the schools, if we get into the colleges and universities, we will be the ones training next generation. So we will be able to tell them what to believe, and so we will control the country and it’s exactly what has happened.

 

Tabitha Smiles: How should Americans handle liberals and pushers of this ideology that are blinded by the lies of socialism and environmentalism? 

Curtis Bowers: They wouldn’t know anything about that. They’re just, a lot of them have been given bad information. So they’re pushing this cause they think it’s good one or whatever. But the people that are instigating that are getting these movements going… Look, I studied it in detail, just the environmental movement. We all care about the environment. I totally care about the environment.

We have a beautiful yard, and trees, and flowers and I love taking care of things. We’re all for that. But as I studied that movement, I thought, who started this? I wanted to know if it was a good movement that got hijacked by bad people. I found the whole roots to that movement were Marxists. I mean, even Mikhail Gorbachev who was out there in the San Francisco area, he, before he stepped down he started an environmental group Green Cross International.

Well you think, oh, does he care about the environment? He sure didn’t when he was head of the Soviet Union, they were one of the greatest violators, and rapers, and pillagers of the environment. I know he didn’t care about the environment. Why is did he act like he did? And then I started to study that.

I mean, he is the one that wrote the Earth Charter which is supposed to be the commandments for the future. Think about it, the communist dictator wrote that! As I dug in more and more, I realized, oh my goodness, this is something they know everyone cares about the environment, so they know if we can package the environmental problems to look like they’re the things that we want to have happen, we can motivate everyone to do what we want, which is what are they trying to accomplish.

They’re trying to destroy capitalism throughout the world. So they thought, “Hey, this is the perfect vehicle to do that. If we can convince people that there’s a huge problem and a solution to the problem is to regulate the capitalism, it will destroy it and then we will impoverish the people throughout the world.

Poor people are very easy to control. They hate rich people.” So if they use people to accomplish their goals by making them believe whatever they are trying to do is something noble and good so the most of the people you’re talking about, no, they don’t know what Marxism is.

They don’t think they [communist] are doing anything evil. These people just believed the lies that they’ve been told that this is how you solve this problem.

But as I’ve studied the environmental movement, I took a year to study every single branch, every root of that tree, every route ended with Marxist communist philosopher or philosophy. Yeah. I realize, okay. It wasn’t ever about helping the Earth be green and beautiful and the very things they’re pushing, I don’t know if you know Dr. Patrick Moore or not, he’s the man who started Greenpeace.

I went and interviewed him up in Vancouver and I said, “Dr. Moore, why did you have to leave the Greenpeace, the group you had started? Why did you have to leave them?” And he told me because the Marxists took it over when the Berlin Wall came down. And they were wanting to do things that actually is going to hurt the environment because all they really cared about was destroying capitalism.

I had to get out, cause I realize, wait a minute, this is no good and this is not even helping the environment. He told me if we actually do the things Al Gore and those people are talking about by limiting carbon dioxide and doing those things, it’s going to hurt everything that is green. It’s going to hurt the planet. The very things that they say are going to help it, we’re actually going to destroy it!

Anybody knows carbon dioxide is plants food, it’s fertilizer for everything that is green. They build up their whole agenda around carbon dioxide being pollutant. It’s the most vital element in all of the atmosphere for everything that is green and yet they called the movement to stop carbon dioxide.

The green movement is a total lie! It’s unbelievable to me and right now the levels of CO2 in the world, what about 425 parts per million or one fourth of the optimum level for everything that is green. So that’s just one example of a movement that has been captured to use people to accomplish their ends.

That ends our interview with Curtis Bowers, a true American hero, and a great mind living in America today.

We hope that you enjoyed this interview on Great Minds/Lessons From History, and hope you will join us again as we continue to talk to America’s greatest minds on the topics of society, philosophy, religion, and ideology. 

 

Today’s quote is from Abraham Lincoln,
“No man is good enough to govern another man without his consent.
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”