A Teacher Turned His Class Into a Fascist Movement in 5 Days

You'd have been the one to say no. This is the Third Wave experiment: in 1967, Palo Alto history teacher Ron Jones turned a class of ordinary teenagers into a real fascist movement in five days, and they loved it. It could never happen here, they said. It took a week. This video walks through what actually happened in Ron Jones's Third Wave experiment, straight from the teacher's own account: how one student's question about Nazi Germany that he couldn't answer led him to try a five-day experiment, how a single rule called "Strength Through Discipline" hardened into a movement, why students started turning in their own friends, how a class of thirty grew to over two hundred begging to join, the national leader who was coming on Friday and never existed, and the film Jones finally played that ended it in silence. Nobody in that room was a monster. They were ordinary kids who'd have sworn it could never happen to them. The experiment didn't reveal something about 1960s teenagers. It revealed something about you. ▸ Watch next: You're in the Milgram Experiment - What Would You Do? https://youtu.be/30lEe_sHQfI All sources linked below. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ The teacher's own account — Ron Jones, "The Third Wave" (1976), collected in "No Substitute for Madness: A Teacher, His Kids & The Lessons of Real Life" (1977, Zephyr Press). The experiment ran at Cubberley High School, Palo Alto, the first week of April 1967. ▸ The documentary with the real teacher and students — "Lesson Plan: The Story of the Third Wave" (2010, dir. David Jeffery & Philip Neel) ▸ The dramatization it inspired — "The Wave" (1981, ABC TV film, dir. Alexander Grasshoff) and Todd Strasser's novelization "The Wave" (1981, published as Morton Rhue) ▸ The German film adaptation — "Die Welle (The Wave)" (2008, dir. Dennis Gansel) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⏱️ CHAPTERS: 0:00 Robert, and a class that went with him 0:14 You'd have said no 0:27 A question about Nazi Germany 0:49 Monday: Strength Through Discipline 1:28 Tuesday: Strength Through Community 1:56 Wednesday: cards, and turning each other in 2:42 Thursday: the movement that never was 3:12 Friday: the rally 3:33 What was really on the screen 3:51 You're exactly the same 4:02 Why it still lands ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎨 Animation by Grystle ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #thethirdwave #ronjones #fascism #psychology #obedience #conformity #history #socialpsychology #whatwouldyoudo #explainer #animation #darkhistory #grystle