People Need to Understand They’re ‘Being Used Against Each Other’: Filmmaker

Documentary filmmaker Mikki Willis says ‘it's time for the Great Awakening’

Mikki Willis, filmmaker and creator of the Plandemic film series, including the third installment, “Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening,” in June 2023. (Screenshot/Epoch TV)

Most people do not realize that America has been at war for a long time, but it is not a conventional war—it is a psychological war, said a filmmaker who recently released a documentary directing people’s attention to this important issue.

“It’s a war of propaganda,” said Mikki Willis, filmmaker and creator of the “Plandemic” film series. The third installment, “Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening,” was released in June.

“It’s a war to divide the people and weaken the strength of our collaborative communities to do anything about these new ideologies being forced upon Americans,” Willis said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.

The new film does not highlight much about COVID-19 or COVID vaccines as filmmakers stayed away from these topics, Willis said. Instead, the documentary illustrates “what all of those [COVID-related] crises were used to advance.”

To explain their point, the filmmakers drew a comparison to a couple of cultural revolutions in history—primarily Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China—to show that the only way for the past dictators to be able to commit atrocities and genocide was to lure the people into a hypnotic spell, to become their force for doing evil, Willis said.

Organizations, such as Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s Youth, Lenin’s Red Army, and Mao’s Red Guards, were examples of such forces formed to accomplish dictators’ evil objectives, Willis added.

“It’s a real wake-up call to the people to understand that we’re being used against each other,” Willis said. “When we are united, that’s when we are literally unstoppable.”

In the 1960s, Mao Zedong, a Chinese Communist Party leader who then ruled communist China, launched the Cultural Revolution, carried out by fanatical youth encouraged to smash, beat, torture, and murder for the sake of destroying the so-called “four olds” of China—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.

The death toll of the Cultural Revolution in China was estimated by many researchers at a minimum of 2 million, while American professor R.J. Rummel, who researched the mass killing, wrote in his book that the Cultural Revolution claimed the lives of 7.73 million people.

Dictatorship Needs Complicity

None of the dictators of the past would have succeeded in committing atrocities or genocide without luring the people into their armies, Willis said.

“Most of [those people] are just citizens that were enlisted in to fight for the dictators and to fight against their own people, and in many cases, against their own families.”

There are people that were part of Mao’s Red Guards that are now coming out in deep remorse of turning their own parents in, Willis said, “but at the time, they were under such a spell that they celebrated the imprisonment, the torture, and execution of their own parents.”

“They thought they were doing something so righteous for the world.”

A poster displayed in late 1966 in a Beijing street shows how to deal with a so-called "enemy of the people" during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images)

Former Red Guard Zhang Hongbing, who denounced his mother as a “counterrevolutionary” to the authorities—which led to her execution—later started a campaign to make his mother’s grave a Cultural Revolution landmark, according to a 2013 report by Beijing News.

Zhang, radicalized by the Cultural Revolution, was just 16 in 1970 when he reported his mother to the communist authorities for criticizing the political leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for promoting idol-worshipping, and for supporting Mao’s political opponent in a family argument.

Zhang’s mother was imprisoned and executed by firing squad upon his denouncement.

Later, Zhang deeply regretted his action and, since 2011, has appealed to the local authorities to have his mother’s grave marked and preserved as a historical landmark of the Cultural Revolution, hoping that people would learn from his tragic experience.

“Let people scorn me and condemn me. I want to serve as a negative example that they can all learn from,” Zhang said in 2013.

“It’s a scary idea to think that we’re capable of turning against our own loved ones, the people that gave us life itself,” Willis pointed out. “That’s what this wakeup call is about in ‘The Great Awakening.’”

Shifting Attention

“The society is faced with this communist-ish takeover, which is ultimately just a globalist plan to bring everyone into a state of total control,” Willis said. “We can be the first generation to responsibly recognize, identify what’s happening and respond accordingly.”

“It’s time for us to take responsibility for enabling all of this to happen. While we may not have facilitated it, we’ve certainly allowed it through numerous ways to creep into our lives as we’ve been focused on and distracted [by] meaningless things in our lives,” he said.

Willis asserted that while people spent time on TikTok and the men have been obsessed with basketball and football, things are happening around them that destroy their lives and the lives of their loved ones, particularly their children.

It is time for people to direct their attention to these destructive issues so they “can come together and truly recreate a system that works for all of us,” Willis said.

“Our attention is our most valuable commodity,” Willis said. “All advertising is about capturing our attention.”

Refugee Experience

Willis also interviewed Chinese dissidents for the documentary and learned that “they all have the same story.”

Falun Gong adherents hold a candlelight vigil in front of the Chinese Consulate to mark 24 years of persecution by the Chinese Communist Party in Los Angeles on April 23, 2023. (Emma Hsu/The Epoch Times)

The film features three refugees, Falun Gong practitioners persecuted for their beliefs by the Chinese Communist regime, who fled their country.

They warn Americans about “what’s happening and what’s coming,” Willis said. “They’re risking their lives to do so because there are secret police stations all over the U.S., and much of the purpose of those police stations [is] to hunt down dissidents.”

“These people know that their lives are under threat, but they are here really to serve the purpose of making sure that this doesn’t continue to spread to other innocent people.”

Falun Gong is a meditative practice with core tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance that has been severely persecuted by the CCP in China for the past 23 years.

Crystal Chen, a Falun Gong practitioner and CCP refugee, said in the film that she was detained in a brainwashing center, handcuffed, hung on a pipe with her feet barely touching the ground for three days , and tortured by four male inmates to the brink of death. The torture was interrupted only when one of the perpetrators suddenly fainted on the floor, Chen said.

Another Falun Gong practitioner and CCP refugee, Minghui Wang, said in the documentary that from age 1 to 5, she was taken care of by her grandparents because her parents were always in detention being tortured. Wang’s first clear memory of her mother was when she was brought into a brainwashing center and saw her mother in pain due to being tortured with a force-feeding tube.

That experience was “very traumatizing,” Wang said. She also recalled that her school principal told her several times not to participate in what her parents do and to report their activities.

Cultural Revolution

Lily Tang Williams, a Chinese immigrant and educator featured in the film, was living in China and was 2 years old when the Cultural Revolution started. Tang Williams said she experienced Maoist indoctrination as a child.

Tang Williams pointed out similarities she noticed between the Cultural Revolution in China and the current situation in the United States, which she called the “American revolution.”

One of the similarities is that children are being taught “not to trust their parents anymore,” Tang Williams said. Children then feel confused and need to turn to their teachers and other authority figures, she explained.

Willis pointed out a recent survey showing that nearly one-third of millennials in America would choose to have surveillance cameras at their homes connected to the government in order to prevent domestic violence.

A report published by the CATO Institute in May stated that 29 percent of Americans under the age of 30 favor Orwellian-style government surveillance cameras installed in every household in order to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”

“Imagine being watched in your home, and one-third of our upcoming generation thinks that’s OK,” Willis said. “How did that happen? How did they get there? We need to start asking these questions.”

Why ‘Great Awakening’

The title of the documentary “The Great Awakening” was an intentional spin-off of the “Great Reset,” Willis said.

The Great Reset is a global initiative to restructure the world’s economy that has been pioneered and championed by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

“The Great Awakening” is the third and latest installment in filmmaker Mikki Willis' "Plandemic" documentary series, released in June 2023. (Screenshot/Plandemic Series)

In Schwab’s view, “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world,” he wrote in June 2020.

“One silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office,” Schwab said.

Willis said the architects of the Great Reset co-opt peoples’ lives with this branding because everyone feels that it’s time for a reset.

“So we’re kind of co-opting that co-opted message to say it’s time for ‘The Great Awakening.’”

Wu Kailin, Tan Shu Yan, and Eva Fu contributed to this report.