He’s setting up a strawman and knocking it down. Does he bother to define his terms? This is the problem with unscrupulous types. When they use a word, it doesn’t usually mean what you think it does.
Advertising is a form of brainwashing when you get right down to it. Billions of dollars are spent to persuade people to buy certain products.
Indoctrination is a form of brainwashing, especially when coupled with younger students who don’t have a fully formed sense of self. Much of what passes for education today is clearly a kind of child abuse. It’s not even so much what they are teaching, it’s what they are not teaching. The ability to think critically, the weigh the source of the information, to spot classic logical fallacies, to use facts and reason and experience to shape our opinions versus emotion.
The modern university liberal arts school is just a marxist boot camp where impressionable youth is turned into reactionary foot soldiers and “community organizers” and similar. This has been ongoing for decades.
The so-called Frankfurt School aka “Social Research”, numerous communists were kicked out of Germany in the 1930s and set up shop in America, Columbia and elsewhere, where they immediately set about dismantling society. This is the thanks they gave.
Agreed. Sloppy thinking everywhere, but sloppy thinking is not brainwashing.