Having seen this video before, I'm not sure dismissing it because of who has taken it seriously is sufficient as an intellectual response. It's a useful modern articulation of the totalitarian strategy. However, when I think of friends who would never watch it because from their perspective, it's just right-wing propaganda, here are the arguments I think they make against it:

- even if it was relevant at the time back in the 80s, applying it to today is not an accurate comparison

- sovietism wasn't real socialism

- whether what he is saying is true or not it arms ideological enemies and undermines the progressive cause, and is therefore misinformation

- his whole structure is decorating an underlying set of deceptions with facts that make it seem true, but it's not.

- if the soviet agenda is that subtle and complex as he says it could have produced him as an equally false disinformation source.

- governments need to do and hide things to manage people and the economy for the greater good so he's saying normal government techniques are evil to make you paranoid

- if you are educated you know this is how politics really work anyway and being responsible sometimes means compromising for the greater good, etc.

- people use this video to justify their existing racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, misogyny, etc.

These have some truth, but I don't think they persuasively discredit the systemic process of attacking a culture with the predictive power that he describes. They're separate things. There is a lot of prior art on the tactics and strategies of totalitarian movements, most of it in the form of american cold war anti-communist propaganda, which though campy, when you view it again from the present perspective of the US having lost it's surprisingly prescient stuff. The soviet goal was to destabilize and dissolve cultures in the space of a couple of generations, and that's what it does.

Sometimes I think the fall of the iron curtain wasn't the end of soviet totalitarianism, but rather, its liberation from being confined to mere nation states, only to spend the 90's and 00's infiltrating western institutions, and we're seeing the fruit of that today. Most of our current leadership went to university in the 90s and were introduced to a wave of critical theory virus then (last one was the 70s), and we are seeing it in the milennials now.