Nobody is calling feign man brainwashed. He is the "brainwasher"...employed to indoctrinate by use of his intelligence and acting skills. My opinion.
I understand that it looks a lot like some guy saying something and the audience just blindly accepting it. Seeing as this is a general course, probably being held to students of completely different fields, not physicists, this is likely the case.
But within the field of physics, it does not happen like that. We don't accept what a famous scientist says because of his credentials. Any achievements of a scientists are used only as a form of respect, not authority to say whatever they like.
We accept something to be true because we do the mathematics and see that it works. Literally, we do this ourselves - if you want to understand a physical phenomenon, you HAVE to do the math yourself. Granted, it was already done by someone else, but you have to go through it to understand it. And there aren't multiple ways to interpret math. Each and every step is exact, precise, it means exactly the same thing to anybody. Mathematics is universal, unbiased, and cannot brainwash you in any way.
Of course, we don't base our knowledge purely on math. For something to truly be considered a theory, it has to have experimental evidence. We conduct experiments tailored to a mathematical model to confirm its validity. Every experiment has to be reproducible, which means it can be done again at any time, anywhere, by anyone, and yield the same results. A single experiment isn't conclusive proof, but when countless institutes around the world do the same experiment and get the same results, it becomes obvious that the model is correct within the circumstances of the experiment, therefore it can be used in the real world.
The works of Nobel Prize winners in Physics in the last century have been the basis of nearly every technology developed since. Things you use every day, like the computer (or smartphone, whatever - they're essentially computers too), wouldn't exist without those works. Now, this doesn't make these people superior, godlike, or anything like that. If they hadn't done these works, someone else would have, eventually. But it is just historical fact that they were the first to do it, and they get their nifty little prize for that (by the way, most physicists don't really care about the Nobel Prize, even after they win it).
Winning a prize in physics makes you respectable as a scientist, but doesn't give you authority to say whatever you want. You can have all the prizes in the world, but if you try to create a theory without working math (which can and WILL be checked by others), and without an experimental basis, that theory will never be accepted. This is why physics is NOT CREDENTIAL BASED.