In a conversation with Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of Media Studies at NYU, he discusses his expertise in propaganda and the backlash he faced for questioning COVID policies. #2020Propaganda #MediaStudies #COVID19
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2020: A PROPAGANDA MASTERPIECE
PART ONE
A Conversation with Mark Crispin Miller [@MarkCrispinMil1], Professor of Media Studies at New York University.
MCM is one of the best cultural critics we have, especially when it comes to Propaganda, a course he taught at NYU until the Neo-Maoists waged a smear campaign against him for questioning the provenance of COVID policies.
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker discusses the global propaganda surrounding COVID-19 and the use of fear mongering as a powerful tool in propaganda. They trace the history of fear propaganda from the demonization of the Germans in World War I to the focus on communism and terrorism. They argue that the current propaganda surrounding COVID-19 is unique in its ability to instill fear and control people's actions. The speaker also highlights the role of conspiracy theories in questioning propaganda narratives and the use of the term "conspiracy theorist" to discredit those who challenge the prevailing narratives. They emphasize the importance of critical thinking and democratic processes in evaluating and responding to propaganda.
Speaker 0: Seems to me that, the year 2020 and then, the first half of 2021 have comprised a global propaganda spectacle of unprecedented scale and sophistication, I for one believe that we were subjected to a series of carefully planned psychological operations them over the course of 2020 and just beyond. I think it started with the rollout of the virus. This particular instance of fear mongering is the most persuasive, the most, compelling, the most devastating kind of fear mongering, you know, that's ever really been used in the history of propaganda. And that's really saying something. We've seen the the fear propaganda, a move from the Hun to communism to terrorism.
It. But now it makes the crucial move to the thing itself, the thing with which previous, enemies have been impaired. The evocation of the virus is all around us. You know? There's enough to turn the wits of millions of highly educated people.
It's a very easy matter to get people to do what you want. You know? Just convinced them they're under attack and that anyone who argues with that claim, is putting them at risk.
Speaker 1: So today, we're talking to professor Mark Crispin Miller about the assault on free thought and free speech. He's been a professor of many subjects for many years. He's been teaching a course at NYU on propaganda. So professor Miller, you're an old friend of ours. Talk talk to us about how you got interested in this field.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It's an interesting story. Before 2,005, I was regarded as an edgy but acceptable media critic and was therefore allowed to write op eds for the Times. I wrote 4 or 5. It.
I was often on NPR, talking about things like pop culture and so on. In 2005, my career took an unexpected turn when Basic Books published, Fooled Again, which was my analysis of how the 2004 election had been stolen. Them. It was a very thoroughly documented study of that theft. It had been vetted carefully by the publishers' lawyers and I and the publisher were very, optimistic about the book's chances of, kick starting a much needed national discussion of, the US voting system, which is the worst in the developed world.
It. And I therefore hoped that this book would make some kind of a difference that people would address the issue. Well, it didn't happen. Much to my surprise and the publisher's surprise, the book was pretty much blacked out by the corporate media. A total of 2 newspaper reviews in the whole country.
1 was a hatchet job. And, it was impossible to get an interview on NPR to talk about it. The Times, The Washington Post, none of them would review it. The strangest thing about the book's reception was that while the corporate media blacked the book out, the left press attacked it as conspiracy theory and called me a conspiracy theorist. I mean, these are outlets that I'd written for myself and, I knew some of the people who wrote these pieces.
So when I got over the shock of this, I I asked myself when exactly did this become a thing? When did conspiracy theory become a thing? It can't always have been, a phrase that springs to everybody's lips the way it does now. So I I researched its history and it was very simple. I I just went to the archives of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time Magazine and did a search on conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist.
And I discovered that, until 1967, conspiracy theory had been used, you know, now and then and in no consistent way. The phrase conspiracy theorist, never. Nobody ever called anybody a conspiracy theorist in print. So what happened in 1967? Well, 1967 was the year that the CIA sent its memo 1035 hyphen 960 to all station chiefs worldwide, basically explaining that the problem they were faced with was the traction that certain conspiracy theorists were getting, raising questions about the Warren court.
Speaker 2: US chief justice Earl Warren is the bearer of the sad epilogue. The report of the assassination of president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, compiled by the commission created by president Johnson, which was headed by the chief justice himself.
Speaker 0: What the memo told the CIA station chiefs to do was to, contact their media assets and encourage them to, attack and discredit the conspiracy theorists. I mean, the memo actually uses that phrase. The conspiracy theorists in question is people like Mark Lane and Edward J. Epstein and others who who have written books raising perfectly rational questions about the Warren report. The memo recommended, for example, arguing that a conspiracy of this magnitude could not have been kept secret, okay, which is an argument we still hear today about things like 911.
You suggest to the editors or reporters you talk to that, the conspiracy theorists, use some material deliberately generated by communist propagandists. Okay? So the memo went out, and it's it's no coincidence that that marks the moment when we first start to seeing those phrases used and used increasingly as the decades roll by. It seems clear to me that we're moving to a kind of crisis point in the deployment of that phrase, because the authorities, the press, the state, now use the phrase openly and explicitly as,
Speaker 1: In reference to who? Who are they labeling with that phrase?
Speaker 0: Well, anyone who raises questions about the prevailing propaganda narratives as a conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 3: They happen to be anti and conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 4: With reasons varying from general skepticism to conspiracy theories. A new wave of conspiracy theories Then it was shared through social media, and COVID 19 is acting as an accelerant to conspiracy theories.
Speaker 5: Conspiracy theories But it's definitely true by dipshit uncle quarterly.
Speaker 0: Evil theories about, you know, did we create the pandemic? Are we trying to profit Trump.
Speaker 3: If you go online, there's no shortage of conspiracy theories. Alright? So here's 1. The virus was bioengineered in a lab. These clean-cut conspiracy narratives are designed to prey on your pre established suspicion.
Let's start with the most widespread theory That the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Speaker 6: It is very, very strongly leaning towards this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulate.
Speaker 3: Something you probably have heard from certain corner of the right is this theory that the coronavirus, quote, escaped from the lab.
Speaker 4: The email sent to you said conspiracy theory gains momentum, and this again was the idea of the lab leak. So how did we get here With America's most prominent public health experts saying that the lab leak theory, which was previously hawked by conspiracy theorists, Might actually be credible.
Speaker 0: Questioning propaganda narratives necessarily means taking conspiracy theory seriously. When someone calls you a conspiracy theorist, they have already lost the argument because that epithet is a way it to prevent discussion from taking place. And a lot of these fact checks, you know, and that kind of thing that are now, dare I say, pandemic, you know, you do a search on practically anything that's controversial and what Google will give you first is page after page of denials and rebuttals and fact checks and all that kind of stuff. Right? You have to go way, way, way down to find the actual story itself that's being called a hoax.
Right? Well, that's because in defending the propaganda narrative, they don't have an argument, they don't have a defense, they have none, they have none. It. So they basically fill, try to fill people's minds with derisive portrayals of the people, raising the question. It seems to me that the year 2020 and then the first half of twenty twenty one have comprised a global propaganda spectacle of unprecedented scale and sophistication.
Let's go back and let's do a kind of review of last year up through January 6 this year and with a thought as to what might be coming next, right, let's go through all that as we would do it in a propaganda course. Okay? Now, let's try to cast our minds back to 2019. Okay? You might say 1 BC, okay?
1 before COVID. It's worth noting that 2019 was characterized at the end of the year in a pretty perceptive article, in Extra, which is the magazine of fairness and accuracy in reporting, noting that 2019 would go down in history as the year of the protest.
Speaker 3: If the authorities were hoping that this protest movement would fizzle over time, They were terribly wrong. Even pouring rain hasn't dampened the protesters' enthusiasm.
Speaker 0: They made the point that the over focus on Hong Kong throughout the Western media tended to obscure the fact that the world was, you know, hit with all kinds of organic spontaneous protest movements that year. The point of the article was that they shouldn't have focused only on Hong Kong, them, right? But they should have taken note of feminist protests all over South and Central America, a long protest movement that wrecked Honduras, you know, over a stolen election, the yellow vest in France, the Bernie movement in the United States, major protest movement in Lebanon, that the over focus on Hong Kong was you know, due to the fact that Western intelligence is sort of involved in all that, right? I think it's worth recalling with a sense of poignancy that there were all these organic protests in 2019 because the rollout of the virus put an end to all that very, very efficiently in exactly the same way that World War I put an end tremendous amount of left wing organization and protest prior to 1914. I, for one, believe that we were subjected to a series of carefully planned psychological operations over the course of 2020 and just beyond.
I think it started with the rollout of the virus, and I wanna make a few observations on this. I mean, we heard big rumors about it, you know, there's a virus in China and so on. What happened? What happened was that China and the UK simultaneously rolled out these really ludicrous images made in China of people dropping dead in the streets. Nobody drops dead of COVID 19 in the streets, but, you know, nobody knew that time because we didn't know what COVID 19 was or supposedly was.
We had no idea. So there are these creepy images people, you know.
Speaker 7: China has identified the cause of the mysterious new virus.
Speaker 8: Coronavirus. Coronavirus.
Speaker 9: There are fears a rapidly spreading virus has reached Australia. This is a rapidly emerging situation where there is not a cause for alarm.
Speaker 4: The first US case has been detected.
Speaker 8: There's confirmation the coronavirus Has reached Australia. China is urging its citizens not to travel abroad as it struggles to contain the virus.
Speaker 4: I have today Declared that the coronavirus presents a public health emergency in the United States.
Speaker 7: Countries around the world have now reported more than 1,000,000 coronavirus cases.
Speaker 0: This particular instance of fear mongering is the most persuasive, the most, compelling, the most devastating kind of fear mongering, you know, that's ever really been used in the history of propaganda. And that's really saying something because propaganda drives, war propaganda drives, right, whether they actually concern war or just political war, have always, always relied on fear and anger, right? And the first effective modern propaganda drive was, what the Allies did in World War I to demonize the Germans as the Hun, right? These stories, these horrific nauseating stories of atrocities in Belgium, right, the rape of Belgium. They supposedly impaled babies bandits and cut off the breast of Red Cross nurses and crucified a Canadian.
They made all these stories completely fabricated. The German Army was fairly ruthless in Belgium, yes, but they did none of the things they were accused of doing and almost no American reporters, told the truth. There were a group of 5 who went over there, distinguished investigative reporters. They came back and they road pieces saying, you know, we didn't see anything like this. This is all made up.
But that stuff was lost in the tidal wave of infuriating propaganda about these brutes. Us. The idea that propaganda, like ideology, is something that they do. The aliens do it, communists do it, you know, the totalitarians do it. That's completely false.
Modern propaganda whether political or commercial is an Anglo American invention. It, okay, the Nazis learned from it. I don't think the Bolsheviks learned from it so much. Their propaganda was more doctrinal, more solidly rooted in Marxist Dogma, but that's not the kind that has prevailed.
Speaker 1: And so what distinguishes this one from, you know, you know, the COVID propaganda drive, rollout From, say, the World War 1 propaganda. What makes it so much worse?
Speaker 0: Well, we we can regard the history of fear mongering in propaganda as a process of making the enemy ever more inchoate and pervasive, okay? The Germans, there they are in the battlefield, right, with their helmets and all that stuff. That's a nation at war, okay? That sort of gives way a few decades later to the specter of communism, right? So the enemy becomes Soviet Communism, which is already more demonic than the Hun because anybody you know, your mailman, could be a communist.
You know? This is the kind of thing that Hoover
Speaker 1: Right. He compared it to an epidemic, didn't he? He
Speaker 10: did. Communism in reality is not a political party. It is a way of life, an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic. And like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting this nation.
Speaker 1: We've almost gotten right down to the metaphor itself, haven't we?
Speaker 0: That's exactly right. The one we all know is the specter of, terrorism. Right? The 911 now conceives the enemy as almost as an abstraction. You know?
It's it's it's terrorism, a war on terrorism, a war on terror.
Speaker 1: It's an abstract noun.
Speaker 0: Right. It's an abstract noun. Makes no sense. Our war on terror Begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.
But it was very important to denationalize the enemy by claiming, well, yes, we'll bomb Afghanistan, although they didn't attack us because they're harboring and this is you know, mental image that calls up of this sort of vast, teeming, swarthy mass of terrorists, you know, who are actually concealing their Islamist, extremism and so on. And there's an idea that this could be infectious too.
Speaker 1: It's catchy.
Speaker 0: It's catchy. Its catching in the prisons and so on, right? And indeed, you know, starting in 2014, we have various world leaders comparing conspiracy theory to the spread of this kind of evil ideology. David Cameron basically says that Spirocy theory is a way for jihadists to be lured into this very destructive machine that will blow things up you know, at a moment's notice. It radicalizes people.
Radicalizes people.
Speaker 5: We know this worldview, the peddling of lies, That 911 was somehow a Jewish plot or that the 77 London attacks were staged.
Speaker 0: And then the following year, Francois Hollande in France, addressing an audience of holocaust survivors says the conspiracy theory is is, you know, something that that infects people with violent antisemitism.
Speaker 11: Antisemitism. It has changed its face, but it has not lost its roots of 1000 of years. Some of its methods have sadly not changed since the beginning of time. It's still conspiracy, suspicion, falsification.
Speaker 0: So we've seen the the fear propaganda move from the Hun to communism to terrorism, but now it makes the crucial move to the thing itself, the thing with which previous enemies have been compared, Right? In a way that makes them seem ripe for extermination. Right? And that is the virus.
Speaker 12: It started in China and is now spreading throughout the world. Today, the World Health Organization officially announced that this is a global pandemic. We have been in frequent contact with our allies, and we are marshaling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people. This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.
Speaker 0: That is something that could be on any surface. That is something that could be adhering to the fingers of any loved one. That's something that's coming out of the lungs of our fellow citizens. People passing us on the street could infect us with this so that we die in agony like, those people who died of the Spanish flu. Right?
That's the fantasy. It is complete fantasy.
Speaker 6: So you may not even know that you're infected it. And be completely asymptomatic and then spread it to somebody else.
Speaker 4: I think that's been the scariest part of this, whole pandemic.
Speaker 2: I
Speaker 0: mean, there is no, asymptomatic transmission of the virus. We don't even know what the virus is. It's never been isolated. Right? It disappears in the open air and the sunlight.
Speaker 9: I mean, this is complete, this is voodoo.
Speaker 0: I mean, this is primitive thinking.
Speaker 1: How do we know there's no asymptomatic transmission?
Speaker 0: This has been well established since a major Chinese study came out last year. There are all these stories of alleged super spreader events, and when you dig into every one of them, there wasn't any such thing. It. It's a fantasy, okay? The place where the virus did arguably spread was in those nursing homes where either democratic governors or other politicians in Britain, Canada and Sweden housed COVID patients with very weakened old people who were susceptible to some kind of viral infection.
Speaker 7: I
Speaker 0: say that in a tentative way, but what I'm saying is that this is a completely irrational fear. It is a kind of primordial fear. It. The reason why the people you and I know who've understood every previous charade have fallen for this one is because they're panicked. Right?
I'm gonna be honest. I felt this way for about a month and a half myself. You know? I mean, I I I was 70. I had Lyme disease.
So I was creeping around in a mask and washing my hands and, you know, then you start you get your bearings and you, start thinking and you look at the evidence around you, you walk past the hospital here in New York City and you don't see, you know, bring out your dead and all that stuff that you're reading in the New York Times. We
Speaker 8: had to get a refrigerated truck To store the bodies of patients who are dying. We are right now scrambling to try to get a few additional ventilators or even CPAP machines. If we could get CPAP machines, we could free up ventilators for patients who
Speaker 3: need them.
Speaker 9: Why is there such a demand on ventilators, and where did this come from? It's a respiratory illness for a large number of people. So, they all need ventilators.
Speaker 0: I'm one who is who believes that China was, in, you know, cahoots with the West, on this whole thing all along and I bolster that by also noting that it was China that developed the ventilator policy that the World Health Organization then recommended to the whole world, right? And those ventilators, killed, I'd I'd say, 9 out of 10 of the elderly people who were hooked up to them.
Speaker 1: Right? Despero trauma just totally blew out their lungs.
Speaker 0: Blew out their lungs, and it was that young doctor, Cameron Kyle Seidel in Brooklyn at Maimonides Medical Center who noticed that putting people you know, intubating them was just a way to kill them because they had, you know, low oxygen levels in their blood. It was more like high altitude sickness. And as we know from the travel nurse, Erin Marie Ozewski, who, you know, went undercover at Elmhurst Hospital. I said, I don't know what to tell you. They they seem to be playing this macabre game of musical bids, you know, just basically doing things to people that would be sure to kill them.
Speaker 7: Like, the guy over in said 220 Yeah. That were 2 negatives. And they're they end up positive. Like, the guy over in 29, I I had him upstairs because I was in CCU before it. Yeah.
And he came in with a with a stroke. I know. That's what 26/1 was, a stroke. And no COVID. And now he's got COVID, and he's on a vent.
Oh, because we gave it to him here. My it. A bigger problem with
Speaker 8: this whole scenario is when they intubate people who don't need it. Yeah. And it looks very clear to me that they're just pushing it.
Speaker 7: It was like the day before intubation who was fine on the rebreather. And now he's 37 years old with that. That's what I'm seeing. Like, all these negative tests and they're and they're putting them on these vents, hopeful that they'll get it, they'll be put on these COVID 4 is murder. It straight up is it is setting these people up for failure based on money.
Speaker 1: Who's paying this bonus of 29,000?
Speaker 3: I think
Speaker 7: I believe it's medic Medicaid Medicare. It's government money, but I don't know exactly where it's coming from, but I know that it is, but I know the orders are coming from, the above, someone above, and everybody says that it's Someone higher up.
Speaker 0: I'm not I'm not suggesting in any way that I think that, you know, COVID nineteen was a hoax, and there are people who think that. But it's it's worth noting that that that characterization of what I'm arguing is a very handy way to discredit what I'm saying. Oh, you think it was a hoax. Well, no. I don't think it was a hoax in as much as there was clearly some kind of illness with fairly unique symptoms that did, you know, really, really hit certain populations in certain places and in certain hospitals very hard, that's true.
It was very hard, that's true. But that doesn't mean that the magnification of the danger wasn't in effect a hoax. That doesn't mean that using this as a pretext for lockdown wasn't a hoax. There was never a single moment when this whole crisis was the subject of appropriate democratic procedures. Not once.
They never had hearings with people on all sides. You know, they never listened to anybody but Doctor. Fauci, right? Well, when people are terrorized and there's a so called state of emergency, you know, democracy is put on hold. I mean, this is something that the framers understood, right?
The reason why they broke up presidential power and, you know, separated powers as they did was to make it much harder for the President to behave like a king and, use war as a way to tax the peasants and have them, you know, join the military and so on.
Speaker 1: Or take on tyrannical powers generally.
Speaker 0: Exactly. They were acutely conscious of the possibility of the executive turning into a tyrannical force, it, right? Well, it works every time we've all heard various people quoting Hermann Goering's famous utterance during the Nuremberg trials when he was interviewed by this Army psychiatrist and Told him that it's a very easy matter to get people to do what you want, you know, just convince them they're under attack and that anyone who argues with that claim is putting them at risk. The psychiatrist and a good American objected that that wouldn't happen in the United States because we are a democratic republic, blah blah blah. And Goring, with a kind of weary cynicism, wave that away and said, it doesn't matter what kind of government you have.
It could be communist, it could be fascist, it could be democratic. It. You just convinced people they're under attack and you can do whatever you want, okay? So again, the evocation of the virus just all around us, you know, was enough to turn the wits of millions of highly educated people, you know, got them doing the most perverse things that they're doing even now, you know, masking their children. Right?
These are people who don't seem to do any study whatsoever. If they did, they'd know that children have strong natural immunity COVID 19, they don't get it and they don't transmit it. They would also know that masks don't work. They would also know that masks make you sicker, that they weaken your immune system, that they dull the wits through hypoxia. They would know this, but they don't because all they do, all they all they read, all they watch is their favorite media outlets, which are all saying the same thing.
It's as if people have been under hypnosis by the media, and it's based again on panic. It's based on fear. If you're sufficiently terrorized by the images, and it is the images and it is the words, right?
Speaker 1: And the numbers on the screen.
Speaker 0: The numbers on the screen, it's constant, it's unremitting, it's one-sided. Those are all characteristics of successful propaganda drive, they're the same characteristics that the Nazis used in their propaganda drives and the German people too were under hypnosis. Right? And at that, I mean, a lot of them, especially the uneducated ones, didn't even really become anti Semitic, you know, but they just kinda gave in because they were surrounded by peer pressure Turin, physical threats and stuff like that. But, you know, I used to think it was tasteless to compare our system and our lives and our society in any way with the Nazis.
I no longer think that. I now understand perfectly how that happened because the same thing is happening here. Right, people have been so terrorized by the plague of COVID-nineteen that they are have been desperate for those injections.
