Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of Media Studies at New York University, discusses the manipulation of public opinion and the division within society. He highlights the corporate co-opting of movements like Black Lives Matter and the suppression of potential Covid treatments. Miller argues that this manipulation is causing further division and may ultimately harm democracy and science.
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@JoshWalkos - Champagne Joshi
2020: A PROPAGANDA MASTERPIECE
PART TWO β DIVIDE & CONQUER
A Conversation with Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University.
βThe conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,β wrote Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda.
From the corporate hijack of the Black Lives Matter movement, to the fraudulent suppression of life-saving Covid treatments, to the βcoupβ on January 6th, Miller makes the case that the establishment seeks to inflame a fractured country. Masked vs. unmasked, vaxxed vs. unvaxxed, Red vs. Blue: the ultimate losers of this pro-wrestling drama may be both democracy and science.
Video Transcript AI Summary
The speaker discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has created a new category of forbidden speech, where questioning masks, vaccines, or the origins of the virus is seen as putting people at risk. They argue that it is important to hear both sides of the story and question the effectiveness of masks. They also discuss the George Floyd incident and the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, which they believe further divide the population. The speaker suggests that the pandemic and protests have been used to demolish independently owned businesses and introduce a woke militancy. They criticize the hypocrisy of wealthy individuals and corporations supporting these movements. The speaker also discusses the Trump presidency, conspiracy theories, and the Capitol riot, suggesting that the media's portrayal of these events is misleading.
Speaker 0: One of the things that the, COVID rollout has done is to create a whole new category of forbidden speech. Okay? That if you raise questions about masking, you raise questions about vaccines, You even question the origins of the pandemic. You raise any questions at all, you're putting people at risk. Okay?
If you're not completely credulous And if you don't soak up everything doctor Fauci says, then you're somehow putting people at risk. You want people to die.
Speaker 1: 99.5% of those Infections are people who haven't gotten vaccinated. I mean, come on. Anybody who disputes that sort of stuff is putting people's lives at risk and potentially killing
Speaker 0: So that's kind of a new, an emergency period, prescription on a whole huge category of speech. It's actually more urgent than ever before that we'd be allowed to hear the other side of the story. People should hear that masking does No good and is actually making you sicker, etcetera. Right? You can't listen to any of that.
If you bring that up, you're putting people at risk. Okay. Secondly, The George Floyd moment and the rise of BLM and along with it, Antifa, And on the other side, the Proud Boys, right? This is, first of all, exquisitely divisive, which is something that comes straight out of the imperial playbook. As it is, masking was a new way to divide the population So that maskers and anti maskers are on opposite sides.
Right? And that kind of matches the blue red, You know, split.
Speaker 2: I'm not afraid. The good lord takes care of me. If I die, I got we gotta get this country moving. Camden, what are you gonna do? Wear masks and stay inside for another year?
Speaker 0: Okay. I believe that the one of the primary purposes of the COVID rollout and the lockdowns was To, largely demolish, independently owned businesses, all over the country and the world. And it was very successful at doing that.
Speaker 3: The Wall Street Journal said 40% of black owned businesses were just gone, April of 2020.
Speaker 0: Then there was the George Floyd moment, You know, the George Floyd incident. After, you know, the infamous video of, Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd's neck, there was an explosion of of protests, not just nationwide, but all over the world. And while there's no doubt that many of the people protesting were sincere, I think that, what we witnessed Here in the city and what people in other cities witnessed was a kind of controlled demolition of still more businesses. You and I each saw with our own eyes, the police actually standing down in the face of really violent vandalism, arson, things like that. We've seen these anomalous piles of bricks placed near, you know, where protests This
Speaker 2: is
Speaker 0: So we have this pattern Protests, you know, followed by a kind of mopping up that's extremely violent and destructive And that guts all these other stores and small businesses, right? So in a way, it's like a further body blow to the independent economy. And this introduces into the narrative a kind of woke militancy that has actually, I think, served to be part of the whole COVID narrative. When you've got Jamie Dimon and Mitt Romney and Jeff Bezos and Bill and Melinda Gates, right, And the Chase Manhattan Bank and Goldman Sachs and Amazon all saying black lives matter. You got Nancy Pelosi.
What is she worth, $120,000,000 taking a knee in the House of Representatives Lobby, you know, with the cloth on. I mean, seriously? These people are the biggest predators out there, and they're all telling us that black lives matter. I mean, this really does Getting the exercise. I mean, if you follow the the the stories of what it's like to be working in the Amazon warehouses under speed up conditions, right, Where these people are calling 911, you know, on a daily basis to report that yet another fellow worker has collapsed.
You got workers wearing diapers. Okay? Because they can't take bathroom breaks. Alright? A lot of those workers are black.
Don't their lives matter?
Speaker 4: If I had the opportunity to talk to Jeff Bezos face to face, I will really wanna ask him, have he ever worked in a warehouse before? Have he sweated for 10 to 12 hours a day and not being able to go to the restroom when He needed to go.
Speaker 5: And the issue of, of working conditions, I'm very proud of our working conditions.
Speaker 4: They got cameras. They watching us all the time.
Speaker 6: It's a lot of walking. It's a lot of fast pace. It's a lot of
Speaker 7: climbing upstairs. It's just a lot
Speaker 6: For the human body
Speaker 4: They're getting treated like robots, and and it's not fair because even robots break down sometimes.
Speaker 5: Command engine start. 2. I wanna thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.
Speaker 8: Go, Jeff. Go, Mark. Go, Paul. Go, Oliver. You are going to space.
Speaker 0: I mean, is it enough for Bezos to say black Lives matter. Is it enough for him to put up a banner on, you know, Amazon Prime? BLM is a brand. Okay? It is a very, very lavishly funded brand.
You know, they'll paint the letters on a street in Washington. They got a $100,000,000 from the Ford Foundation, Right? They're getting that kind of funding. Right? Again, that's CIA money.
All right. So let's talk about the 3rd act in this grotesque Theatrical, right, starting in January 2020 and in a sense concluding on January 6 this year. Now, let me, preface this by noting that the equation of Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler actually began before the 2016 an election. There's a lot of people out there who actually think that those two historical figures are very similar, And that's based on knowing absolutely nothing about either Hitler or Trump, okay? Michiko Kakutani, the veteran book reviewer of the New York Times, was actually trotted out to do this big review of a new biography of Hitler, And the whole review was this elaborate comparison of Trump with Hitler, right, which tells me, The New York Times being as it is Intelligence connected, you know, tells me that this was a narrative that they wanted to have in people's minds, and it could even Relate to what I still regard as the surprise election of Donald Trump because it it fed the assumption that He had sort of taken over the country illegitimately.
I'm in no way a Trump, apologist or champion. I have no use for him at all. Right? I think that he and I were equally surprised by his victory. That's my own reading because, some Pretty compelling forensic evidence is out there that the 3 swing states, that he miraculously won late in the night, this is how it This goes down.
You know, there's a lot that's really wrong with those numbers. There's a lot that's suspicious about all that. And the fact that Team Trump didn't even have an acceptance speech written, because their own polling clearly told them that Hillary Clinton was gonna win, And that that was my reading of the polls.
Speaker 9: Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated.
Speaker 3: You and I have a mild disagreement. I think that part of the The pro wrestling nature of Trump was to act surprised that he, you know, got the election. I mean, I think I think there's a a plan that unfolded for Trump to be president. I mean, I like to do this thought experiment. Let me throw it at you.
Imagine if Trump had been the one to say
Speaker 10: You must have a mask.
Speaker 3: You gotta close down your businesses. No school, no church, no small business economy. You know what? Everyone's gonna have to be taking a shot pretty soon, and and this is the way it is. People would have rightly said this is fascism.
But because Trump said it, I mean, he was so perfectly positioned earlier as, you know, this opponent of rationality or this, You know, this bigot or this, you know, this anti science persona, whether he got there by accident or not, he's definitely served a major purpose, Which was to weaponize the truth in a way against, people who might want to employ it.
Speaker 9: People think that goes away in April with the heat As the heat comes in, typically that will go away in April. We're in great shape there. The Democrats are politicizing The coronavirus. You know that. Coronavirus.
Speaker 2: And this is their new hoax.
Speaker 9: Healthy people, if you're healthy,
Speaker 11: You will probably,
Speaker 9: go through a process and and you'll be fine.
Speaker 12: President, is it safe or appropriate to be holding rallies during
Speaker 9: I think it's very safe. Yeah. I think it's very safe.
Speaker 1: The global death rate at 3.4%.
Speaker 9: Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false This number now, this is just my hunch. Personally, I would say the number is way under 1%. Everybody has to be calm. It's all going to work out. I mean, most people are getting better.
Most by far, the people are you get better with or without the vaccine. It's going to pass. Stop testing Right now, we have very few cases, if any. One thing that's for certain, don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it.
Speaker 3: So, so this had tremendous consequences, but, of course, he was also the person who spearheaded, Operation Warp Speed, Which is giving us the dubious vaccine.
Speaker 9: Today, I wanna update you on the next stage of this momentous medical initiative. It's called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project. You really could say that nobody's seen anything like we're doing, whether it's ventilators or testing.
Nobody's seen anything like we're doing now Within our country, since the 2nd World War
Speaker 0: Donald Trump has served as a a central Polarizing figure in a spectacle of politics that is Like nothing so much as a pro wrestling match. You know? I mean, Trump is the pro wrestling president. That's actually a fact in as much as he, you know, appointed Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration and he has himself Participated in, you know, pro wrestling SmackDowns.
Speaker 2: Indeed. Yes. The Donald is here live on He's still here. And, mister Trump, not coming along.
Speaker 0: There's something about the guy as a reality TV star that suggests He's playing a part. He's playing the part of of the swaggering, conceited, You know, wrestler who enjoys provoking the audience to ever wilder boos and cat calls, you know, and he He plays dirty tricks on the good guy, the opposition. And then that this reminds me of that moment in the debates with Hillary when he stood behind her looking like a Stalker. You
Speaker 13: know? So at some parts of watching last night, I was, like, I was really getting nervous because she was in a space. He's like a dog who's starting to get anxious. He's being backed in a corner. So I had a little anxiety during these moments.
Speaker 12: Fascinating. Let's talk about the handshake.
Speaker 0: He relishes that kind of provocation In a way that really does recall pro wrestling. And just as pro wrestling is fixed, You know, it's it's it's, it's a kind of orchestrated sports spectacle, that that Sticks to a script and uses certain special effects and so on, our politics is the same way.
Speaker 14: Clip, clip, clip, clip.
Speaker 2: At At WrestleMania, Donald Trump, I'm gonna do what everybody wanted to do.
Speaker 9: Well, you know, Vince, I don't know if you've seen the latest poll. I saw the other night John Travolta. He prefers Trump. I see others prefer Trump. The poll shows 95% of the Hollywood celebrities want your head shape, and we're gonna do it, Vince.
We're gonna do it.
Speaker 0: I don't think we can underestimate, the shock people felt when this orange buffoon became president, you know, with his cape, right, and his tights swaggering around the ring, you know, running up to the, his opponent When the referee's back was turned, you know, and hitting him, the kidney with his elbow, that kind of thing, they couldn't believe that he was president. Right? They never got over the shock of it.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump is In a world he is not familiar with. Come on, kid. Hey. Look at this. On a trip.
Traitor Traitor Traitor Traitor. Donald Traitor.
Speaker 14: And I
Speaker 0: think it does have some kind of psychopolitical dimension to it Because what it actually ended up doing, I mean, pretty quickly, was was, making the CIA and the FBI and The bureaucracy in Washington generally suddenly appear heroic, like our champions, you know. They're gonna protect us from from the bad orange man and his, his handler in the Kremlin. Right? This was combined With, this demonization of Putin
Speaker 1: The FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Speaker 15: Do you still believe the
Speaker 16: president could be a Russian asset?
Speaker 1: I think it's possible. I think that's why we started our investigation.
Speaker 16: It's very clear that the Russians interfered in the election, and it's Still puzzling as to why mister Trump does not acknowledge that and embrace it and also push back hard against mister Putin. The Russian threat To our democracy and our democratic foundations is real.
Speaker 17: This was the classic textbook Soviet and now Russian Tradecraft.
Speaker 11: The FBI doesn't do molds and campaigns, do they?
Speaker 18: No. It's a bunch of nonsense. The FBI's His mission is to protect the United States. So if they had tips that there might be a Russian infiltration into the United States to meddle with our election, which has been found out, then they should go after that. So using a confidential informant, a trusted source, to go test out those leads, It would be negligent for them not to do that.
Speaker 11: So that's a deep, deep state you got. By deep state, if you mean professionals who are consummate professionals My heroes who My heroes, the deep state. What continuity means, you understand what the constitution is.
Speaker 19: Right.
Speaker 11: If you don't care about party, if you don't care about politics Right. And just do what's right and and honor the law and honor Then god bless the deep state. But he's purging.
Speaker 5: Thank god for the deep state.
Speaker 16: I don't know what the principal protagonist in this drama is going to do, but I surely hope that those adults and those people In the White House and in the cabinet and in the congress are going to recognize that they need to act before there's a real disaster.
Speaker 1: To the truth. Yes. To the truth.
Speaker 0: You know, I mean, the whole thing has has actually jerked American Liberals back into the position Of the John Birch Society in the fifties or the far right because all of a sudden Russia is this this demonic force that that, you know, is is Directing all the far right movements in Europe and elsewhere. Also, the demonization of Trump has entailed a Ferocious hatred of the American working class.
Speaker 13: You could put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.
Speaker 2: You might have some support from this audience, but 95% of them are idiots.
Speaker 9: To me, they look like a very smart group of people.
Speaker 0: As you've said, All kinds of extremely acute people who have understood and who have grasped the the the falseness of Narrative after narrative, right, until now have have succumbed to this.
Speaker 20: Even after we produce A vaccine. Experts say that it could be months or even years before we come back to anything Approaching normal.
Speaker 10: About between 750 a 1000 people today are dying. When he was presented with that number, he said it is what it is. Well, it is what it is because you are who you are. That's why it is.
Speaker 0: What's happened is, we've had this president Who would say certain things that have really serious real world consequences. He would say, for example, that hydroxychloroquine works, right? If you take it early enough, it will help you get over COVID-nineteen. He said this. So all of his followers believe it because he said it.
Okay? They don't believe it because it's true or they have any way of verifying it. They just believe it because he said it. Alternatively, everybody on the other side of the of the aisle, all the liberals, think it can't be true because he said it. That's just it.
He said it can't be true. Trump lies. I've heard that so many times. It's it's it's as if they've been subjected to some kind of, you know, communist brainwashing. Right?
He said that it can't be true. Well, as a matter of fact, he was right. And the suppression of hydroxychloroquine, The proscription on its use by governors interfering with doctors trying to treat their patients. I mean, this is this is a crime against humanity.
Speaker 9: I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it. Hydroxychloroquine. I'm taking it. Hydroxychloroquine.
Speaker 0: Well, You shouldn't be taking it.
Speaker 5: Is there any evidence to suggest that as with malaria, it might be used as a prophylaxis against COVID nineteen?
Speaker 9: No. The answer is is no, And and the the evidence that you're talking about, John, is anecdotal evidence.
Speaker 12: A large new study links hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to a higher risk of death in coronavirus patients.
Speaker 13: This is a study that was led by folks at Harvard and was published in The Lancet just today.
Speaker 21: Last week, The executive group of the solidarity trial decided to implement a temporary pause of the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial because of concerns raised about the safety of the drug.
Speaker 12: The Food and Drug Administration is ending its emergency authorization for the use of hydrochloroquine to treat COVID 19. President Trump has repeatedly praised hydrochloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment.
Speaker 5: This is the mother of all studies right now. This was 96,000 patients.
Speaker 22: This is not just a government culpability And, malfeasance with respect to hydroxychloroquine. This is academic malfeasance. There were 2 Fraudulent papers, 1 in New England Journal of Medicine, 1 in Lancet, they were withdrawn, and and the New England Journal of Medicine in Lancet acknowledged that they were fraudulent papers. They were scare papers to scare people on hydroxychloroquine. Since that time, there's been dozens of pile on, scare tactics in academics.
This isn't the government. This is people in my field in academic medicine who are committing academic fraud. I reviewed a paper. I'm a cardiologist. Theologist, I reviewed a paper that made it into the medical literature demonstrating that hydroxychloroquine causes a heart attack.
That hydroxychloroquine causes a giant scar in the heart. And I can tell you, I'm at Baylor in Dallas. We have the world's most recognized cardiac pathology program in the world. Our senior examiner has held in in his heart his hand in his hands, more human hearts than anybody in the history of mankind. I can tell you firsthand, hydroxychloroquine does not cause giant scars in the heart.
So academic medicine is committing fraud, Is committing, I think, a crime against humanity, there must be a motivation behind this that's much bigger than just democrat versus Republican.
Speaker 0: At any rate, after the last election, which was Demonstrably stolen. There was a huge and, I think, entirely justified demonstration in Washington. And as a believer in electoral democracy, although I regard our politics as theater now, I think it's important Honor the will of the electorate, even if they don't, you know, entirely understand what they're voting for. I think they were taken in by Trump. That's irrelevant.
They had every right to demonstrate. But by over focusing on the PSIOP in the capitol building, the media was able to give the impression that the nation's capitol was sort of overrun by brown shirts and Klansmen. If you carefully examine both the videos taken inside the Capitol and the way the event was covered and reported, It was obviously staged to provide footage, you know, for the talking heads To define this ridiculous invasion as an attempted coup.
Speaker 15: The peaceful Transfer of power, the cornerstone of American democracy, seemed a highly abstract concept today as Trump supporters clashed with police as they tried and succeeded to storm the congress where America's elected leaders had gathered to certify the election victory of Joe Biden.
Speaker 10: Our nation, so long the beacon of light and hope for democracy, It's come to such a dark moment.
Speaker 9: I am in tears today to see this scene. This is not an American insane.
Speaker 11: Could you ever imagine seeing that in America?
Speaker 12: Did we just witness a coup attempt in the United States of America, or was this an insurrection?
Speaker 11: How would you describe what happened
Speaker 9: on that day? Was it a coup, an act of domestic terrorism? What was it in your view?
Speaker 13: Some local political experts you spoke with today are calling this an attempted coup.
Speaker 10: This was, by any dictionary definition, a coup attempt.
Speaker 9: Any other country this was happening, it would be called a coup. We'd we'd call it that. So that's what it is.
Speaker 16: It was very clearly an attempt to carry out A, coup to overthrow the elected government.
Speaker 0: This takes my breath away. These people don't know what a coup is? What do you do when you mount a coup? Well, you take over the media. Right?
You often kill the incumbent. You know, you have troops take over. Okay. Did anything like that happen this time? Have these people ever heard of Chile?
You know, their 911 in 1973, that was a cool. There have been coups that our CIA has has Cultivated and paid for and encouraged, and they're usually pretty bloody, and they usually mean an attempt to take over the government. And I don't see any evidence that these people who put their feet up on a few desks and banged on a few doors We're trying to take over the government, and I also think that a number of them were agents as usual. Now it's obvious that the Capitol Police, and that's a very, very Powerful and well organized protective force. K?
Somehow that day, they weren't. Somehow that day, members of that force were ushering people into the capitol building. It's there for your eyes to see. It took down the barricades and guided people into the capitol. Police
Speaker 23: are squabbling with protesters. Oh, there we go. And they just reached the castle.
Speaker 2: The police here are willing to work with us and cooperate peacefully. But it's like our first amendment allowed. Give you that. The show. Alright.
Nothing are going to be heard. Everybody, this must be peaceful. This has to be peaceful. We have the right to peacefully assemble.
Speaker 0: And then The most absurd footage of all was the footage of this lone capitol policeman Standing with his club, trying to hold off this horde of, you know, white supremacists coming up the stairs. Right? Now if you watch this carefully and and try to maintain your calm of mind, you'll notice, first of all, that there's a guy standing Right on the other side of the landing that he's on, you know, filming him, it's it's like a movie is being filmed. Then you say to yourself, but wait a minute. The footage I'm watching was also taken on somebody's cell phone.
Right? It was staged.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 0: But the language around it was so hysterical. Right? And I've learned this in studying these PsiOps over the years, it doesn't matter what you're actually looking at. You know? It doesn't matter what you see with your eyes.
If the voice over narration is sufficiently compelling, you will tend to have that color your understanding of what you're seeing. Okay. Now, it didn't look like a coo. It looked like a kind of, lark or frolic, you know. It looked like, you know, what this looked like, you know, a panty raid on campus.
And this marks the moment when conspiracy theory is explicitly equated with domestic terrorism, okay? Now things, as I said, were drifting in this direction from the time that David Cameron and Francois Hollande sort of likened conspiracy theory to extremist movements that threaten people's lives, you know. So we've come a long way from the CIA memo in 1967, which passingly relates To, you know, the fact that what the conspiracy theorists were arguing about the Warren report, referred to material used, You know, deliberately contrived by communist propagandists. Now it's been flipped, to, make the urgent and kind of hysterical claim Often, that conspiracy theory is a form of domestic terrorism, and it's based on this fantasy Of a kind of, you know, like this brown shirts out in the streets of the United States and that Trump supporters are are Nazis. You know?
The Nazi threat was used several times over the last, you know, year or so, to try to take the gloss off of really huge anti lockdown demonstrations, fairly big ones in Michigan, you know, which were then tarred with the brush of Nazism by this supposed plot by, you know, bearded Neo Nazis to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. That to me is so explicitly phony that I just have to laugh.
Speaker 24: Earlier today, attorney general Dana Nessel was joined by officials from the Department of Justice and the FBI to announce state and federal charges against 13 members of 2 militia groups who are preparing to kidnap and possibly kill me.
Speaker 1: Now a big investigative report on BuzzFeed News has revealed a bunch of new details and particularly about the role that FBI informants played in the plot And breaking it up. We,
Speaker 8: you know, we always knew even from the moment the case was announced that there was at least 1 informant, in fact, at least 2, and that they had sort of been in the plot. The great revelation, you know, of our reporting and also what's come out in the court documents and in other media, including the Detroit Free Press, which has done a great job on this, is that there were as many as 12, informants. And that those informants played a much larger And, you know, more active role. One of the informants actually rose to become the 2nd in command of the Wolverine watchmen.
Speaker 0: And then when there was a big, Gigantic demonstration in Berlin. It was like a 1000000 people, and Bobby Kennedy addressed them and Got right down to it and said they're gonna call this a Nazi get together.
Speaker 19: I'm back at home in the United States. The newspapers are saying that I came here today to speak to about 5,000 Nazis. And tomorrow, they're gonna report that, yes, I was here, and I spoke to maybe 3 to 5 1,000 Nazis. But I look at this crowd, and I see the opposite of Nazism. I see people who love democracy, people who want open government, people who want leaders that are not gonna lie to them.
Leaders will not make up arbitrary rules and regulations to orchestrate obedience of the population. I look at this crowd. I see all the flags of Europe. I see people of every color. I see people from every nation, every religion, all caring about human dignity, about children's health, about political freedom.
This is the opposite of Nazism.
Speaker 0: We were told that a contingent of these Nazis actually Storm the Reichstag. Right? I mean, seriously, can we just get a grip here? You know, that's theater. That's theatrics, and the people protesting lockdown are not Nazis.
Speaker 14: I will I'm going to go down under the ground because somebody tells me that debt's Coming around, and I will not carry myself down to There's been rumors of war and wars that have been. The meaning of life has been lost in Instead of learning to live, they are learning to die. Let me When someone is pulling the wool over me. And if this war comes and There's always been people that have If I had the movies and the riches and crowns, I'm buying the whole world and I've Change things around. I throw all the guns in the tanks in the sea.
Let me drink From the waters where the mountain streams flood. Let the slug of wildflowers flow free through my blood.
