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April 16, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
34:00
Professor of Media and Culture Mark Crispin Miller

Mark Crispin Miller discusses culture and propaganda in society with RFK Jr.

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Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University.
I think you actually teach a course on propaganda, which has been one of your focuses for many, many years.
Mark is my friend.
He's the author of too many books to even list here.
His essays and articles appeared in many journals, magazines, newspapers around our nation and the world.
In 2004, Miller wrote The Patriot Act, a show that he performed for six weeks at New York Theatre Workshop that is more relevant than ever today.
He's a recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Ingram Merrill, and Guggenheim Foundations.
Miller is on the board of the Organization for Propaganda Studies.
An international consortium of scholars and the Alliance for Human Research Protection, whose goal is to prevent or correct violations of informed consent in medical research.
Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks a million for having me on again, Bobby.
I appreciate it.
I've always loved talking to you.
There's a couple of things I wanted to talk about.
One, you have a piece that ran this week about the Oscars, and particularly about the In Memoriam section of the Oscars.
You've also, for the past several months, published a list of people who died suddenly.
And I want to talk to you about both of those issues.
Give us your take first on the Oscars.
Yeah, I suffered through the Oscars and was quite struck by many things about it.
Including how it was sponsored by Pfizer.
Yes, that's a crucial point.
Sponsored by Pfizer and BioNTech.
Just like most TV news, right?
Brought to you by Pfizer.
I think that that sponsorship has everything to do with a particular egregious moment in a broadcast filled with egregious moments.
This one was the annual necrology.
They call it in memoriam, where they honor the memory of those who left us over the previous year.
Now, formerly, they would do this with some dignity, creating a kind of quiet moment in the midst of this raucous spectacle, which would be taken up with a montage, usually without music, sometimes with somber music. usually without music, sometimes with somber music.
but a montage together.
directors, producers, you know, people throughout the industry who had died.
This time, they upstaged that montage by choreographing in front of it a loud, ebullient song and dance routine by a big chorus of performers.
So you couldn't really focus on the names and faces.
And they also had three different movie stars suddenly pop up in spotlight and offer a heartfelt tribute to these three departed movie people.
It was Tyler Perry who said something about Sidney Poitier.
And Jamie Lee Curtis, holding a little puppy, said something about Betty White, and Bill Murray talked about how much he misses Ivan Reitman.
Okay, this was just amazingly vulgar and distracting, and I know I'm not the only person who was really offended by it, but the more I thought about it and thought about Pfizer's sponsorship in particular, I was particularly struck by how many Really eminent Hollywood people were not included in the video.
And I've never seen anything like that before.
Bob Saget was not included.
Norm MacDonald was not included.
Eddie Asner was not included.
It's a long list of people who were not included.
They are named on the webpage that the Academy maintains for this purpose, but I've never really seen an Oscars broadcast in which such famous people did not make the cut of the video.
And I realized that the likeliest reason for this is that if they included everybody who has died since the last Oscars, I might say died suddenly, it would have gone on for a very long time.
It would have lasted probably too long for the amount of time they had allotted for the broadcast.
And it would have kind of messed up the hysterically celebratory mood of the Oscars because it's kind of a downer.
But I think the primary reason is they didn't want people thinking about this astonishing spike in deaths, sudden deaths, most of them for no reported reason.
Or reported as having been caused by heart attacks, stroke, cardiac arrest, you know, one of those cardiological adverse events, or a sudden and aggressive cancer, right?
To make sure or try to make sure that people would not mull this over, would not be struck by the fact that as in the military, and as in professional sports, So in the film industry, the number of those who died suddenly and often prematurely is really off the charts, see?
And this would suit the interests of Pfizer and BioNTech perfectly.
I mean, we've known for over a century that big advertisers basically call the tune, right?
We've known this since the days of patent medicine in the 19th century.
You and I spoke about this in a previous conversation.
We know this from the history of tobacco advertising.
Well, so is it now with Pfizer.
They pay for content that they would not pay for if there were any chance that the content could cast a shadow on their product.
So I think that this moment of excruciating vulgarity in the Oscars was driven by a desire to have people not thinking about the toll that's been taken Yeah, you know, the astonishing compendium, and you've been one of the people who have kept track of it, is the sports figures.
You know, this really astonishing epidemic of deaths in play and collapses in play.
And I think the count is a reason, many people are keeping off-Broadway, are keeping...
The track of these collapses and numbers you're seeing now are typically seven to eight hundred recorded collapses, with over half of them resulting in deaths.
Yeah, it is staggering.
But in a way, even more staggering is the media's pointed silence on that crisis.
And in some cases, their brazen attempt to normalize it.
There's a particularly disgraceful piece in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago by Glenn Kessler making this argument that the claim that an inordinate number of athletes have died is right-wing propaganda.
And he goes to great trouble.
I mean, he had to go to great trouble to construct a kind of argument to make that point, which is...
Patently false, you know?
I mean, what I've been doing is a weekly summary of all those sudden deaths that have been reported both in the U.S. and worldwide.
This is all on my sub stack, you know, which people can subscribe to.
It's where I did the piece about the Oscars, too.
I started doing this in late January.
Died suddenly.
Knowing, as I do, that that expression used to be an obituary euphemism for either suicide or a drug overdose.
Just as after a long illness used to mean cancer, a died suddenly had a very particular meaning.
You know, it was a code.
It's not like that anymore.
Now people are literally dropping dead.
And not just mid-game, not just athletes mid-game, but all kinds of people.
We have all these reports of teachers and others, you know, dying on the way to school.
We have all these reports of children dying in class.
All right.
Now, I mean, I really get sort of exercised by people suggesting that this has always been the case.
And there's nothing unusual here.
Nothing to see.
move along.
I mean, that is patently false.
Anyone who's been reading newspapers for years, as I have been and you have been, will know that this is completely unprecedented.
And I've found since late January that it's getting harder and harder to do this job because there are so many reports worldwide that it really takes a tremendous amount of time and effort just to track them, you know, and then put them in some kind of clear, that it's getting harder and harder to do this job because there are so many reports worldwide that it really takes a tremendous amount of time and effort just to track them, you know, and then put them in some kind of clear order.
And in so doing, to point out the subtle ways in which the media will try to distract from the likeliest cause of the death.
Like they'll mention some prior medical condition from years ago, suggesting that this person died because of like cancer that they had beaten, you know, long since.
In the case of William Hurt, you know, speaking of movie stars, Hurt did beat prostate cancer.
Well, some of the obituary articles mentioned that in a way that encourages us to draw the inference that he died of prostate cancer.
But it does not say that he died of prostate cancer.
It just says he died.
So this is a big and I think necessary job.
I'm just still staggered.
I shouldn't be by now, but I am, that the media is not doing this, but they're doing the opposite.
They're trying to cover all this up.
They have absolutely no shame.
They have no more shame than they have journalistic scruples.
And as far as I'm concerned, and I know I'm not the only one to feel this way, when they bend over backwards to fact-check something, they're actually only inadvertently Confirming the very thing that they're trying to deny, because that's what they do.
It's like that expression, you know he's lying when his lips are moving.
But I believe at this point, they have so little credibility left.
The whole juggernaut has so little credibility at this point.
These outlets are losing readership and viewership all over the place.
CNN doesn't even have a million viewers a night.
Whereas Joe Rogan will have 12 or 14 million.
That really tells us something.
And it tells us something good, which is that there's a certain point at which maybe most people, or at least a majority, just won't believe the lies anymore.
And I mean, that day can't really come soon enough, it seems to me.
Yeah, the construct that they usually use is what experts say.
And they don't actually...
I don't think I've ever seen a scientific citation.
You know, it's all that the experts...
Here's what the experts say.
And of course...
I did an interview with Megan Kelly a couple of weeks ago, and it was really courageous for her to do that.
It was a four-hour interview, and it was wide-ranging on a lot of different topics.
I actually had a wonderful time, but actually, afterwards, she did something that appeared kind of underhanded, which is she went in and she fact-checked me.
So when you look at the interview...
It will, when I make an answer, at least the first two hours, she does this, I don't know, five or six times.
When I give it an answer, then she pauses the interview and fact checks it.
And in each case, her fact check is wrong.
It's just erroneous.
She has a fact check that says...
Aluminum experts say aluminum is safe for babies.
Of course, you know, you can pay an expert, we call them biostitutes, to say anything you want, but it doesn't make it true.
Each one is demonstrably untrue.
And I know why Megyn Kelly did that.
Megyn Kelly did that because she didn't want to be deplatformed.
She didn't want to be censored.
And so she had to go through the motions of proving that She hadn't been seduced or taken in by my disinformation propaganda typhoon.
And so I'm really grateful to her for her courage.
I'm grateful for her for figuring out a way to do this.
But it just shows how kind of bogus the entire fact-checking industry is, and it has nothing to do with a search for existential truths, you know, which is what we're all supposed to be ultimately involved in.
It's all about, you know, it's all about making sure that you are the nobody veers outside of the guardrails of the official narrative.
If you do that, you're going to get fact-checked.
And it's really, it's Orwellian in a way that it is.
I think if Orwell had put it in 1984, Kafka or, you know, Aldous Huxley had said this.
We think that's a pretty cool imaginative construct of fiction.
This is a ministry of truth.
Absolutely the ministry of truth.
I've long said that 1984 is probably the most essential reading one can do to grasp what we're going through now.
It's extraordinarily prescient.
And indeed, ignorance is strength- War is peace.
Those are just satiric anticipations of what we live every day when we read the news.
To look at the front page of the New York Times is basically to transport oneself into the world of that novel.
I don't see the difference.
And the more I study the propaganda in World War I, Which we now look back on as having been thoroughly dishonest and false with its depictions of the Hun and all that stuff.
The more I see that we have not actually progressed a centimeter since then.
People are just as credulous, just as susceptible to fear-mongering and to being enraged by some atrocity story.
They're every bit as susceptible as people were a century ago.
And I've also noticed that the way most of my colleagues in the academy teach propaganda is unhelpful in that regard, because they tend to teach it as something that the Nazis did, something that the Bolsheviks did.
Maybe they'll talk about World War I, because that's safely in the past.
I mean, I teach it, or I should say I taught it because they no longer let me teach it at NYU. I always have provided the students with that background, right?
And it's used by totalitarian systems and so on.
But our main focus has been, every semester that I was able to do it, has been on propaganda in real time.
And that's particularly challenging, you know, because we have no trouble spotting the propaganda we disagree with We call it propaganda in a pejorative spirit, but it isn't so easy to spot it when you agree with it.
Let me be more precise.
It isn't so easy when it tells you what you want to hear.
And that's the key to all this fact-checking.
That's the key to the New York Times coverage and all the rest of the media, is that it works because people naturally don't want to believe that the authorities would be so malign People don't want to think that they live in a world like that.
I appreciate that.
I sympathize, you know.
But the fact is that wishful thinking can be lethal, as it is in this case.
If you allow what they're telling you to contradict the evidence of your own senses, to contradict your own experience, then I think you're lost.
I mean, there are a lot of people out there.
I've done these weekly summaries Of sudden deaths that have made news.
Well, there are vastly more such deaths that make no news, that just happen to people.
You know, they'll sometimes tweet about it and so on.
But an awful lot of people who have actually lost loved ones to vaccination refuse to see any connection.
I understand that too, but I find it very frightening.
That you can go that far.
And we know that the bulk of the people who are waging this war are people with vaccine-injured children, right?
These are the people who, over the years, have had the horrible experience of losing a child to some battery of shots, right?
I think that these people are crucial to the health freedom movement.
While there are also people throughout that history who...
Couldn't and won't face the connection.
I think they feel too guilty, whatever the reason is.
You know, not everybody wakes up due to the collision of their own experience with what the propaganda is saying.
But this is one reason why I think that propaganda study is so urgent, and why we really should be teaching propaganda in not just colleges, but in high schools as well, if not even earlier.
because people have to learn to keep their heads in the face of these barrages of untruth that have always been very successful.
It could now really mean the end of us all if we don't get a grip here.
And it's the propaganda itself feeling I had this morning.
I learned that a friend of mine who is 49 years old and had two kids, perfectly healthy, dropped dead, hiking in one of the canyons near where I lived in Los Angeles yesterday.
And he had just taken the vaccine.
His family is super liberal and Very pro-vax.
And there's no way that they will ever acknowledge that that could have been a cause of his death.
Because they've been told by the medical establishment that that's not true.
And people who say that's true are right-wing Trump people.
And that you see people who have a relative who died, who will say suddenly, who will then say, well, I'm glad he took the vaccine anyway.
And just the level of denial that has basically hijacked their capacity for critical thinking.
And it feeds on themselves because everybody's telling each other that can't be the reason these people are dying.
And so when they're relativized, they don't even report it to the VAERS system.
And when they don't report it, it means it doesn't show up, it doesn't register anywhere as a vaccine injury.
Right.
And it's the same thing that's happened for years.
You know, it's armored, the orthodoxy is armored and fortified by, as you point out, that profound self-interest that we all have of living in this kind of safe place.
Propaganda cocoon where the authorities are, you know, are not malignant and where everybody's well-intentioned and the truth is, the truthfulness of the official narrative is self-evident.
Right, it has to be.
Just as people generally succumb to wishful thinking because they don't want to believe that they live in such a world where these things could happen, right?
About 50% of the income for a typical pediatrics practice comes from the vaccination schedule.
Now, that doesn't mean that it comes from selling the vaccines and profiting from them, but it comes from wellness visits because the child has to do 8 or 10 wellness visits.
And that guaranteed traffic is a guaranteed income for the practice.
And it used to be like when I was a kid.
I never went to the doctor unless I needed stitches.
So today, kids are guaranteed to go to the doctor for those 10 wellness visits.
And that income is a guaranteed steady income from that practice.
And it doesn't mean that the doctors are cynical and that they know that they're injuring people, these pediatricians.
Most of them are just adamant that they're not injuring people.
It's almost impossible for me to understand that because I, you know, I had 11 siblings.
None of them had food allergies.
I had 70 first cousins.
None of them had autism.
Autism when I was growing up was 1 in 10,000.
Today it's 1 in 44.
Why aren't the pediatricians noticing it?
I didn't notice the sudden explosion of food allergies, of autoimmune disease, of rheumatoid arthritis, of juvenile diabetes, of diseases we never even heard of, like eczema and narcolepsy and ticks, which are all listed as side effects on the vaccine inserts and all became epidemic after 1989.
How can How can the pediatricians, particularly the older ones, not notice this?
The truth is that they don't.
And part of it, as you say, is probably this phenomenon that Sinclair Lewis talked about, that if it's almost impossible to persuade a man of a fact...
If the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.
And it's not because the person...
For many years, I ran into oil executives and tried to show them data on climate change, etc.
They just wouldn't believe it.
They wouldn't look at it.
They wouldn't believe it.
They don't want to hear it.
But it's not because they believe that they're poisoning people and killing people and destroying the planet and Acidifying the water and all this.
There's something about the human brain that doesn't want to see things that are not in our interest.
No, I think that's true.
I mean, this does not obtain for the authors of this crisis.
I think they do know the harm they're doing and they don't care.
That's right.
It's kind of psychopathy, right?
Somewhat analogous to all this, although it hasn't much to do with economics per se, is the number of doctors that Who scoffed back in the 20s and 30s and 40s, scoffed at claims that smoking was lethal because they all smoked, or a lot of them smoked, just as a lot of reporters smoked.
So the media was disinclined to make much of medical findings suggesting that smoking cigarettes was extremely unhealthy.
They were smokers themselves.
So they didn't really particularly want to go there.
And interestingly enough, just as we who question the COVID measures and question vaccination are immediately written off as being on the far right, being Trump supporters, Back then,
there was a kind of a similar reflex in that anyone who questioned the healthfulness of smoking was some kind of temperance crank because Christians and temperance union people were quite vocal against cigarette smoking.
I mean, often for religious reasons, but that was a kind of gift to the tobacco cartel because you could then associate any criticism With that kind of regressive worldview.
So if you were an enlightened person, you weren't any kind of a religious crank.
You just ignored any bad news about smoking.
I mean, this, again, takes us into the province of propaganda practice and how you can most effectively kind of preempt the truth or people's ability to take it in.
Let me offer an observation to you and a kind of hypothesis.
In 2001, liberals fought like hell against the passage of the Patriot Act and against the war in Iraq.
The Patriot Act was this, you know, we were in the middle of a crisis, much like today, where we were under attack by, you know, an outside enemy.
And Lots of Americans have died in 9-11, and the neocons are using that opportunity as a pretext to do what they wanted to do for a long time, which is to turn America into a security state and have this very aggressive,
bellicose foreign policy to invade Iraq, to get ahold of its oils, to control its oils by And to establish global hegemony for the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And liberals resisted that vision.
Today, 20 years later, you have COVID where the same thing is happening.
You have these tremendous incursions on the Bill of Rights and our Constitution.
You have the rocket-like A rise, emergence of a national security state.
And that's all accompanied by this very, very belligerent foreign policy that is bent on putting America and a particular group of elite Americans in charge of the rest of the world.
It appears now that liberals We're the big barricade against these kind of incursions against our traditions in 2001 today are the people who are inviting it in and something it appears that people are no longer armored We're defended against propaganda.
Probably, you know, you compare this to the generation of World War I, but it seems we even had less armor, less defenses against propaganda than people did in World War I, because we're giving up all of our constitutional rights back then and during the Civil War.
People fought against Abraham Lincoln when he abolished habeas corpus, and we fought against the incursions on civil rights during World War I, but today we're inviting a man and the people who Oh, that's absolutely true.
I mean, I've written voluminously on this, as you know.
I mean, the professions are the problem.
I think working people are pretty sane in the face of all this stuff.
You know, they tend not to be vax fanatics and so on.
And they have tended to put on masks, you know, grudgingly because they have had to.
I'm not saying this is true of all working people, but in my experience, there's been a marked difference between people who work for a living and the professional classes, all right?
I mean, they work for a living too, but you take my point that the academy and the media and the medical establishment have been the problem here.
As the left has become kind of a censorship juggernaut and has long since ceased to have any anti-war impulses at all, I think Obama was helpful in that regard because he started these five more wars beyond the two that Bush Cheney had started.
And I never noticed a peep of protest from the left over that.
Now they're not anti-war anymore.
They're all for censorship, because it is they who are kind of the spear tip of this whole thing.
And I'm really interested in precisely how that happened.
I think it was some kind of a gradual process.
And I think that the placement of Donald Trump in the White House was key to the whole thing.
That created a kind of hysteria throughout the left.
And then gave them...
A disillusion with democracy.
Well, yes, a disillusion.
Believing that if democracy is going to produce Donald Trump, then, you know, what use do we have for it?
It's failed.
There's people who are so crazy in this country that they'll vote for this guy.
Therefore, they have to be manipulated through censorship and propaganda, and that democracy no longer works.
Well, that's right.
I mean, I found, you know, like you, I spent years trying to make election reform an issue in this country.
And that's why I wrote my book, Fooled Again.
And I know you wrote a couple of terrific essays on this.
We were trying to make this issue give it traction, you know, so that we would...
Be able to jumpstart a real national debate on the urgent need for election reform, which could be done without much difficulty.
But I never noticed any interest, even on the left, you know, even though the left was sort of disadvantaged by the illegitimate rise of Bush-Cheney, they never really showed any interest in this.
And now, as you say, there's an actual animus against democracy with Trump hatred as the ground of that whole thing, you know.
But the interesting thing is that this administration, let's call it Biden-Harris, is actually more totalitarian than Trump ever was.
I mean, Biden has been ruling by decree, and his regime is all about attacking journalists and outlets that are critical of his policies.
They're terribly woke, but as usual, woke serves as a kind of mantle that predators can wear to get away with the kind of So,
the interesting thing about the Trump phenomenon and what we call Trump derangement syndrome is that it has blinded Everybody on the left, it seems to me, to the actual totalitarianism that has been coming down on us for the last two years.
The last time we had this conversation, we talked about all the ways in which constitutional democracy had basically been halted by the COVID crisis.
No more open congressional deliberations.
Over whether the COVID policies made sense, no more jury trials, you know, I mean, we can just go through the whole list of democratic features that had been obviated or nullified by, right?
Now that strikes me, all of it, as a big, you know, red flag.
I mean, we're talking about the It's a nullification of American democracy and its replacement by a kind of bio-fascist order.
But if you hate Trump and you think that the truckers in Canada and in the United States are all fascists, then you're protected from being able to perceive the actual totalitarianism that's already here because you keep looking over there.
You keep looking at what you call the far right.
Assuming that the use of Trump to that end was kind of a deliberate thing, you know, with this result in view, I'd say it was kind of a brilliant accomplishment because all these people who one would once have relied on to take a stand against things like the Patriot Act are now on the other side and will not protect us against fascism because they're promoting it themselves.
At this point, I feel I shouldn't be staggered anymore, but I still am.
Mark, as always, wonderful to talk to you.
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