Meet the Censored: Mark Crispin Miller
The NYU Professor becomes the latest academic to fall afoul of idea police
Matt Taibbi
Jan 4
Mark Crispin Miller, author and longtime New York University professor, has
unconventional views. Even work hes done thats won mainstream praise is
unconventional, upon close examination. If you came of political age during
the Iraq war years, you probably remember him for The Bush Dyslexicon, a
witty, challenging book that took a deep dive into the speech patterns of
George W. Bush.
Unwrapping the thought processes behind famed Bushisms like The question
is, how many hands have I shaked?, Miller found a metaphor for the broad
illogic under American society. However, that books central idea that we
Americans have been tricked out of our democracy by a vast and very smart
conspiracy of stupid talkers was too rich for some mainstream
commentators.
Crispin Miller argued that when people like Donald Rumsfeld told us that
victory in Iraq may not come in a month or a year or even five years,
that in fact even fighting forever might be a victory, in my view, the
joke was not that this message was garbled by Bush, but rather that it was
conveyed clearly by producers, anchors, editors, journalists, and pundits,
who were fatally dyslexic in doping out the very spectacle it presents to
us. Presenting madness as sanity required a brokenness of mind that just
happened to come of the presidents mouth as laugh lines.
Since then, Crispin Miller has become known for blogging about official
deceptions, and his attentions are often focused in directions that make
even hardened skeptics like me nervous. On MarkCrispinMiller.com, he posts
headlines like, The Official Story of 9/11 is Based on a Gigantic Lie and
Rogue Chinese virologist presents smoking gun evidence that SARS-COV-2
was created in a lab. As noted in the interview below, he once suggested a
student read Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, a book that inspired a $450,000
defamation award to the parent of a Sandy Hook victim.
At the same time, his observations about the nature of media in America
remain poignant and rare in a country whose citizens are trained to believe
that propaganda is something only other people consume. Crispin Miller tries
to undo those thinking patterns via a course in propaganda at NYU that, he
says, urges them to evaluate material independently, and is what got him in
trouble.
Theres a paradox in the way we consume information in the U.S. Our country
does not (yet?) insist that official lies remain accepted as truths forever.
Even the U.S. Naval Institute is now allowed to write lengthy tracts about
how high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American
public in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and its accepted that similar lies
were told about everything from WMDs to the pretext for the 1999 NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia. Even the Zero Dark Thirty account of how we
supposedly killed and captured Osama bin Laden was a mess, with then-chief
counterterrorism advisor John Brennan saying initially that bin Laden used
his wife as a human shield, only to have the government retract the claim
shortly after.
While already-proven deceptions are fair game, the penalties for those who
raise the first questions grow higher all the time. The term conspiracy
theorist is now applied equally to people like Alex Jones and Sy Hersh,
whose objections to the story of bin Ladens capture have been effectively
memory-holed, as have his oft-denounced reports on reported chemical attacks
in Syria (the subject of numerous recent whistleblower accounts claiming
official deception).
Additionally, the term conspiracy theory is now often wrapped in
accusations of bigotry. In fact, the spreading of conspiracy theories is
understood to be a key element of racist movements. Theres obviously some
truth to that, as theories about Jews in media or disease-ridden immigrants
are among the most common form of the genre. However, it shouldnt follow
that because racists spread conspiracy theories, all people who investigate
conspiracies are racist.
That faulty syllogism now means that the person who tries to take on an
entrenched official story not only risks being called crazy, but a racist,
sexist, Assadist, etc. The latter charges, if they stick, lead to an
expanding array of consequences, from removal from the Internet to job loss.
This effect has heightened during the pandemic, a period when weve been
encouraged to forget how often conventional wisdom about Covid-19 has
shifted:
Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno
This tweet (from March) has just been deleted
December 21st 2020
2,913 Retweets5,899 Likes
Crispin Millers recent troubles stem from being a skeptic about mask use.
He points out that until 2020, studies were unenthusiastic about their
benefits in stopping the transition of respiratory illness, and even the CDC
only recently changed its mind on the issue. When he broached the subject in
class, a student responded critically on Twitter:
Julia Jackson @julia_jacks
@nyuniversity: an MCC tenured professor spent an entire class period telling
students that wearing masks doesnt prevent the spread of COVID-19, and that
hydroxychloroquine trials were made to fail so more people would be given
the vaccine and have their DNA changed. thread 1/
September 21st 2020
58 Retweets149 Likes
Criticizing Crispin Miller for sending links to a site that in turn linked
to The Charlie Kirk Show, Zero Hedge, Technocracy News, Global Research,
and more, the student went on to tag the University leadership and wrote,
I hope they take immediate steps to relieve him of these duties.
Crispin Millers department responded by promising, We have made this a
priority and are discussing next steps. This in turn led to a now-standard
cancelation ritual. A denunciation letter from academic colleagues asked the
school to complete a review of Millers intimidating tactics, abuses of
authority, aggression and microaggressions, and explicit hate speech, none
of which are excused by academic freedom and First Amendment protections.
The faculty letter began with complaints about Crispin Millers blog, which
they said includes direct mockery and ridicule of trans individuals and a
characterization of transgender surgery as a eugenic form of
sterilization. They went on, however, to say that no matter how damaging
these very visible views may be to the department, he has a right to his
opinions that we must uphold.
The signatories then shifted and argued that by mentioning that tweeting
student, Crispin Miller moved out of the realm of mere damaging opinion, and
into the crime of creating an unsafe learning environment. Through this
bait-and-switch, the opinions on the blog that colleagues only a few
paragraphs before said must be upheld, were now re-entered as part of the
argument against him.
The letter says Crispin Miller through his blog used his position of
authority to intimidate students who choose to wear masks and abide by NYU
policy, which implies but does not exactly say he was telling students not
to wear masks. Crispin Miller insists he did not do the latter, and notes
that he wears a mask in discharge of his professional duties.
Near the end, the signatories wrote:
We support the queer, transgender, and non-binary members of the NYU
community. We support those in our community who are Black and Indigenous
people of color, and immigrants, and who come from marginalized and
historically underrepresented communities, particularly those who have been
targets of ongoing and systemic racism and violence. We unequivocally
condemn white supremacy, anti-trans/nonbinary bias, and any hate speech.
With this language, protesting faculty moved the Crispin Miller issue from a
technical violation of campus mask policy, or even just an accusation of
unsound or non-evidence-based teaching, and into an argument that
positioned him additionally as a defender of white supremacy. This
double-whammy construction has become a regular part of the accusatory
formula in such cases.
Crispin Miller responded with a petition to defend his academic freedom that
so far has gained over 26,000 signatures, as well as a lawsuit against
academic colleagues for libel and defamation, charging among other things
that the letter by faculty members, in espousing their liberal credentials,
led any reasonable reader to falsely believe that plaintiff holds
regressive views, opposing social equality for insular minority groups and
espousing hatred toward them.
I disagree with a lot of things Mark has written over the years, but hes
exactly the kind of person whose teaching style tends to benefit college
students: a smart person who thinks for himself and challenges students to
do the same. By encouraging the school to sack him over a complaint, Crispin
Millers colleagues are telling students that its faster to eliminate or
suppress unpleasant ideas than find successful arguments against them. This
feels like the opposite of teaching.
Katie Halper and I interviewed Mark for Rolling Stones Useful Idiots
podcast. An abridged transcript of the interview is included below:
MT: What happened?
MCM: I've been teaching at NYU since 1997. Media studies is my field
basically. And one of the courses I've taught every year, every semester,
really, and sometimes even more than that, is a course on propaganda
I began the course, as I always do, by making clear that my approach to the
subject of propaganda is not to treat it as some ancient thing where we look
at the Nazis, we look at the Bolsheviks, maybe we talk about World War I,
maybe we talk about McCarthyism, right?
We definitely look at those earlier examples, but the focus of the course,
the mission of the course is to try to teach students how to recognize it in
real-time, make an effort to assess its claims impartially, even if you
agree with them, and then see if you can discern the hallmarks of a
propaganda drive, because it always comes disguised as news or entertainment
or something like that. Figure out who's behind it, and what its purpose is.
And I make this abundantly clear, it is a difficult thing to do,
intellectually difficult. It can even be socially and psychologically
difficult to be skeptical, to that degree. So I said, as I always do, we
would naturally focus on some of the things that are going on now. For
example, look at the way we're meeting. We're meeting via Zoom. This is an
eloquent testimony to the success of the whole COVID crisis propaganda. And
propaganda does not have to be
MT: False?
MCM: Right. Pejorative
Nefarious, as you said. A campaign to get you to
wear your seatbelt in a car, that's propaganda, but propaganda it is anyway.
And so we would want to deal with it. For example, we might want to look at
the mask mandates. I would encourage you to look at a body of very
interesting scientific studies, eight randomized controlled studies
conducted over the last 15 years or so among healthcare professionals of the
effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses, because the consensus of
those studies, and those are the most rigorous kind of scientific study,
randomized controlled studies. The consensus is that they're not really
effective. I would encourage you to read those
I also think you should read more recent studies finding otherwise. And I
gave some guidance as to how a layperson can assess the soundness of
scientific studies because I mean, I'm not a scientist, right? And they're
not scientists, most of them. I said, for example, there are scientific
reviews of these studies. You can find them. In some cases, there's actual
press coverage of very public objections to studies. And you'll want to look
at the universities where these studies were done and see if they have
financial arrangements with big pharma companies or get money from the Gates
Foundation, because this might suggest some kind of conflict of interest. I
said, all this. I want to add, I said pointedly, I am not telling you not
to wear masks. NYU has a strict rule. I observe the rule. This is an
intellectual exercise, or would be, if you did it.
The following week, or maybe a little later, a student emailed me and asked
to join late. And as I always do, I said sure, the more the merrier. And she
joined us. And the second day she was there, she had spoken up at one point
the first day about Edward Bernays's book, Propaganda, which we were
discussing. The next day, the mask thing came up again. So that little bit
resumed. And she didn't say anything. That was on a Thursday.
Early the next week, I get a call from my department chair asking me, in a
kind of accusatory tone, if I had discouraged them from wearing masks, or
did I have them read something that suggested they don't work? Whatever he
asked me, I said, Well, this is what I said, this is what happened. And he
said, "Oh, well, I'm going to have to tell the Deans COVID task force," or
whatever it's called. I said, "Okay, what's up?" And he told me that a
student had gone on Twitter and demanded that I be fired.
MT: Do you suspect that there are views that you've held previously that
your colleagues disagree with, and that this has become a pretext? And if
so, what might those things be?
MCM: First of all, I think my colleagues are sincerely outraged by some of
my views or what they think my views are. Now see, if they were in my class,
I could actually engage them in a conversation about some of the things they
think I said. One of the things they claim in their letter is that on my
website I've denied Sandy Hook happened. On my site, Markcrispinmiller.com,
anyone can do a search on Sandy Hook, and they'll see that it doesn't come
up once. I don't mention it.
What they're referring to, and what incensed them, apparently, [was] that in
a class, in a propaganda class
someone mentioned Sandy Hook, which was the
first in the series of school shootings that have been so high profile in
this last decade. Columbine was much earlier, and that was very different. I
said, "There is some very interesting research on Sandy Hook that is
troubling and very challenging, and I dismissed it out of hand until I read
it. And I have to say, there's something to it. And so if you're interested
in this, you might read it." And I mentioned this book, a collection of
essays. That was my denying that Sandy Hook happened.
So clearly, a student in the class reacted in precisely the way I urged them
to try not to act in the class, i.e. just heard me say that about Sandy
Hook, and went and told some of my colleagues, He's denied Sandy Hook
occurred. And then they all said, "See? Typical. He's denied Sandy Hook
So that's an example of what I take to be their sincere discomfiture with my
engaging precisely the sort of subject that most academics and journalists
and others are, sort of, trained to avoid, because you get in trouble if you
talk about them.
But the whole course, as your question implies, is about that. We can always
easily spot the propaganda that we don't agree with. You ask any liberal,
what's propaganda? They'll say, "Oh, Fox. Fox News." You ask any
conservative what's propaganda? They'll say, "MSNBC." They're both right.
Both are propagandistic, but what they can't see is the propaganda that they
agree with because they think it's just information. They think it's just
the truth.
MT: Isn't the academic world struggling with whether the appropriate way to
go about teaching is to encourage kids to read everything and discover
things for themselves, or to just give them the right texts and tell them to
avoid the wrong texts? There's a school of thought that believes strongly
that some things are just aren't worth reading, versus the traditional
notion that a student should read everything, even things that are horrible.
Katie Halper: Even Mein Kampf
MCM: Calling it a school of thought I think is dignifying it because it's
not thought at all. It's thoughtlessness, the school of thoughtlessness. And
it's not a school, therefore, because you're not teaching anybody anything
except groupthink, and that's what's happening. It's very oppressive.
It sounds hyperbolic, but it's like going to school during the Cultural
Revolution or Gleichschaltung, which was the Nazi term for streamlining.
It's when they made all the cultural institutions, they Nazified them all.
Of course, there was stuff you couldn't read. It would be a crime to read it
or even bring it up, and it's kind of like that now. Many of the people
who've been attacked by their colleagues, as I have, tend to be toward the
right. Scott Atlas was attacked by the Stanford faculty for working under
Trump on health policy, and Alan Dershowitz has been attacked by the Harvard
faculty for his legal advice to that effort after the election
But as my case shows, you don't have to be on the right to be attacked this
way. I've heard from many people, professors at other schools, who've had
their slings and arrows, had those shots at them, risked getting fired. Some
have been fired. And they're long-time left people, but... the left today
is
not the left that I remember, that I have long considered myself part
of, which is antiwar, which is about rectifying grotesque income inequality,
strengthening the working class, certainly civil rights
Those are, I see
them as left issues. Many of them are also libertarian issues. So what the
left has now become is a pro-censorship army. It wants censorship, so the
left has changed immensely, and I think that I'm sort of a casualty of that.
