In this interview, professor Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., provides us with a startling example of a crackdown on academic freedom, with dire implications for free speech in America today. Ironically, it was his teaching students how to question propaganda, and to resist it, that brought on the curtailment of his academic freedom, after over 20 years of teaching that important subject at New York University.

His experience at NYU in the fall of 2020 culminated in his suing 19 of his department colleagues for libel — a case that has become a major flashpoint in the larger struggle to defend free speech and academic freedom, not just in the United States, but throughout the West today. Miller explained how he had come to teach the study of the media, and propaganda in particular:

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“I had learned, as an English major, how to read literary texts closely and carefully to discover their hidden depths … and I discovered to my delight that you could do that with great movies as well. The more closely you watch them, and the more times you watch them, the more you see in them.

I then began to notice that TV commercials were also extremely subtle. As propaganda messages, they were really very carefully done so that they would appeal to you on both a conscious and an unconscious level. So, I started writing about those, and then about political rhetoric. . . .

Fast forward to 2001 … I shifted my interest from media concentration to the urgent need for voting reform, because it was becoming ever clearer that the outcome of our elections does not necessarily reflect the will of the electorate … As you can see, my interests were becoming more and more taboo.”

Signs of trouble emerged in 2005, when Miller published the book “Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform.” Miller and his publisher had hoped the book would open the door to nationwide discussion of the need for radical reform of the election system, but to their surprise, the book was instantly “blacklisted” by the corporate media. No one would review it.

Oddly, it was the LEFT press — for which he had often written — that now labeled Miller a “conspiracy theorist” — a stigma that’s stuck with him ever since. The slander drove him to investigate more deeply. “I asked myself, when did this become a thing?” he says. “When did ‘conspiracy theory’ come to spring from everybody’s lips?” . . .

From 1967 onward, however, “conspiracy theory” was used with increasing frequency. Why? Because, in early 1967, the CIA sent a memo — No. 1035-96 — to all its station chiefs worldwide, instructing them to use their media assets to attack the works of Mark Lane, Edward Jay Epstein and other investigators who were questioning the Warren Report for its ludicrous assertion that “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy. . . .

As Miller started advocating for media reform, he was hired by the late Neil Postman to teach at the NYU. . . .

Over the years, NYU’s media studies department ballooned and shifted direction, becoming more diffuse, more theoretically inclined and more fixated on the pieties of “social justice” — a phrase that Miller points out has been appropriated to mean something other than what it used to mean. Indeed, the “social justice” issue has a great deal to do with the censorship — the “canceling” — of professor Miller.

While it acquaints his students with the history of modern propaganda — its birth in World War I, its use by the Bolsheviks and by the Nazis — Miller’s course on propaganda is primarily concerned with teaching students to perceive and analyze propaganda in real time, or to look back at very recent propaganda drives. . . .

Miller made these points at the first “meeting” (via Zoom) of his propaganda course in September 2020, noting that such a thorough and impartial propaganda study can be difficult, not just because it makes you question your own views. Such a study can also pose a social challenge, as your discoveries may come as a shock to those around you — friends, roommates, family, even other of your teachers, who’ve never looked into the matter for themselves. . . .

One topic Miller suggested studying in that first meeting of his propaganda course last fall, was the mask mandates. Miller made it clear that he was NOT telling the students not to wear masks, but that this would be a purely intellectual exercise. . . .

The following week, a student who missed that introductory talk (she had joined the class late) was present when the subject of masks came up again, and she was so enraged by Miller’s emphasis on the importance of those prior studies (whose consensus had been echoed by the CDC until early April 2020, and by the WHO until early June 2020), that she took to Twitter, accusing him of endangering the students’ health, and of posting on his website (News from Underground) material “from far-right and conspiracy sites” — and demanding that NYU fire him. . . .

Shortly after that, the department chair asked Miller to cancel next semester’s propaganda course, “for the good of the department,” on the pretext that Miller’s film course would attract more students, so that he should teach TWO sections of that course. (Both courses admit 24 students.) Miller agreed, as the chair has that prerogative, but he did so under protest; and, he couldn’t let the matter go. . . .

A month after the student attacked Miller on Twitter, he received an email from the dean, informing him that he was ordering a review of Miller’s conduct at the request of 25 of his department colleagues, whose letter to him was attached. . . .

Beyond infringing on freedom of speech, Miller’s case shows how censorship ultimately ends up chilling independent thinking and curbing your freedom of inquiry — the freedom to ask questions and ponder an issue or problem from multiple angles.

And, without the ability to think freely and express one’s thoughts, life itself becomes more or less meaningless as well as dangerous, while higher education becomes nothing more than training for compliance, as students are each trained to “do what you’re told,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it so gleefully November 12, 2020.

What are your thoughts on what happened to Professor Miller? What will censorship look like in five years? Write down your thoughts and prayers down below in the comments!

(Excerpt from Mercola. Article by Dr.Joseph Mercola. Photo by Headway/UnSplash)