In memoriam, the Oscars honor the memory of those who have died in the previous year. This year, there were no prominent people who were not included in the In Memoriam. Why did this happen? And why did they not include them in the usual montage of people who had died over the past year? In this episode, sociologist Mark Crispin Miller and I discuss why this might be the case. And why Pfizer and BioNTech should be worried about the growing number of deaths from sudden cardiac arrest, heart attack, or stroke, among other causes, that have been reported in the past few years. We also talk about why the Oscars should have included a list of all the people who died suddenly since the last time they were honored in such a way, and why that would have been a bad idea. And we talk about how the Oscars' lack of such tributes might be a reflection of the industry's anxiety about the rising death toll from heart attacks, strokes, and other heart attacks. and why they chose not to include them. . Mark Miller is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, and teaches a course on propaganda, which has been one of his focuses for many, many years. He s the author of The Patriot Act, a show that he performed for six weeks at the New York Theatre Workshop. that is more relevant than ever today. Dr. Mark is on the Board of the Organization for Propaganda Studies and the Alliance for Human Research Protection, an international group that seeks to prevent or correct violations of informed consent in medical research. He s of the use of pseudoscientific research in medicine. Mark is a writer, and an expert in the field of propaganda, and he s an author of too many books to even list them everywhere, to even include The New York Times Magazine, and his essays and articles that have appeared in many journals, magazines, and articles in many papers around our nation and the world and newspapers around the world. In 2004, he wrote The PatriotAct. And he s a book about the book he wrote, The War Room a show about the war of the late 19th century tobacco. and early 20th century. We've known this since the late 1800s, but did you know who he was talking about it? Robert Downey Sr.? And now you do, too? And you do?
00:00:15.000He's the author of too many books to even list here.
00:00:20.000His essays and articles appeared in many journals, magazines, newspapers around our nation and the world.
00:00:27.000In 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.
00:00:37.000He's a recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Ingram Merrill, and Guggenheim Foundations.
00:00:45.000Miller is on the board of the Organization for Propaganda Studies.
00:00:49.000An 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.
00:02:13.000They call it in memoriam, where they honor the memory of those who left us over the previous year.
00:02:20.000Now, 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.
00:02:44.000directors, producers, you know, people throughout the industry who had died.
00:02:49.000This time, they upstaged that montage by choreographing in front of it a loud, ebullient song and dance routine by a big chorus of performers.
00:03:03.000So you couldn't really focus on the names and faces.
00:03:07.000And they also had three different movie stars suddenly pop up in spotlight and offer a heartfelt tribute to these three departed movie people.
00:03:18.000It was Tyler Perry who said something about Sidney Poitier.
00:03:24.000And Jamie Lee Curtis, holding a little puppy, said something about Betty White, and Bill Murray talked about how much he misses Ivan Reitman.
00:03:32.000Okay, 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.
00:03:52.000And I've never seen anything like that before.
00:04:01.000It's a long list of people who were not included.
00:04:04.000They 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.
00:04:17.000And 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.
00:04:33.000It would have lasted probably too long for the amount of time they had allotted for the broadcast.
00:04:40.000And it would have kind of messed up the hysterically celebratory mood of the Oscars because it's kind of a downer.
00:04:47.000But 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.
00:05:00.000Or 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?
00:05:11.000To 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?
00:05:31.000And this would suit the interests of Pfizer and BioNTech perfectly.
00:05:36.000I mean, we've known for over a century that big advertisers basically call the tune, right?
00:05:43.000We've known this since the days of patent medicine in the 19th century.
00:05:46.000You and I spoke about this in a previous conversation.
00:05:49.000We know this from the history of tobacco advertising.
00:05:56.000They pay for content that they would not pay for if there were any chance that the content could cast a shadow on their product.
00:06:04.000So 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.
00:06:27.000You know, this really astonishing epidemic of deaths in play and collapses in play.
00:06:36.000And I think the count is a reason, many people are keeping off-Broadway, are keeping...
00:06:43.000The 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.
00:06:57.000But in a way, even more staggering is the media's pointed silence on that crisis.
00:07:07.000And in some cases, their brazen attempt to normalize it.
00:07:12.000There'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.
00:08:53.000Anyone who's been reading newspapers for years, as I have been and you have been, will know that this is completely unprecedented.
00:09:02.000And 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.
00:09:22.000And in so doing, to point out the subtle ways in which the media will try to distract from the likeliest cause of the death.
00:09:30.000Like 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.
00:09:42.000In the case of William Hurt, you know, speaking of movie stars, Hurt did beat prostate cancer.
00:09:50.000Well, some of the obituary articles mentioned that in a way that encourages us to draw the inference that he died of prostate cancer.
00:09:59.000But it does not say that he died of prostate cancer.
00:10:20.000They have no more shame than they have journalistic scruples.
00:10:24.000And 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.
00:10:43.000It's like that expression, you know he's lying when his lips are moving.
00:10:49.000But I believe at this point, they have so little credibility left.
00:10:53.000The whole juggernaut has so little credibility at this point.
00:10:57.000These outlets are losing readership and viewership all over the place.
00:11:01.000CNN doesn't even have a million viewers a night.
00:11:05.000Whereas Joe Rogan will have 12 or 14 million.
00:11:10.000And 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.
00:11:21.000And I mean, that day can't really come soon enough, it seems to me.
00:11:24.000Yeah, the construct that they usually use is what experts say.
00:11:43.000I did an interview with Megan Kelly a couple of weeks ago, and it was really courageous for her to do that.
00:11:51.000It was a four-hour interview, and it was wide-ranging on a lot of different topics.
00:11:56.000I 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.
00:12:52.000And so she had to go through the motions of proving that She hadn't been seduced or taken in by my disinformation propaganda typhoon.
00:13:06.000And so I'm really grateful to her for her courage.
00:13:10.000I'm grateful for her for figuring out a way to do this.
00:13:14.000But 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.
00:13:30.000It'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.
00:13:42.000If you do that, you're going to get fact-checked.
00:13:44.000And it's really, it's Orwellian in a way that it is.
00:13:48.000I think if Orwell had put it in 1984, Kafka or, you know, Aldous Huxley had said this.
00:13:56.000We think that's a pretty cool imaginative construct of fiction.
00:14:39.000And 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.
00:14:52.000The more I see that we have not actually progressed a centimeter since then.
00:14:57.000People are just as credulous, just as susceptible to fear-mongering and to being enraged by some atrocity story.
00:15:08.000They're every bit as susceptible as people were a century ago.
00:15:12.000And 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.
00:15:28.000Maybe they'll talk about World War I, because that's safely in the past.
00:15:33.000I 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?
00:15:42.000And it's used by totalitarian systems and so on.
00:15:46.000But our main focus has been, every semester that I was able to do it, has been on propaganda in real time.
00:15:54.000And 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.
00:16:11.000It isn't so easy when it tells you what you want to hear.
00:16:15.000And that's the key to all this fact-checking.
00:16:18.000That'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.
00:16:40.000But the fact is that wishful thinking can be lethal, as it is in this case.
00:16:45.000If 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.
00:16:56.000I mean, there are a lot of people out there.
00:16:58.000I've done these weekly summaries Of sudden deaths that have made news.
00:17:04.000Well, there are vastly more such deaths that make no news, that just happen to people.
00:17:10.000You know, they'll sometimes tweet about it and so on.
00:17:13.000But an awful lot of people who have actually lost loved ones to vaccination refuse to see any connection.
00:17:21.000I understand that too, but I find it very frightening.
00:17:27.000And we know that the bulk of the people who are waging this war are people with vaccine-injured children, right?
00:17:35.000These are the people who, over the years, have had the horrible experience of losing a child to some battery of shots, right?
00:17:45.000I think that these people are crucial to the health freedom movement.
00:17:50.000While there are also people throughout that history who...
00:17:54.000Couldn't and won't face the connection.
00:17:57.000I think they feel too guilty, whatever the reason is.
00:18:01.000You know, not everybody wakes up due to the collision of their own experience with what the propaganda is saying.
00:18:08.000But 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.
00:18:21.000because people have to learn to keep their heads in the face of these barrages of untruth that have always been very successful.
00:18:33.000It could now really mean the end of us all if we don't get a grip here.
00:18:39.000And it's the propaganda itself feeling I had this morning.
00:18:44.000I 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.
00:20:07.000And it's the same thing that's happened for years.
00:20:10.000You 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.
00:20:22.000Propaganda 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.
00:20:40.000Just 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?
00:20:51.000About 50% of the income for a typical pediatrics practice comes from the vaccination schedule.
00:21:03.000Now, 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.
00:21:16.000And that guaranteed traffic is a guaranteed income for the practice.
00:21:23.000And it used to be like when I was a kid.
00:21:26.000I never went to the doctor unless I needed stitches.
00:21:30.000So today, kids are guaranteed to go to the doctor for those 10 wellness visits.
00:21:38.000And that income is a guaranteed steady income from that practice.
00:21:43.000And it doesn't mean that the doctors are cynical and that they know that they're injuring people, these pediatricians.
00:21:52.000Most of them are just adamant that they're not injuring people.
00:21:56.000It's almost impossible for me to understand that because I, you know, I had 11 siblings.
00:22:14.000Why aren't the pediatricians noticing it?
00:22:16.000I 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.
00:22:37.000How can How can the pediatricians, particularly the older ones, not notice this?
00:22:44.000And 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...
00:22:57.000If the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.
00:23:17.000But 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.
00:23:28.000There's something about the human brain that doesn't want to see things that are not in our interest.
00:23:47.000Somewhat 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.
00:24:10.000So the media was disinclined to make much of medical findings suggesting that smoking cigarettes was extremely unhealthy.
00:24:23.000So they didn't really particularly want to go there.
00:24:26.000And 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,
00:24:42.000there 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.
00:25:00.000I 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.
00:25:13.000So if you were an enlightened person, you weren't any kind of a religious crank.
00:25:19.000You just ignored any bad news about smoking.
00:25:23.000I 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.
00:25:35.000Let me offer an observation to you and a kind of hypothesis.
00:25:40.000In 2001, liberals fought like hell against the passage of the Patriot Act and against the war in Iraq.
00:25:49.000The 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.
00:25:58.000And 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,
00:26:20.000bellicose 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.
00:26:43.000Today, 20 years later, you have COVID where the same thing is happening.
00:26:50.000You have these tremendous incursions on the Bill of Rights and our Constitution.
00:26:54.000You have the rocket-like A rise, emergence of a national security state.
00:27:02.000And 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.
00:27:18.000It 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.
00:27:44.000Probably, 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.
00:28:02.000People 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.
00:28:27.000I mean, I've written voluminously on this, as you know.
00:28:31.000I mean, the professions are the problem.
00:28:33.000I think working people are pretty sane in the face of all this stuff.
00:28:40.000You know, they tend not to be vax fanatics and so on.
00:28:44.000And they have tended to put on masks, you know, grudgingly because they have had to.
00:28:49.000I'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?
00:29:03.000I 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.
00:29:14.000As 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.
00:29:31.000And I never noticed a peep of protest from the left over that.
00:30:33.000I mean, I found, you know, like you, I spent years trying to make election reform an issue in this country.
00:30:41.000And that's why I wrote my book, Fooled Again.
00:30:44.000And I know you wrote a couple of terrific essays on this.
00:30:47.000We were trying to make this issue give it traction, you know, so that we would...
00:30:53.000Be able to jumpstart a real national debate on the urgent need for election reform, which could be done without much difficulty.
00:31:04.000But 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.
00:31:17.000And now, as you say, there's an actual animus against democracy with Trump hatred as the ground of that whole thing, you know.
00:31:26.000But the interesting thing is that this administration, let's call it Biden-Harris, is actually more totalitarian than Trump ever was.
00:31:38.000I mean, Biden has been ruling by decree, and his regime is all about attacking journalists and outlets that are critical of his policies.
00:31:51.000They'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,
00:32:10.000the 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.
00:32:28.000The last time we had this conversation, we talked about all the ways in which constitutional democracy had basically been halted by the COVID crisis.
00:32:38.000No more open congressional deliberations.
00:32:43.000Over 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?
00:32:56.000Now that strikes me, all of it, as a big, you know, red flag.
00:33:01.000I mean, we're talking about the It's a nullification of American democracy and its replacement by a kind of bio-fascist order.
00:33:10.000But 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.
00:33:25.000You keep looking at what you call the far right.
00:33:28.000Assuming 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.
00:33:52.000At this point, I feel I shouldn't be staggered anymore, but I still am.
00:33:57.000Mark, as always, wonderful to talk to you.