Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, discusses his current lawsuit against 19 of his academic colleagues for libel and the neoliberal machinery aiming to take down anyone who does not espouse certain political views within media, powerful institutions and universities alike. Detailing the recent history at New York University where he experienced a “mobocracy” of various accusations over the course of 2020, Miller elaborates how last fall he became the focus of an “expedited review” of his “conduct” for having asked his students in a course on propaganda to question the science behind COVID-19 mask mandates. Contending that we look beyond propaganda stating that “propaganda’s obverse is always censorship” with the ideal of dominating the subject’s “heart and mind completely” without argument, Miller analyses how the neoliberal left today only recognises propaganda when it epitomises a narrative with which it disagrees despite its reach going well beyond the political binaries. Taking aim of the censorious academic climate today where the “hate speech” and “micro-aggressions and aggressions” of which he found himself accused, Miller elucidates how the left is couching disagreement as a quasi-criminal act as it carries out a Gleichscheltung in complete defiance of the basic principles of freedom of speech while advancing some extremely regressive notions of identity politics as “progressive.”
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