NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller Fights Back Against the Academic Crybullies
Published: April 20, 2021
Mark Crispin Miller teaches a course on Mass Persuasian and Propaganda at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development for 20 years. He is now suing 20 department colleagues for libel after they signed a letter to the dean of his school demanding a review of Miller's conduct. Today we talk to Miller about his course, his views, his libel suit, and the state of free speech in the era of increasing COVID tyranny. SHOW NOTES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=40981
“Masks Don’t Work” by Denis Rancourt
MCM’s libel lawsuit, complete (thus far)
Help Mark Crispin Miller sue for libel (GoFundMe)
Nope, Aristotle Did Not Say, “It Is the Mark of an Educated Mind to Entertain a Thought Without….”
Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance Dehaven-Smith
Masking ourselves to death: Part 1 of 3
Masking Ourselves to Death:
A Stunning Propaganda Win For Voodoo Epidemiology
- By NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller - September 01, 2020
It was a bright, hot day in August when I started writing this in New York City: in the mid-90s, and very humid. And yet, as sultry as it was that day, it felt as if the summer world had vanished into late October country, enduring a psychotic Halloween—a lockstep, all-pervasive quasi-Halloween, one not at all like the traditional fun-scary holiday of old (i.e., just last year) in the United States, when troupes of children went out trick-or-treating in their chosen costumes, the little ones watched over by their parents, all going door-to-door, the jack-o'-lanterns grinning at them, to gather goodies from their neighbors. This all-wrong, planetary Halloween is like no holiday on Earth, is not fun-scary, like the movie Halloween (1978), but traumatically abusive; for this one is a mandatory Halloween, a global Halloween, imposed on children and adults alike by governments worldwide at every level, watched over by the cops, and livid, screaming citizens, requiring everybody to stay far apart, and just back off and get out, and keep those masks on everywhere they go.
This forced masquerade has often been quite brutal under governments with low regard for human rights or civil liberties, like Pakistan, where cops zapped maskless people with electric shocks (and "other punishments include[d] standing in the sun for an hour, and a slap from a policeman"); Chechnya, where cops fanned out with long plastic clubs to beat all quarantine violators, included unmasked people; India, where one policeman was himself beat up by his superior for going maskless; Kenya, where the cops' arrest of an unmasked cab driver touched off a pitched battle with outraged citizens, three of whom, according to witnesses, were shot and killed; Ethiopia, where over 1,300 people were swept up and thrown in jail for going unmasked (a sweep condemned as "needless" by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission); El Salvador, where gangs helped out the state by "threatening citizens strolling in the streets without a mask"; and Israel, where unmasked Jews were mauled so savagely by cops that you might almost think that they were Palestinians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR8oFLl4Nyo
https://www.india.com/viral/cops-in-pakistans-faisalabad-are-using-shock-devices-to-punish-people-for-not-wearing-masks-4054067/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb42rxKN5BI
https://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/coronavirus-pandemic-delhi-senior-police-official-allegedly-hits-constable-with-baton-for-not-wearin-2212762 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XePY_PBt-M
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/ethiopia-over-1-300-held-for-going-out-without-masks/1839883
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/el-salvador-prison-crackdown-nayib-bukele/2020/04/27/5d3cea4c-88c9-11ea-80df-d24b35a56https://www.kikar.co.il/abroad/366292.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFgQzqrX6T8&feature=youtu.be
And then there's China, whose CDC director, George Gao, was asked, in late March, what guidance he would give to other countries battling COVID-19: "The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks.”
The virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you've got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-protect-against-coronavirus-big-mistake-top-chinese-scientist-says
Those Chinese citizens who, for whatever reasons, flouted Dr. Gao's guidance were subjected to the sort of vicious public shaming that was de rigueur throughout the Cultural Revolution—the major difference being that Chairman Mao had let the Red Guards do their thing unhindered by China's police, whereas the unmasked “running dogs” of COVID-19 have been humiliated publicly by cops and citizens together. Such rituals were captured gleefully on videos "shared widely on Chinese platforms like WeChat and Weibo, as well as Western platforms like Twitter," reported David Gilbert, for VICE, on Feb. 18. "One video shows a man being tied up by his neighbors, who forced him to wear a bra as a mask," while another "shows a woman being marched through the street by police officers, her hands chained together."
She was forced to admit her mistake in not wearing a mask, stand beside a sign saying "Please wear a mask," and allow the scene to be recorded. "Another shows a man being tied to a pillar and berated by an official for failing to wear a mask." And so on.
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/3a8pv5/shocking-videos-show-chinese-authorities-humiliating-people-for-not-wearing-masks
Once upon a time, those living in the "free world" would have felt a certain smugness in the face of all that zealous violence in China, and the sunny climes of Africa, South Asia and El Salvador, presuming that such state repression Could Not Happen Here. But there is no such smugness now—not because the same thing is now happening here, but, far worse, because so many people here see nothing wrong with it, this terrifying global Halloween having completely spooked them, too.
The Chinese way of dealing with the "threat" of unmasked people has recurred all over Europe. In Spain, four cops in a Madrid train station kicked and pummeled a "mask-dodging rail passenger," and threatened a bystander who tried to intervene—a throwback to the long, dark reign of Gen. Franco, and his paramilitary squadrons of police. In Germany, two beefy polizei—both unmasked—tackled to the ground and battered an unmasked man in a supermarket, attacked a woman trying to stop them, and finally clamped a hand over the cellphone being used to video the assault. Under the shadow of la COVID-19, France too has regressed. Having eased its neo-Vichy lockdown strictures—checkpoints nationwide, deployment of surveillance drones in search of escapees from home, and roadblocks to identify, and fine, "those traveling without a government-approved purpose"—Emmanuel Macron's government then ramped up its attack on unmasked citizens. "Police wrestled with a woman refusing to wear a mask after she remonstrated with officers and allegedly bit one of them in angry scenes [sic] at a[n outdoor] market in Aubenas," a village in the south of France, the Daily Mail reported on May 24. "As chaos reigned, the woman was dragged along the ground by four officers and eventually forced into a police car—facing charges of violence against the police." And over in Ukraine, in early July, a "burly shopper" at a supermarket in Kiev assaulted a much smaller man who wasn't wearing a mask, shoved him out of the building, chased after him, and beat him on the face with a large sausage.
https://en.as.com/en/2020/06/19/videos/1592571782_166582.html
https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/69/6922.asp
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8353253/German-state-plans-end-coronavirus-restrictions-June-6-proposal-received-criticism.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11934316/burly-shopper-sausage-ukraine/
All this was going on as the actual threat of COVID-19 was, from mid-April, waning—the virus weakening as it spread; and, as ever more people were exposed to and/or infected by it, the vast majority of “cases” asymptomatic, or presenting mild symptoms, the percentage of those (reportedly) killed by COVID-19 kept on shrinking, until it was comparable to the annual mortality rate of influenza (just as Dr. Fauci had predicted back in February), the crisis having clearly passed by mid-August.
It was just then that the mask mandates became more urgent, sweeping and coercive, the imposition still more punitive: especially in Melbourne, where, suddenly, the police were smashing the car windows of motorists insufficiently forthcoming with their “information,” barging into people’s homes with no forewarning, and without warrants (on suspicion that there might be gatherings there), and brutally assaulting people in the streets—as when, on August 10, a tall Victoria policeman, two heads taller than his victim, grabbed an unmasked woman by the throat, and coolly throttled her as she screamed for help (“He’s choking me! He’s choking me!”), his female partner trying to restrain her, until he finally forced to the ground, still choking her, and kneeling on her back. (She had a medical exemption.)
https://ellenbrown.com/2020/08/22/from-lockdown-to-police-state-the-great-reset-rolls-out/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTgzv8cKuwo
Dr. Fauci's sudden China syndrome
And then there's the United States, whose CDC (now) echoes the stern warning of George Gao, the Chinese CDC director, that "you've got to wear a mask," as Dr. Gao put it on March 27—when the US CDC was saying the opposite:
Wear a facemask if you are sick:
> If you are sick: You should wear a facemask when you are around other people (e.g., sharing a room or vehicle) and before you enter a healthcare provider's office. If you are not able to wear a facemask (for example, because it causes trouble breathing), then you should do you best to cover your coughs and sneezes, and people who are caring for you should wear a facemask if they enter your room. Learn what to do if you are sick. > If you are NOT sick: You do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask). Facemasks may be in short supply and they should be save for caregivers.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200328203152/https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html
Thus the CDC, on March 28, took the same position that Dr. Anthony Fauci—head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (within the NIH), and the famous face of US COVID-19 policy—had unambiguously spelled out on March 8, on CBS's "60 Minutes":
Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to walk around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people [air quotes] feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people [air quotes] think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences, because people keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face[s].
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/top-health-official-on-the-danger-of-downplaying-risk-of-infectious-outbreak/#x
That consensus—based on the most rigorous scientific studies (as we shall see)—was also spelled out clearly by the WHO, on March 26, in a video for all the world to see:
If you do not have any respiratory symptoms, such as fever, cough, or runny nose, you do not need to wear a medical mask. When used alone, masks can give you a false feeling of protection and can even be a source of infection when not used correctly.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Image0608152020-3.png
Sometime in April, that official truth became (to use a classic Nixonism) "inoperative," replaced by Dr. Gao's position, as abruptly and completely as the Inner Party's foreign policy in 1984. ("Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.") "Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth face cover when around others," read the (new) CDC guidelines, first posted on April 29:
Everyone should wear a cloth face cover when they have to go out in public, for example to the grocery store or to pick up other necessities.... The cloth face cover is meant to protect other people in case you are infected.... Do NOT use a facemask meant for a healthcare worker.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html And Dr. Fauci too has been on board since then, as he demonstrated (none too clearly) on June 5, in an interview on CNBC's "Halftime Report."
When you have crowds of people together and you have the lack of wearing a mask [sic], that increases the risk of there being transmissibility. I have no doubt about that. When we see that not happening [sic], there is a concern that that may actually propagate the further spread of infection.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/dr-anthony-fauci-says-americans-who-dont-wear-masks-may-propagate-the-spread-of-infection.html
Also on June 5, the WHO revised its previous position: “The World Health Organization has changed its stance on wearing face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
People over 60 and people with underlying medical conditions should wear a medical-grade mask when they’re in public and cannot socially distance, the WHO said. The general public should wear a three-layer fabric mask in those situations.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200608/who-changes-stance-says-public-should-wear-masks
Dr. Fauci and the WHO each had a different explanation for their official pivot. “We were concerned that … the N95 masks and the surgical masks were in very short supply,” said Dr. Fauci on TheStreet.com on June 18. “We did not want [healthcare workers] to be without the equipment they needed.” For his part, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom claimed that the turnaround was based on “new research findings,” that masks “can provide a barrier … for potentially infectious droplets.” “Our free press” did not note that those two explanations were at odds, or both to look into those “new research findings,” because their role was not in any way to question the effectiveness of masks, but to demand their use as urgently as Dr. Fauci and the CDC and WHO were doing (now). Far from asking whether Dr. Fauci was now lying about having lied, or if his rationale for having “lied” was even true, some were outraged that he hadn’t called for universal masking from the start, like China did: “When all is said and done, Fauci might be remembered as a folk hero, but he sure has a lot of blood on his hands. And none of this is anywhere close to done,” raged MSN’s Matt Novak on June 16 (when the US COVID-19 death rate had been steadily declining for six weeks).
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-who-masks/wear-masks-in-public-says-who-in-update-of-covid-19-advice-idUSL8N2DI3BW
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dr-fauci-made-the-coronavirus-pandemic-worse-by-lying-about-masks/
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/06/cdc-after-10-week-decline-in-covid-19-deaths-it-may-soon-no-longer-be-an-epidemic/
By thus hammering the CDC/WHO’s sudden new position (with TV newsfolk even wearing masks themselves when doing stander-uppers "on the scene"), the media helped push the USA into the same repressive mask-cult that's had cops and citizens assaulting unmasked people the world over.
"Get out, you fuckin' bitch!": Mandatory masking in America
In Brooklyn on May 13, a woman heading toward the exit of the Barclay Center subway station with her little boy, her face mask down around her neck, was ordered by a cop to pull it up around her nose and mouth, and, being in a hurry, she refused—and was instantly attacked by five beefy members of the NYPD, who forced her to the floor, and cuffed her as she screamed and struggled, her young son looking on. (A sixth cop had him by the hand.) After the video of that assault aired on New York One, Mayor de Blasio half-heartedly deplored the cops' behavior, but stressed the need for everyone to wear a mask, and faulted the young woman's attitude: “No one should disrespect police officers," he said. "No one should ignore police officers." (The woman was white.) That assault came nine days after Patrick Lynch, president of the Policemen's Benevolent Association, demanded that the city "get cops out of the social distancing enforcement business altogether," because of public outrage stoked by a viral video of two savage beatings by police in the East Village, where, first, four cops brutalized a couple "for an apparent social distancing violation" (they were standing too close together?), and then, when a (black) bystander protested, one bulky cop stumped over to him, taser drawn, and, shouting profanities, knocked him down and repeatedly punched him in the head, as one of his confederates rushed over to help "make the arrest."
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/05/14/video-shows-cops-placing-mom-in-handcuffs-in-clash-over-face-mask-regulations
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nypd-officers-say-coronavirus-social-distancing-policing-needs-to-end
https://6abc.com/nypd-violent-arrest-east-village-caught-on-camera-legal-aid/6147837/
The fury over that attack was wholly justified, and Patrick Lynch's stand against "the social distancing enforcement business" was, to say the least, refreshing. But there was little public outrage over the assault in Brooklyn ten days later, and no NYPD official calling for the city to “get cops out of the mask enforcement business altogether." There was still less public outrage in Philadelphia, when, on April 11, an unmasked bus passenger refused the driver's order to disembark, and seven cops showed up to drag him off. The viral video of that police action showed that the passenger was merely manhandled, and not arrested, but all those cops showing up to force one guy off a city bus was worrisome enough to merit TV coverage, and a damage-control statement from the city's transit authority. Nor was there much hue and cry over a video of a cop performing a violent "take-down" of a mask-resistant woman trying to shop in a Wal-Mart in Birmingham, Alabama—picking her up and slamming her onto the floor. "It appears he was trying to handcuff her," AP guessed. While the Birmingham Police Department cast her as a menace—"The officer used a take-down measure to gain control due to the other threat factors in the store," said a BPD spokesman, ambiguously—several of her relatives, who were there at the time, "said the woman was leaving the store when the officer used the measure." In any case, the woman "was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and criminal trespass." (All the figures in that episode—the woman, the cop who assaulted her, and the BPD spokesman who defended him—are black.)
https://abc30.com/coronavirus-bus-septa-passenger-removed-rider-no-face-mask/6095665/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/08/alabama-woman-without-face-mask-police-officer-viral-video/3094159001/
North of the US border, in Minden, Ontario, things went much worse for a 73-year-old man who went to shop at Valu-Mart. "Police say that after the store employees confronted the man for not wearing a mask, he allegedly assaulted one of the employees before driving away." Two cops then tracked him to his home, where, after an unspecified "interaction," they "opened fire," and "three hours after he refused to wear a mask, he was dead." (Following up, the CBC reported that that old guy was trouble: "Neighbours paint a picture of a reclusive figure who was sometimes even hostile.")
https://www.wakingtimes.com/2020/07/22/elderly-man-shot-dead-by-police-after-refusing-to-wear-a-mask-in-grocery-store/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/family-members-fatal-haliburton-shooting-siu-1.565414
As in China, so is it in the USA that cops are not the only ones assaulting unmasked people. On May 25, an unmasked woman buying groceries in a ShopRite on Staten Island was accosted by a would-be lynch-mob of masked shoppers, bellowing and shrieking in foul-mouthed hysterics, like coked-out extras in a bad Scorsese movie: "Get out, get the fuck out!" "Get out, you fuckin' bitch!" "Get the fuck outta here!" "You're a loser, bro! [sic]" "[inaudible] that acts like a dirty-ass hick!" "She's a dirty-ass ho', whaddya think?" There was a more restrained reaction in a Colorado Costco on May 21, when a would-be shopper, having loaded up his cart, was approached by a masked employee, who seized the cart and primly ordered him to leave. The shopper was recording it on video. "I work for Costco, and I asked this customer to put on a mask, because that is our company policy," the worker said. "And I'm not doin' it, because I woke up in a free country," said the shopper, optimistically. "Thank you very much, sir. You are no longer welcome here, in our warehouse. You need to leave. Have a great day."
With that, the worker wheeled the cart away, to put the products back on the shelves (maybe after disinfecting them). Similarly, on June 26, a couple and their little girl had just started shopping at a Grocery Outlet in Spokane, when a young woman with big glasses, her hair dyed blue and purple (with her own mask slipping underneath her mouth), strode up and yelled at them for being there unmasked, warning that there were surveillance cameras watching. "Please leave this store! You are not welcome here!" ("You're not well," the outraged mother countered, as the family walked out.) And on July 10, a man shopping in a Wal-Mart, somewhere in the South, was accosted by two women wearing masks, each making a video of his infractions—walking the wrong way down the aisle, and, worse, not wearing a mask. When he protested the surveillance ("You're like two monkeys fallin' out of a tree!"), the maker of the video (on Twitter) exploded in authoritarian rage. "Can you not follow the lines on the floor?? The mayor's askin' us all to wear masks, and look at you! Not wearin' a mask! ... Have you heard of Darwinism, evolution? Evolve, mister! .... Are you burnin' crosses?"
https://www.facebook.com/cquadrello/videos/10163561442140565/?t=2
https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/2020/05/video-shows-angry-mob-berate-woman-without-mask-at-staten-island-supermarket.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8fkVqEZGRA
https://twitter.com/realjuliasong/status/1281667780794814465?s=12
Other assailants haven't been so talkative. At a Wal-Mart in Kimball Junction, Utah, near Salt Lake City, a masked male shopper went ballistic on an unmasked woman (with medical reasons for not wearing one), repeatedly ramming her shopping cart with his, after yelling "Thanks for not wearing a mask!" The encounter left the woman, who has "other medical conditions that affect her back, in “substantial pain.”
And, in what has to be the craziest such incident, a man who had removed his face mask as he was exiting a Costco in Mettawa, Illinois had his shopping cart rammed by a woman—Elizabeth Mach, 42—yelling that he'd taken off his mask too soon. As he ignored her, she shouted, "I am a schoolteacher, and I have COVID-19!”—and then took off her mask, and spat in his face.
It should be obvious to everyone, on either side of this explosive issue, that that reaction was insane (although, to some, it may not be so obvious). As she couldn't have been worried that the man might have infected her, since she was already infected (or so she'd been told), why did she spit on him? To teach him a lesson? Because misery loves company? For revenge? Whatever she was thinking, she did almost exactly what she punished him (and, through him, countless others) for doing—the only difference being that he arguably did it out of insufficient zeal, while she did it on purpose. (Ms. Mach was arrested on charges of battery and disorderly conduct.) Like all dedicated maskers, moreover, that schoolteacher (God help her students) probably believes that asymptomatic carriers are infectious; and so she should have been in quarantine at home, and not in that Costco at all, much less gobbing on the clientele.
https://kslnewsradio.com/1929614/confrontation-over-face-mask-leads-to-alleged-assault-in-park-city-store/
https://www.bnd.com/news/state/illinois/article244115777.html
Such craziness has spread beyond the vast enclosures of America's retail giants, even to those sun-drenched, breezy open spaces where respiratory viruses (if any) pose little threat. On August 1, a bright day in Manhattan Beach, California, two friends were lunching on a bench outside a restaurant, laughing about something, when a young couple, masked, approached them, evidently thinking that the two were laughing at them, and as one of the men (who was wearing a body-cam) tried to explain what they were laughing about, the masked woman said, "Y'all need to be wearing masks." "I can't eat a burrito with my mask on," the other friend replied, and his buddy cheerfully elaborated: "We're on the other side of the fence," he told her. "We don't believe in this stuff." As he went on, calmingly assuring her that he was a longtime local businessman, and quite responsible, his friend and her husband were arguing inaudibly, still (it seems) about the husband's accusation that the two men had been laughing at the couple, and it got ugly. "What are you looking at me for?" said the friend. "I didn't say shit to you. Get the fuck out of my face!"—and then the woman threw her cupful of hot coffee on him.
He jumped up and punched the husband out, as the woman tore his t-shirt and slapped his face, the other buddy trying to break it up. "You shouldn't do that," he told her. "You shouldn't throw hot coffee on people." "I don't give a fuck!" she shouted twice, defiantly, as her husband, his nose bleeding, dialed 911, claiming to have been assaulted for no reason. The cops arrived, watched the body-cam footage, and told the couple to apologize.
https://www.ibtimes.sg/california-couple-throws-coffee-man-not-wearing-mask-gets-beaten-then-play-victim-49383
The viciousness just worsened as the summer sizzled on, the media ramping up the panic, even as (or because) the COVID-19 death rate kept going down. "Two guys were talking towards me, and one of them coughed, so, as they single-filed past, I said, 'One of you coughed. Guess I should cross the street,'" reported Bruce Joshua Miller from Chicago. One of them says, "You should be wearing a mask." "Wrong," I replied; and the other guy says, "Fuck off and die, you piece of shit."
And at a Wal-Mart in Gaineville, Georgia, a tall masked woman marched up to the mother of two little girls, the three of them shopping without masks on. She barked down at the children, whose mother told her that they didn't have to go out masked because they were under ten. "I hope you all die, because you're all gonna kill me!" said the woman as she strode away (thereby proving that she didn't think her own mask was protecting her).
"Our free press" looks the other way of course, not all the aggressors in this sudden civil war have been masked marauders, as rage has also been expressed, and violence perpetrated, by people without masks, especially against those trying to enforce "the rules" in retail warehouses nationwide. Between both sides, however, there is the key difference that the "anti-maskers" don't have allies in police departments, or in the national or international media, which have radically misrepresented what’s been going on.
Nearly all the incidents recounted here thus far, worldwide and in the USA, were caught on video; but none of them, or any of the many others like them, has drawn national or global press attention. The only instances of mask-related violence that have been prominently covered are those in which mask-wearers were the victims of unmasked marauders.
The most notorious example is the horrid story of Philippe Monguillot, the French bus driver who, on July 5, was beaten savagely by four (or three, or two) passengers incensed by his request to put on masks, and, when they refused, to see their tickets, as the rules required. The beating left him comatose, and he died six days later, when his family took him off life support. Although the details of that “barbaric” incident are murky (it evidently wasn't caught on video by any passenger), the assault, and then Monguillot’s death, made wrenching headlines the world over, often with sidebars on the urgent need for everybody to wear masks in public.
That fatal beating of an employee just trying to "keep people safe" recalled a prior story out of Flint, Michigan, where, at a Family Dollar outlet on May 1, a security guard refused admission to a family of four because the daughter had no mask. There was an argument, the family left, and then the father and son returned with guns, and shot Calvin “Duper” Munerlyn, the guard, in the back of the head. (That’s reportedly what happened. The news items were murky, and there's apparently no video.) The story ran worldwide ("US family 'murdered shop guard for enforcing mask policy,'" as the BBC headline put it), highlighting the urgency of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s mask mandate, and hinting that the murder symptomized the general depravity of its opponents. "It is important that the governor's order be respected and adhered to, and for someone to lose their life over it is beyond comprehension," said Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton, whose pious affirmation of "the governor's order" was quoted in press coverage all throughout the US, and beyond.
https://www.startribune.com/police-probe-killing-of-store-security-guard-over-virus-mask/570175442/?refresh=true
And there was a like barrage of coverage everywhere on May 11, stoked by a surveillance video from a Target store in Los Angeles, showing two unmasked men "brawling" with three security guards who were escorting them outside for their refusal to wear masks—a fracas that left one guard with a broken arm. What really happened isn't clear, either from the (silent) video, or from the LAPD's incoherent report: "As they approached the exit, one suspect, suddenly without provocation, turned and punched a store employee, causing him and the suspect to fall to the floor. While on the ground, the store employee broke his left arm. A fight ensued between the two suspects and store employees." That hazy incident was instantly deployed as further propaganda reaffirming the necessity of mask mandates, and demonizing all who don't obey. "Two men caught on video breaking a Target employee's arm after he asked the shoppers to wear a mask" [sic], screamed the headline on DailyKos, a Democratic Party propaganda mill, whose item ends with this inflammatory shot at all those thugs whose disobedience "puts everyone at risk": “Essential workers across the country are risking infection and now face potential physical harm as individuals rebel and retaliate against regulations."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-11/two-arrested-in-brawl-with-target-employee-over-refusal-to-wear-masks
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/12/1944545/-Two-men-caught-on-video-breaking-a-Target-employee-s-arm-after-he-asked-the-shoppers-to-wear-a-mask
Those stories of belligerent anti-maskers have, since May, been spotlighted throughout the "liberal media," in pieces that purport to be impartial overviews of all the tumult on the retail battleground. In "Fighting Over Masks in Public Is the New American Pastime," the New York Times' Jonah Engel Bromwich sides openly with those who see the masks as necessary, interviewing some of them and no one who feels otherwise. "People just don't understand it. If everyone just wore a mask, this would be over." Thus Joe Rogers, "a resident of Dallas" (and brother of a local Democratic politician), helpfully sums up the (second) CDC position on masks. A veteran of several "shouting matches" at his local CVS, and a fistfight in a Minimart, Rogers is a sympathetic figure in the article, his provocations righteous, his punches thrown only in self-defense. (The article is headed by an image from a "recent viral video"—oddly, not a screen-shot, but "an artist's rendering," in which "an employee of a Florida Wal-Mart is seen to be shoved [sic] by a maskless customer, who also falls," although that "employee" is standing.) The anti-maskers' violence (they're all pro-Trump, it is implied) is such a problem nationwide that "[s]ome restaurants even say they'd rather close than face the wrath of various Americans who believe that masks, which help prevent the spread of coronavirus, impinge on their freedom."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/style/mask-america-freedom-coronavirus.html
Just as it's a given that "masks help prevent the spread of coronavirus" (about which more below), so is it a given that the libertarian impulse of those (red-state) anti-maskers would be laughable, if it weren't threatening all of us—and, first of all, those "essential workers"—with death. That's the gist of Bromwich's faux-overview, and also of the Times' "Who's Enforcing Mask Rules? Often Retail Workers, and They're Getting Hurt," by Neil MacFarquhar (a Timesman who, in 2017, won a Pulitzer for his "series on Russia's covert projection of power"). NBC, ABC and CBS have all dished up the same story, on (respectively) "Today," "Good Morning America" and "Moneywatch," while CNN's "When store workers are forced to turn sheriff" has also aired on MSN, and local TV stations nationwide—a media barrage from which millions of Americans have learned that "the onus of ensuring that stores say safe from defiant customers is increasingly falling on these already vulnerable frontline workers" (a line implicitly equating those "defiant customers" with the coronavirus).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/coronavirus-masks-violence.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/masks-coronavirus-walmart-lowes-family-dollar-dollar-tree/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/when-store-workers-are-forced-to-turn-sheriff/ar-BB14ncud
Those loaded paeans to "essential workers across the country risking infection" tacitly equates such employees at Wal-Mart, Costco, Target and the like (all of them gigantic beneficiaries of the lockdowns coast to coast) with the embattled healthcare workers on "the front lines" of the coronavirus crisis—an implication hinting that those people who blow up when ordered to wear masks in giant retail outlets might as well be throwing punches at the doctors, nurses, orderlies and ambulance drivers struggling to "save lives" from COVID-19. Thus the deeper subtext of all such inflammatory stories is that enduring relic of the US "war on terror": "Support our troops."
"It works the same in any country"
What we have here—those yellow-journalistic stories of malicious disobedience, and the concurrent media blackout on the scores of videos, and news reports, of violence against unmasked Americans and countless others all across the planet, the whole non-stop, one-note spectacle hypnotically instructing us, through "expert" after "expert," that "you've got to wear a mask"—is a gigantic, and enormously successful, propaganda drive, whose victory is clear, as state and city governments from coast to coast are imposing mask mandates with ever harsher penalties for disobedience, and all the nation's top retailers, airlines, and most small businesses (what's left of them) are refusing to serve unmasked customers—a rolling crackdown that, in late July, was (allegedly) supported by 72% of the American people, including all those masked hysterics prowling chain stores nationwide, and the multitudes of other propagandees harrying the unmasked all over Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (which, in August, started to delete the posts of anti-masking groups). Those muzzled screamers clearly got the two-part message of that propaganda: (1) face masks are protecting all of us from death by "the coronavirus," and, therefore, (2) anyone who isn't wearing one in public is a murderously selfish pig, who should just "get the fuck outta here," or be locked up, in prison or at home, or killed by the coronavirus, along with their whole families, for "putting everyone at risk."
https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2020/retailers-require-face-masks-coronavirus.html
Despite its altruistic rationale (“Wearing is caring”), that view is deeply hateful, driven by a terror of contagion that is itself contagious, infecting others with a boiling rage at anyone who doesn't fear along with everybody else (six feet apart). Thus that view is, in the crudest sense, "political," as those in thrall to it see all who would "rebel"—against "the governor’s order,” or the mayor's, or Costco's and/or Wal-Mart's "regulations" as menacing "deplorables," allied with the detested Trump, who also (until one time in late July) wouldn't wear a mask, since he too doesn't care if people die (unlike the Democratic governors of New York, California, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, who ordered nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients, resulting in as much as 40% of the US COVID-19 toll). As winning propaganda always works in black and white, those swept away by it, their minds crammed full of it, see everything that way, unable to perceive more than just one Great Evil at a time. And so, just as they seem to see "the new coronavirus" as the only cause of death, almost as if nobody died before it came along (and as if there have been no deaths from hunger, suicide, drug overdoses, medical neglect, domestic violence, homicide, despair, or any other consequences of the lockdowns), so do they see Trump, and his disgusting "base," as the only evil in America, the first such evil in our history, as if the USA since World War II was paradise, until that devil Putin made him president.
There's certainly a class dimension to that Manichaean view: "Complaints [about people not wearing masks] have been pouring in from affluent parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, more so than in other areas, even though these neighborhoods have lower rates of infection and death than lower-income sections of the city," the Wall Street Journal reported in late May. And yet those privileged liberal snitches in Park Slope and SoHo aren't the only ones who see their unmasked fellow-citizens as Trump-supporting slime, as that same animus is also evident among those masked proles shopping at Wal-Mart—"Evolve, mister! Are you burnin' crosses?"—or stocking up at ShopRite on Staten Island, and calling that unmasked mother who was also shopping there (or trying to) "a dirty-ass hick." With three out of four Americans now supporting strict mask mandates, and governors throughout the South imposing them, it's obviously not just blue-state liberals who've been swept away.
We have seen this kind of thing before, though never on so vast a scale, or engineered with such sophistication. This inorganic mass hysteria had its antecedents in the "war on terror" after 9/11, the Red Scare after World War II (miscalled “McCarthyism”), and the rage against "the Hun" in World War I. The basic propaganda strategy for engineering such a frenzy was famously laid out by Hermann Goering, in a chat with Gustave Gilbert, the American psychologist who interviewed the defendants during the first Nuremberg trials, in 1946. "Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering said.
Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Goering's sweeping observation moved the wide-eyed Gilbert to except the USA (apparently forgetting how his government had roused the US masses against Germany some thirty years before): "There is one difference," he insisted. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
The Reichsmarschall wasn't having it: "Voice or no voice," he replied, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Replace "pacifists," "lack of patriotism" and "country" with "anti-maskers" (or "anti-vaxxers"), "selfishness" and "all of us," respectively, to see that Goering's brutal wisdom still applies today—indeed, now more than ever—"we" having not progressed one centimetre since the "war to end all wars" over a century ago, or (therefore) since Hermann Goering and Dr. Goebbels, and their Fuehrer, pursued their dream of "racial hygiene" throughout Europe (and, eventually, the USA). That gang would be delighted by this global Halloween, its cops, and panicked masses, going after those not scared into compliance, with "our free press" all pounding variations on the theme that "it's okay to yell at strangers who don't wear masks" (to quote a headline on the aptly named Yahoo). Although there's much about this mass insanity that would have thrilled the Nazis (as we shall see), what would have awed them most, perhaps, is the entrancement of so many millions, all around the world, by this divisive, terroristic propaganda, whose staggering success has proved the awful truth, observed by David Foster Wallace, "that the people to be most frightened of are the people who are most frightened."
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/ok-yell-strangers-don-t-134608959.html
How to break the spell: (1) Keep your head
That propaganda is a feature of totalitarian regimes, perfected under Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and/or Mao, is itself a propaganda myth, long deployed, projectively, by "democratic" governments to stoke mass fear and loathing of such "closed societies." Although propaganda, both commercial and political, was actually perfected in, and by, Great Britain and the USA, neither one of them (back then) totalitarian, winning propaganda always is itself totalitarian, in that it wants your full attention, all the time, always wants to fill up all the media, thereby filling every mind completely, so that contradiction will become impossible, then inconceivable.
In short, unlike democratic oratory, propaganda wants no argument, hence its need for rigid censorship (often imperceptibly enforced) along with spurious "fact-checking," and the relentless smearing of all dissidents as “conspiracy theorists” (and/or, in this case, "anti-vaxxers," "anti-maskers," "COVID deniers" and/or "Trump supporters"), and the (ever fewer) outlets open to such heretics as rank founts of “disinformation,” "fake news," and/or"junk science." (Certain other current propaganda drives tar all who question them as "racists," "white supremacists," and/or "Trump supporters," "anti-semites" or "transphobic," and their [few] outlets as purveyors of "hate speech" generally.)
Since winning propaganda floods the media (suffusing everything you read, watch, and/or listen to) and thereby floods the mind, the only way to break its spell, at first on you, is to deliberately rise out of it, pull high up and away from it, dry off, and squeeze that salty water from your eyes, and so start looking at it, and not through it, in order to attain that critical distance without which there is no telling truth from lie, or knowing anything about what we might quaintly call "reality." Without that separation from the flood—the Latin criticus, whence "critic" comes," derives from the Greek kritikos ("capable of judgement"), whose root is krinein, "to separate" (or "decide")—it is impossible to keep your head above that rising flood-tide, which, if you don't, will carry you away, along with everybody else.
As we look down on this furious mask propaganda, then, let's not just keep our heads but use them—first, by exercising simple common sense, augmented by some consciousness of history, and of what's been happening elsewhere. It surely tells us something that, in no previous pandemic, were healthy people ordered to stay home, or “social-distance,” nor were schools and businesses shut down; nor has there ever been a state law or directive that "you've got to wear a mask." (In the so-called "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918/19—a scourge exponentially more lethal than this crisis—some US municipalities passed mask ordinances, but cities nationwide were more concerned with public spitting.) There is, in short, no precedent for the mask mandates imposed worldwide today (and imposed after COVID-19 has, according to the CDC's own data, run its course).
Moreover, a glance beyond our borders, and the borders of those other countries now requiring masks in public, tells us that it makes no sense. Take Hong Kong, whose "particular success in the pandemic" was, on June 25, ascribed by researchers there to the near-universal voluntary use of masks. "Despite [Hong Kong's] proximity to mainland China, its infection rate of COVID-19 is generally modest with only 1,110 cases to-date," noted Dr. Sunny Wong of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a letter to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. “This correlates with an almost ubiquitous use of face masks in the city (up to 98.8% by respondents in a city)." That conclusion was, unfortunately, premature, as, just two weeks later, Hong Kong was hit by what the South China Morning Post called (with some hyperbole) a "third wave" of COVID-19, as a "fresh cluster" of 38 new infections was discovered at a "public housing estate, adding to existing ones centred around [an] elderly care home, restaurants and taxi drivers," notwithstanding the "almost ubiquitous use of faces in the city." This recent "spike" in masked Hong Kong recalls the never-mentioned fact that Wuhan's people were already going masked before the COVID-19 crisis there, since Wuhan's air was so egregiously polluted that, in the summer of 2019, it sparked mass protests; and masks were one way for the people of Wuhan, and other perilously smoggy Chinese cities, to protect themselves from that. (On Feb. 1, Anbound, a think tank in Beijing, proposed that Wuhan's air pollution may have been the cause of what the Chinese then called "Wuhan pneumonia.)
https://www.contagionlive.com/news/hong-kong-masks-independently-significant-coronavirus-intervention https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3092611/coronavirus-schools-suspended-hong-kong-over
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/10/asia/china-wuhan-pollution-problems-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.eurasiareview.com/01022020-polluted-air-could-be-an-important-cause-of-wuhan-pneumonia-oped/
Meanwhile, New Zealand—whose tough, Chinese-style measures were applauded by the WHO, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern having "crushed the curve" by placing the whole population under house arrest—had no mask mandate (a fact unmentioned by the WHO), as that country's Ministry of Health, having reviewed the scientific literature on masking as protection against COVID-19, found "no convincing evidence one way or [the] other to require the use of non-medical face masks for healthy people in the community to protect from COVID-19." Neither was there any mask mandate in Norway, Denmark of Finland—or in Iceland, which did not lock down, and yet did even better than New Zealand. Masks were not mandated in Belarus, where the issue was (as here) stridently politicized, with masks worn ostentatiously by opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko, whose laid-back approach to COVID-19, though fulsomely assailed throughout the Western media, has been vindicated, as Belarus (where, shrieked CNN on April 12, "COVID-19 is a modern-day Chernobyl") has suffered 538 deaths-by-coronavirus, out of a population of 9.48 million—a mortality rate of 0.006%. Nor, of course, has there been any mask mandate in Sweden, which, despite the thunderous propaganda drive against that state's refusal to lock down, has successfully reached herd immunity, with fewer COVID-19 deaths out of total population than Belgium, Italy or Spain, which are among those European countries lately tightening their mask mandates, while Sweden remains mask-free (and its schools and businesses still open). Meanwhile, despite the uptick in the Netherlands, the Dutch government is not requiring masks, "asserting that their effectiveness has not been proven," reports Reuters (with a hint of incredulity); and Denmark's health officials have agreed: "From a medical point of view, there is no evidence of a medical effect of wearing face masks, so we decided not to impose a national obligation," said Medical Care Minister Tamara van Ark.
https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/feature-stories/detail/new-zealand-takes-early-and-hard-action-to-tackle-covid-19
https://www.outbreakobservatory.org/outbreakthursday-1/6/11/2020/new-zealand-declares-itself-covid-free
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/ (on Denmark and Norway)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/how-iceland-beat-the-coronavirus
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/12/opinions/vitali-shkliarov-belarus-covid-19-chernobyl/index.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/whitney-looks-sweden-was-right-after-all
https://news.yahoo.com/dutch-government-not-advise-public-180223717.html
https://fee.org/articles/europes-top-health-officials-say-masks-arent-helpful-in-beating-covid-19/
Even if we just use common sense unaided by some knowledge of past history or the experience of other countries, we see that the hysterical demand for everybody to wear masks to "stop the spread" of COVID-19 is absurd. If masks block transmission of respiratory viruses like COVID-19 (which, in fact, they don't, as Wuhan's and Hong Kong's experience makes clear—and as "the science" also tells us, as we’ll see), how is it rational, much less "okay," for people wearing them to "yell at" those not wearing them? If mask-wearers are, as we so often hear, virtuously acting for the common good, to make sure others aren't infected (a propaganda droplet as contagious as it is sanctimonious), then aren't those unmasked rogues the only ones at risk? Asked this question, zealous maskers have (in my experience) replied, nonsensically, by parroting the WHO’s “new research findings” that the viruses are carried by "droplets," which come from you, and that the masks will keep you from infecting others with those "droplets"—even though the major carriers are said to be asymptomatic, and so not coughing and/or sneezing any "droplets"; and even though those "others" threatened by those non-existent "droplets" are all wearing masks—which, apparently, they don't believe are actually protecting them. Their own belief that masks don't work is obvious enough from how masked people often halt, and turn their heads away, or lurch six feet away, when people without masks walk past them on the street. (“I hope you all die, because you’re gonna kill me!”)
The fact is that, for all their pseudo-altruism, those screaming "Get out, you fuckin' bitch!" at some lone unmasked woman, and or ramming her shopping cart, are beside themselves with terror for themselves, suggesting that they don't believe they're safe, despite their masks—just as parents who have had their children vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, and "our free press," attack those parents who (having studied its grave risks) have decided not to do it to their children. Those parents, and reporters, foaming at the mouth must not believe such "vaccination works"; or maybe unconsciously enraged by the suggestion that the MMR vaccine, like all too many others, is just as dangerous as those damned "anti-vaxxers" say it is. In any case, such fury, whether over masks or vaccinations, is insane. (Try to imagine some masked hothead screaming, "Get out, you fuckin' bitch! You might get sick!")
https://markcrispinmiller.com/2020/09/masking-ourselves-to-death-part-1-of-3/
