https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/i-should-be-disqualified-from-teaching?s=w
I should be “disqualified” from teaching, argue two professors in The New Republic
All those who—like me—are making “false and morally repellent claims” should NOT be granted academic freedom
by Mark Crispin Miller
The New Republic (whose TV critic I once was) has published an attack on my “pseudoscholarship,” by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, he an English professor at Penn State, she a professor of film studies at Portland State. The piece has been adapted from It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy and Academic Freedom (published by Johns Hopkins University Press).
Though I decided to ignore it, friends have urged me to respond, because the shots against myself are at the service of the authors’ toxic argument that academic freedom should be limited to those who don’t take issue with the propaganda narratives put over by the media: Bérubé and Ruth find patently absurd, and somehow very dangerous, my disbelief in the official story of 9/11, my view that the courts ought to adjudicate the question as to whether Sandy Hook went down as advertised, my observation that Black Lives Matter has been funded by the Ford Foundation (a longtime CIA pass-through), and my statement that the “vaccines” are an “inhuman witch’s brew of nanoparticles, human DNA (from fetal cells), and toxic adjuvants,” created and distributed in furtherance of a globalist agenda.
“If Miller is indeed teaching such material in his courses on Mass Persuasion and Propaganda,” the authors write, “we think he should be treated identically to someone who tells students that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a reliable source.” Since I know quite a lot about the Protocols (and lost nine cousins—that I know of—in the Holocaust), I find that sentence not just intellectually vulgar but offensive; though I’m less offended by that cheap shot than I am by the authors’ thesis—and its publication by an academic press—that professors who depart from a consensus pumped out by the government, and parroted by all the media, should be “disqualified” from higher education.
Since they have likened me to a proponent of the Protocols, I here return the compliment by noting that their argument would certainly have gratified the Nazis—who, throughout the early Thirties, laughed off true accounts of their brutality by calling them “atrocity propaganda” floated by “the Jews.” Thus Bérubé and Ruth don’t bother to address the points that they find so outrageous on their face, but simply jeer them as “conspiracy-mongering” (a tactic crafted by the CIA). Just as “good professors” under Hitler would accept as true whatever Dr. Goebbels’ press asserted (as “good professors” did under Soviet rule), so do these two treat as Gospel everything they’ve soaked up from the New York Times, whether it makes any sense or not, and even if (just like the Protocols) it’s been repeatedly, and totally, debunked.
Thus they call my heretical positions “manifestly falsifiable,” which means they need not bother to explain exactly how they’re false; and I suspect the reason why they don’t is that they can’t, because they haven’t felt the need to study any of the issues that (along with many others) I have raised, and for which they seem to think I should be fired, and so should anybody else who dares contest what Bérubé and Ruth just know is true, because the Gray Lady told them so.
When two such “good professors” solemnly insist that others’ academic freedom be abridged, to suit the narratives in which they fervently believe, and that demand is published as a book by a prestigious academic press, and featured in The New Republic (once upon a time a staunch defender of free speech), we need to call them all out for the mortal threat they pose to academic freedom, and American democracy itself.
(p.s. Although the judge in my libel suit did indeed grant my colleagues’ motion to dismiss the case, I am appealing that decision, and expect to prevail. I will post more about this matter in the coming weeks.)
Click on the link for the rest—an excerpt from the New Republic article.