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[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This is an extremely thought-provoking interview with Mark Crispin Miller. Not because of the subject matter - we're all familiar with propaganda - but because Miller uses the same propaganda-detection process to examine his own closely held beliefs.

As a result he is now a skeptic on certain issues that he once had certainty about, notably the climate and gun control. Some listeners will be understandably put off by what he now believes and why, by his willingness to even listen to what people are saying who are generally considered beyond the pale and where his newfound skepticism has led him in a broader sense.


Anyone who wants to understand that more should listen to the interview. The only purpose of this post is to summarize the general discussion about propaganda and spotlight the main takeaways:

It's easy to spot propaganda we disagree with, much harder to spot the propaganda we agree with, so you have to maintain a certain intellectual humility and willingness to move out of your comfort zone...You have to make an effort to read comprehensively and strive for a certain impartiality, which can be very hard.

We need to consciously seek out the truth, wherever that may lead.

We need to keep our cognitive filters and defenses up but keep our minds open; that means challenging our own beliefs and assumptions to see whether we're on the right track, how those beliefs comport with reality.


Types of propaganda:

  • Gray propaganda is the most successful, it comes to you disguised as news, the expertise of an "authority" or entertainment.

  • White propaganda comes to you without disguise - a billboard or TV commercial, a political speech - we know it's propaganda and have a certain amount of skepticism.

  • Black propaganda would include false flag information and information pretending to be from a different source.

Ferreting out the truth

With the media consolidation we've seen over the past couple of decades and its increasing closeness with the government, the media has become "an enormous propaganda engine of unprecedented scale and mendacity, lies so flagrant you can't believe the people telling them don't know they're lies."

Print media, television, radio - they're all saying the same thing and that doesn't happen organically with a genuinely free press.

"Catapulting the propaganda" - into the trash bin

Sometimes it's easy to seek out a different point of view because in pushing their propaganda narrative the mainstream media will also take shots at voices that disagree, calling them "conspiracy theorists" or "Covid deniers" or accusing them of hate speech.

  • That's the first thing we should go look at, what is being dismissed, called a hoax or "fake news"; look at the people who have been "canceled". They often make a compelling case and demolish the mainstream narrative, which is why they've been slandered.

  • The point of propaganda is not to get you to look at various sides of an issue, it's to make sure you don't even try. Because propaganda is not persuasion. Persuasion tries to engage the listener's mind in what's being said; propaganda wants to move us at a sub-rational level, to sway us. This is why war propaganda primarily relies on fear and anger, whether it's about war per se, or it's a psychological war or political war.

  • Even people who understand how propaganda works can still fall victim because it's designed to play on the things that we're already inclined to believe. So our defenses tend to go up when someone questions what we believe.


The conspiracy theorist meme: the CIA weaponized it in 1967 to attack critics of the Warren Report, kicking off one of the most successful propaganda drives in human history. And what it's done is made people distrustful of their own healthy, rational suspicions of elite intentions.

  • Ask yourself, does the official story add up? Are the propaganda tactics or memes sound? "Maybe you should look at this, maybe you should look at that" - this is what Miller does with his students. [i.e., you don't have to have a full- blown theory about what did happen, say with JFK's assassination or with 9/11, to conclude that the official reports are complete BS]

  • Look at the scientific arguments, they fall apart upon scrutiny;

  • or look at the propaganda in which these arguments are embedded, clearly designed to lead you in a certain direction;

  • or look at the people and organizations that are promoting this that have literal corporate investment interest;

  • look at the larger vision being presented here and what it eventually leads to.

  • the conspiracy theory meme has been so successful, because the "conspiracy theorist" is telling you something you just don't want to think is true.

One thing that does tend to wake people up (though it doesn't always), is when one's own horrible personal experience is directly contrary to what they've been told and wanted to believe.

What sources to trust?

They discuss some of the sites and writers they read on a regular basis but the main point is this: the question of which sources can be trusted may precede from the wrong assumption - that there is a source or sources that you "trust" in the straightforward sense of "whatever they say I'm going to take on board."

No, we have to apply the same filters and process for taking in information, scrutinizing it, evaluating how it fits in with the other information we're finding. We shouldn't blindly accept anything from any source.