Mark Crispin Miller | |
---|---|
Born | 1949 (age 74–75) |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Professor |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Northwestern University (BA) Johns Hopkins University (MA, PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Media studies |
Institutions | New York University (NYU) |
Website | markcrispinmiller |
Mark Crispin Miller (born 1949) is a professor of media studies at New York University. [1] He has promoted conspiracy theories about U.S. presidential elections,the September 11 attacks and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as well as misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.
In the introduction to Seeing Through Movies,Miller argues that the nature of American films has been affected by the impact of advertising. [2] He has said that the handful of multinational corporations in control of the American media have changed youth culture's focus away from values and toward commercial interests and personal vanity. [3]
In a June 2001 profile by Chris Hedges for The New York Times ,Miller described himself as a "public intellectual" and criticized television news "that is astonishingly empty and distorts reality". [4] He has appeared on the Useful Idiots podcast and was praised by its host,Matt Taibbi. [5] [6]
In his social and political commentary,Miller frequently espouses conspiracy theories. [7]
On social media and in other statements,Miller has promoted conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks; [8] Miller is a signatory to the 9/11 Truth Statement [9] and a member of the 9/11 Truth movement. [8] [10] He dislikes the term "conspiracy theory",calling the phrase a "meme" used to "discredit people engaged in really necessary kinds of investigation and inquiry." In a 2017 New York Observer interview,he said anyone using the term "in a pejorative sense" is "a witting or unwitting CIA asset". [11]
In his book Fooled Again,Miller claims that the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections were stolen. [12] He has since claimed that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was stolen. [7]
In 2016, Miller gave a speech to the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. [7] After a "truthers" symposium on 9/11, Miller told Vice that the official explanations for 9/11 and John F. Kennedy's assassination "are just as unscientific as the ones that everybody feels comfortable ridiculing". [13]
In a blog post, Miller suggested that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax; in a subsequent interview, he denied that any children died in the shooting and voiced "suspicion" that "it was staged" or was "some kind of an exercise". [7] Miller praised a Sandy Hook denial book by James Fetzer as "compelling" (a $450,000 defamation judgment had previously been entered against Fetzer, after the father of one of the murdered Sandy Hook students sued him for false statements made in the book). [7]
Miller has also screened for his students the anti-vaccination film Vaxxed , produced by disgraced [14] former physician Andrew Wakefield (who was struck off the medical register in the UK for scientific misconduct). [8] [11] Miller has spread COVID-19 misinformation, including misleading claims about the efficacy of face masks and false claims that COVID-19 vaccines alter recipients' DNA, [7] [15] and believes the virus may have been an artificially created bioweapon. [16]
Miller's books include:
Alexander Emerick Jones is an American far-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist. He hosts The Alex Jones Show from Austin, Texas, which was previously broadcast by the Genesis Communications Network across the United States via syndicated and internet radio. Jones's website, InfoWars, promotes conspiracy theories and fake news, as do his other websites, NewsWars and PrisonPlanet. Jones has provided a platform and support for white nationalists, giving Nick Fuentes a platform on his website, Banned.Video, as well as providing an "entry point" to their ideology. In 2023, leaked texts from Jones's phone revealed that he created the website National File to evade social media bans on InfoWars content.
There are various conspiracy theories that attribute the preparation and execution of the September 11 attacks against the United States to parties other than, or in addition to, al-Qaeda. These include the theory that high-level government officials had advance knowledge of the attacks. Government investigations and independent reviews have rejected these theories. Proponents of these theories assert that there are inconsistencies in the commonly accepted version, or that there exists evidence that was ignored, concealed, or overlooked.
During the 2004 United States elections, concerns were raised about various aspects of the voting process, including whether voting had been made accessible to all those entitled to vote, whether ineligible voters were registered, whether voters were registered multiple times, and whether the votes cast had been correctly counted.
The 9/11 truth movement encompasses a disparate group of adherents to a set of overlapping conspiracy theories that dispute the general consensus of the September 11 attacks that a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four airliners and crashed them into the Pentagon and the original World Trade Center Twin Towers, which consequently collapsed. The primary focus is on missed information that adherents allege is not adequately explained in the official National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports, such as the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. They suggest a cover-up and, at the least, complicity by insiders.
James Henry Fetzer is an American professor emeritus of the philosophy of science at the University of Minnesota Duluth, known for promoting conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. Fetzer has worked on assessing and clarifying the forms and foundations of scientific explanation, probability in science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science, especially artificial intelligence and computer science.
InfoWars is an American far-right conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Alex Jones. It was founded in 1999, and operates under Free Speech Systems LLC.
Benjamin Swann is an American television news anchor, investigative journalist, and conspiracy theorist. He became a TV sports producer, and later a news journalist and producer, and managing editor on network affiliates, FOX, and RT America of the Russian state-owned TV network RT.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator, Adam Lanza, fatally shot his mother before murdering 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and later committed suicide. A number of fringe figures have promoted conspiracy theories that doubt or dispute what occurred at Sandy Hook. Various conspiracy theorists have claimed, for example, that the massacre was actually orchestrated by the U.S. government as part of an elaborate plot to promote stricter gun control laws.
James Frederick Tracy is an American conspiracy theorist and former professor who has espoused the view that some American mass shootings did not occur and are hoaxes.
A crisis actor is a trained actor, role player, volunteer, or other person engaged to portray a disaster victim during emergency drills to train first responders such as police, firefighters or EMS personnel. Crisis actors are used to create high-fidelity simulations of disasters in order to allow first responders to practice their skills and help emergency services to prepare and train in realistic scenarios as part of full-scale disaster exercises. The term has also been used by conspiracy theorists who claim that some mass shootings and other terror events are staged for the advancement of various political objectives.
Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe is a 2016 American pseudoscience propaganda film alleging a cover-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of a purported link between the MMR vaccine and autism. According to Variety, the film "purports to investigate the claims of a senior scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who revealed that the CDC had allegedly manipulated and destroyed data on an important study about autism and the MMR vaccine"; critics derided Vaxxed as an anti-vaccine propaganda film.
Joseph E. Uscinski is an American political scientist specializing in the study of conspiracy theories. His most notable work is American Conspiracy Theories co-authored with Joseph M. Parent. He is an associate professor at the University of Miami's Political Science department, and author of several academic publications. He has been made a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 2020.
Del Matthew Bigtree is an American television and film producer who is the CEO of the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network. He produced the film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, based on the discredited opinions of Andrew Wakefield, and alleges an unsubstantiated connection between vaccines and autism. His frequent public speaking engagements and an influx of funding in 2017 have made Bigtree, who has no medical training, one of the most prominent voices in the anti-vaccination movement.
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire is a 2008 non-fiction book by Matt Taibbi, published by Spiegel & Grau on May 6, 2008.
Conspiracy theories in United States politics are beliefs that a major political situation is the result of secretive collusion by powerful people striving to harm a rival group or undermine society in general.
The Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (SPM) is a controversial group of academics and activists whose stated purpose is to study propaganda and information operations surrounding the Syrian civil war. It was formed by environmental political theory professor Tim Hayward and former academic Piers Robinson in 2017.
Elizabeth Williamson is an American journalist. She is a feature writer at The New York Times and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth is a nonfiction book written by journalist Elizabeth Williamson and published in 2022 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
He thinks there is 'abundant evidence' that Biden stole the 2020 election.
The founders of the OPS include Piers Robinson, a former journalism professor at Sheffield, and Mark Crispin Miller, a media professor at New York University. Both are 9/11 "Truthers" who challenge the official explanation of the World Trade Center attacks. Professor Crispin Miller has shown his students the film Vaxxed, made by Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor struck off for falsely linking the MMR jab to autism.
[He] said that the worldwide mask-wearing is propaganda peddled by the "left" and mainstream media
Another director, Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, has written that the coronavirus "may be an artificially created bioweapon".