F (36:19)
I wasn't even really debunking it. I was speaking hypothetically to my students about the fact that most propaganda courses in universities tend to dwell on. They tend to dwell on the past, totalitarian propaganda. And that reduces the subject to a kind of academic exercise. My view was, and remains to be that we study propaganda, not so we'll know what the Nazis did and the Bolsheviks did or what happened during the Cold War. Any decent propaganda course is going to teach the students how to spot propaganda and then how to determine whether it's truth or falsehood. Okay? And I used a hypothetical example the first day of class, saying, you know, we were. I was teaching it remotely, so I said, why? Why are we doing this? You hate this. I hate this. We're not in the same room. Well, it's because of COVID Now, there are many things we could discuss about COVID Say, for example, you decide to write a paper on masking. All right? Or we spend a week talking about masking. I said, if you're going to do that, you have to read all the literature on masking. I mentioned that all the most rigorous scientific studies on the subject had found that masks don't work. I told them this. I said, you will have to read those studies, but you also have to read the studies that recent studies that have been rushed out. I didn't say rushed out, but that find otherwise. Right. So this led one of the students in the class to demand that I be fired for putting the students at risk. She went on Twitter, and even though she had only 79, you know, followers, led to three big media hit pieces on me, including NBC News in New York. Clearly, the university was somehow behind this. And then a month later, most of my department colleagues demanded that I be investigated, that my conduct be scrutinized. They accused me not only of telling the students not to wear masks, which I had never done, but they accused me of hate speech and attacks on students. I mean, it was the whole woke playbook, you know, And I had done none of these things. I've never done things like that. The class had always been very popular, so they didn't fire me, but they did tell me that for the good of the department, the following semester, I shouldn't teach the course. And then it turned out that the next semester stretched into the subsequent semesters, and they never wanted me to teach it again. You know, basically, I was found guilty of teaching the slaves to read. You follow me. That was the crime. I have never. I've never told my students what to think. I. I offer myself as a kind of example of how you go about thinking critically for yourself. Okay, so the arc of my career, to get back to your original question, you know, I started out as a grad student in English. I was an English professor for several years. I studied and taught Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and also American film. Now, as I studied the great films that had come out of Hollywood, I discovered that you can subject these great movies to the same kind of close reading that I had learned in graduate school, you know, to deal with great literary texts. So I shifted over to the movies. And then I discovered, idly watching a commercial one day with the sound turned down, I discovered that advertising is just. Is also a text. Advertising is something that we can also subject to very close reading. Now, ads are not like great works of literature. They're not ambiguous or subtle. Well, no, take that back. They're very subtle. And if you watch them with care, you discover what it is they're doing visually to try to get you to buy a deodorant, soap or cigarette or whatever. So I started studying advertising that way. So I was beginning to look at propaganda as a close reader, you see. And this then led me to start looking at political speeches. I was writing for magazines with human readers as opposed to academics. You know, I was writing, you know, for the New Republic, the Nation, Rolling Stone, And I was increasingly interested in these kinds of texts, you know, not literary texts per se, not cinematic texts per se, but commercial and political texts. And then this led me to discover the true depth and scale and nefariousness, dangerousness of propaganda across the board. And this at a time, you know, you mentioned it was in 2020 that this happened to me. Well, you know, there. It couldn't have been a timelier study than it has been since COVID started. And then it is now, right with this clown show in Washington. We have been living under a kind of serial bombardment by propaganda since 2020, one thing after another. So propaganda is not just, you know, lies in print or lies that come squawking out of a loudspeaker in the streets of China. Propaganda often comes at us as events. And the more closely we study those events, the more we see that these are not natural, organic happenings. Now, this is where some people roll their eyes. They call me a conspiracy theorist. But as I told my students back when I was allowed to teach the course, the study of propaganda is very difficult. Not intellectually difficult, but psychologically difficult and also socially difficult. Because if you allow yourself to take a careful, impartial, well informed look at what the propaganda is saying, you discover that it's false. And by the way, Jimmy, I'm not sitting here posing as someone who's beyond all that. I'm not acting like someone that this doesn't happen to. It continues to happen to me. I continue to discover that something I long believed is actually false and had a. Had a. Have had a purpose that, you know, one is obliged to figure out. Because propaganda, and I'm not exaggerating in combination with censorship, these things are going to be the death of us. So, you know, the point of my career really has been a growing realization of the danger posed by propaganda. And that's why I'm glad to be talking to your audience today.
