Does Rogan give space to some crackers views about the Covid vaccines? Yep. So what? And I ask that as someone who is very pro-vaccination. If you dislike what Rogan says, then set up your own podcast to counter him. How about doing that, Neil Young? You could be pro-science for a change. Here’s the thing about Rogan: his success is the least mysterious thing in the 21st-century media landscape. It is the colonisation of the mainstream media by woke elites who all think in the exact same way, and who will hound you off their turf if you don’t, that created the conditions in which a questioning, dissenting pod like Rogan’s could become a global phenomenon. It is the mainstream media’s failures that birthed the success of Rogan and others; it is the stifling of free, frank, deep discussion in the old media that created the space for new media to emerge and flourish. The old hippy Neil Young would have understood that; the newly square Neil Young clearly doesn’t.
Meanwhile, in great moments in mutually assured cancellation: AWKWARD: Lefties CHEERING Neil Young for trying to cancel Joe Rogan TRIP spectacularly over his homophobic past.
Since the Washington Post believes that Eric Clapton should still be accountable for a drunken racist outburst in 1976, shouldn’t the same rules apply to Young?
Finally, also joining the cancel-culture brigade is Joni Mitchell — and Nils Lofrgen(?!): Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren latest to pull music off Spotify in protest.
Lofgren wasn’t exactly a best-selling solo artist in the 1970s, which is both why he joined Springsteen’s band after “Miami” Steve Van Zandt left temporarily in the mid-1980s, and why Lofgren is eager to get an extra 15 minutes of fame in 2022 by pulling his solo tunes from Spotify. But why is he defending someone who has made such homophobic statements? Why is he anti-free speech and pro-big government? Particularly when Springsteen himself has said that “blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed:”