By James Howard Kunstler - January 28, 2022
Rock’n’roller Neil Young’s conniption over having to share the Spotify platform with Joe Rogan affords a glimpse into the glutenous mire that is a mind bethinking itself “progressive” these drear days of American unraveling. For those of you not tuned in: Joe Rogan is a comedian and martial arts maven who runs the most popular podcast in the world, renowned for long-form interviews (three hours sometimes!) often with high-powered intellectuals. A month ago, he interviewed the mRNA developer Dr. Robert Malone, who has become an outspoken opponent of the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccines,” and of the US-led world pandemic policy in general under Dr. Anthony Fauci, going as far as to call for an immediate end to the world-wide vaxxing program because, Dr. Malone says, the vaxxes don’t work and they kill and disable people. Hearing that, Mr. Young called for Joe Rogan to be cancelled for spreading “misinformation.”
It’s worth paying attention to just how disordered Mr. Young’s thinking is because it summarizes everything that has gone awry on the political Left: He is wrong two ways: 1) morally, and 2) on the facts of the matter — which is as wrong as you can be. Like virtually everyone on the Democratic Party / Woke / Progressive axis, he is obviously in favor of suppressing free speech. Since when did that become okay for old hippies?
If I remember correctly (cuz I was there) the youth movement of the 1960s was all about freedom to say pretty much anything, except yell “fire” in a crowded theater — based on the idea that ordinary people were equipped to sort out the truth. During the War in Vietnam, we hippies were especially averse to the official lying that emanated from the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House under both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. We founded “alternative” newspapers in defiance of the establishment’s propaganda. We applauded Daniel Ellsberg’s purloined Pentagon Papers, revealing the mendacity of the war effort. Altogether, this activity made it more difficult for the government to prosecute that war, and to defend the strategy behind it.
Today the Left is not only all-in on speech suppression, but also censorship of print and broadcasting, and is especially avid for the diverse punishments of cancellation — ruining careers, reputations, livelihoods, and families of anyone who opposes Woke right-think. Alternate views are not tolerated, labeled “unacceptable” (Mr. Young put it exactly that way), and flagged as “misinformation” (ditto Mr. Young). It’s gotten to the point where the word misinformation has acquired a distinct odor that signals bad faith in everyone who flogs it. These days, the charge of misinformation is deliberate misinformation.
Today, the Left is all-in for FBI home invasions, DOJ malicious prosecutions, CIA manipulations of public opinion, a fake president fronting for an unseen cabal, and a news media that wouldn’t know the actual shape and substance of reality if it jumped up and bit Jim Acosta on the lips. Ideas and principles don’t really matter to the Left; they’re just window-dressing for their sole interest, which is pushing other people around, in a word: coercion. That is the moral quagmire the Left is in and, having captured so many institutional transmitters of our polity, that is the nature of the evil they represent.
On the facts of Dr. Malone’s public statements about Covid-19 public health policy and the “vaccines,” Neil Young doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just dead wrong, uninformed, possibly ignorant. The vaxxes have been a disaster from the start and the damage gets worse every week that the insane policy of coercing more vaxxes goes on. The vaxxes are a false magic talisman for a psychotic cargo cult of disordered minds who cannot face the actual quandaries in this momentous Fourth Turning of our foundering civilization — namely, our dwindling energy resources, the economics based on them, the malfunctioning operations of money, our over-investments in techno-complexity, and the out-of-scale dynamics of just about everything in daily life.
Fortunately, enough Americans now see through this matrix of bad faith and mendacity that the opposition is poised to wipe up the floor with the Left in next November’s election. The Left has screwed things up so completely that the end of Covid will expose every broken thing on the landscape — and now it’s up to others to try to repair it all, if possible. One thing is certain to happen a little less than a year from now, the day a new Congress is sworn in: “Joe Biden,” if he is still alive, and still in office, will be impeached. And unlike his several predecessors — Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump — “Joe Biden” will be convicted in the Senate, too, and of serious crimes against his country, not just trivialities because the evidence is there. He’ll be convicted of the very things spelled out in the constitution: treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors . . .
[SNIP]
