Years after rock ‘n’ roll has been effectively dead, hippie folkster Neil Young decided for a shot at newfound relevancy by attacking Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster on the planet.
To recap, Young, who in a career approaching six decades has had one No. 1 hit for one week 50 years ago, gave Spotify an ultimatum: dump Rogan for his alleged anti-vaccine advocacy or remove Young’s music. Spotify, Young said, “can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”
Spotify went with Rogan. No surprise.
But in the wake of this supposed “controversy,” credit must go to where credit is due.
As young left-wingers unite with aging hippy Boomers and long-forgotten musicians to rally behind Young and call for taking down, or out, both Spotify and Rogan, the liberal Daily Beast website has exposed Young as a fraud on this issue.
Columnist Louis Anslow penned a piece noting that Young “threatened to pull his music from Spotify to protest Joe Rogan’s anti-vax misinformation. I hope Neil Young will remember that he helped create this problem.”
Anslow referred to Young’s 2015 album and tour, “The Monsanto Years,” in which Young made musical hay by attacking genetically modified foods, or GMOs.
“A collective amnesia has set in amongst progressives regarding the left’s past pandering to the anti-biotechnology movement,” Anslow wrote.
“Reactionary luddism—especially around biotechnology—was both politically correct and convenient for progressive celebrity activists. But that was in the ‘before times.’”
Back in the ‘before times’ inhabited by Young and others on the left, it was fashionable to denounce those who used science – which Dr. Anthony Fauci claims to represent and which we’re all supposed to “follow” – to make better foods to feed starving populations in the Third World.
The crux of Anslow’s article is a state law passed by Vermont in 2014.
Vermont mandated that food producers label products made with GMOs – even though there was no scientific evidence such foods were unsafe. As New Scientist magazine noted in a 2018 article, “Refusing to accept GM food is safe is like climate change denial.”
In 2014, Anslow noted, “The new Vermont law threatened to be a pointless and impractical nightmare for food manufacturers, so trade groups sued the state. But with Big Business fighting the mandate, its repeal was easily framed by the anti-GMO movement as an affront to consumer safety and democracy.” Enter Neil Young, who not only made music about the issue, but promised $100,000 to help Vermont defend its law.
“Young’s Monsanto album release and media tour doubled as activism – amplifying misinformation about GMOs to large mainstream audiences. He released a short anti-GMO documentary aptly named “Seeding Fear,” Anslow noted.
Fast forward to the COVID-19 outbreak, Anslow contends, and we can see the outcome.
“Amplified by Young, the anti-biotechnology movement helped lay the foundations of the anti-COVID vaccine movement today, giving it an arsenal of misinformation to be repurposed, mainstream articles to be referenced, and misguided laws to be held up as proof of inherent dangers posed by safe technologies,” he wrote.
“COVID vaccines containing a genetically-engineered virus were framed by skeptics as risky, simply by pointing to the way regulators and media outlets had treated GMOs, often at the behest of radical activists like Young.”
“The current mainstream narrative is that ignorant opposition to modernity and biotechnology is strictly a phenomenon on the populist right,” Anslow concluded. “But technological Luddism knows no party.”
Young, he added, “should atone for his own role in seeding COVID vaccine skepticism.”
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For almost 50 years, I was an ardent fan of Neil! Have 90% of his albums and cds, BUT I COULDN’T CARE LESS NOW! DONE WITH HIM! HE LIKE MOST ONTHE LEFT, REALLY DON’T KNOW JACK S*** ABOUT POLITICS AND HISTORY!
Wow after reading that last comment, I feel guilty posting this but here goes. I purchased every decent song Neil Young did and you know i dont have any in my collection. Guess I would have to say to mr Young, stay in your lane. Don’t raise your voice acting political stick to writing crappy songs.