Hippies for censorship: Neil Young versus Spotify

But here’s the thing – Young isn’t alone. Bizarrely, agitating for powerful corporations and publishers to exclude ‘offensive’ speech is all the rage among supposed radicals. Witness those mobs that are forever calling on Twitter to cast out Donald Trump or feminists who believe that people with penises are men and anyone else found guilty of wrongthink in the kangaroo court of wokeness. These phoney leftists and liberals are essentially calling on a corporation to use its property rights as a sledgehammer to crush dissenting and discomfiting speech. At Spotify itself, employees threatened to strike when Rogan was added to the platform’s podcast family. Remember when striking was something working-class people did for better pay and conditions? Now it’s a tactic of the easily offended Ivy League middle classes who cannot abide breathing the same air as someone they disagree with. Some Netflix staff revolted over Dave Chappelle’s show The Closer, shocked that their employer would give airtime to a man who thinks that if you have a dick then you are not a woman. Millennial employees at Penguin Random House Canada went nuts when they discovered that their bosses had decided to publish a book by Jordan Peterson. Some apparently wept at the news.

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All of these cases highlight the alarming intolerance of the woke era. There is a puritanical zeal to the new censorship. These ‘platform’-depriving mobs, these weeping millennials, are not content with simply not listening to Joe Rogan, or not buying Jordan Peterson’s books, or not watching Dave Chappelle’s specials (your loss). No, they want to make sure that nobody else can access such scandalous material, either. They are so arrogantly concerned with preserving their own moral purity that even the knowledge that Rogan’s podcast exists makes them feel uncomfortable. They consider it a pollutant to their virtue. They consider having to share the world with Joe Rogan to be an intolerable affront to the pristine moral condition they believe they live in. This is why some people have sworn to stop using Spotify if it refuses to excommunicate Rogan – because lurking behind wokeness there is the staggeringly narcissistic and borderline medieval conviction that any belief system that runs counter to one’s own must be exterminated. They require the scalps of wrongthinkers in order to feed their own moralistic hubris. Rogan is the sacrifice this hungry, conceited mob yearns for the most. It would sustain them for decades.

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