It Ain't About the Vaccine Disinfo

It's about the continued war between political ideologies

I wrote on Saturday that Joe Rogan’s meteoric rise as the most listened to podcaster in the world should be no big surprise. If you take the time to listen to a bit of his show (I have in the most cherry-picked fashion, avoiding the comedians, quasi-scientists, and Jordan Peterson, jumping in on the cool authors and filmmakers) the guy is really just a libertarian millionaire talking to people he’s curious about or who have Big Theories on things he’s interested in.

So Neil Young (a noted purveyor of anti-science himself) decided to take a stand against Rogan, pull his music from host Spotify, and encouraged other artists to do the same. Sure enough, Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Liza Minnelli, Willie Nelson, Barbara Streisand, Dave Grohl, and Pearl Jam have joined him and the Boomers and GenXers who could manage to figure out Spotify in the first place are forced to go back to their CDs and vinyl to catch the music of these currently relevant musicians.

“Who the fuck is Joe Rogan?” — a 63-year-old fan of Neil Young

I have no dog in the fight because I never really got into Spotify which felt more like Pandora with a social media component but I do have thoughts about why this bizarre fight between millionaires is trending now. It ain’t about vaccine disinformation, either.

At this point, everyone but the few on the fringe of “Get offa my land, treehugger!” and “I have rights and you must serve me that meat lover’s pizza and I’m not wearing a [scientifically proven as wholly ineffective against COVID] cloth mask!” crowd knows that A) the vaccines are proven effective, B) those who went out and got the three shots might still contract the virus but are highly unlikely to be hospitalized or die from it, and C) this pandemic is only volatile for those who remain unvaccinated.

It is odd, however, that following Michael Keaton in Hulu’s Dope Sick where we learn what a bunch of lying, profit-over-lives megalomaniacs run Big Pharma, we on the Left side of the divide are oblivious to the fact that the same fuckers who gave us the opioid crisis are now telling us that their vaccines are the only way.

Let’s be frank. Those all up in their cups about Joe Rogan don’t listen to Joe Rogan and those Rogan fans don’t listen to Neil Young or Barbara Streisand. This is about a predisposed disgust with one another that is creating the most bloodless, lazy Civil War the world has ever seen, waged on the battlefields of our incredibly wealthy avatars of moral virtue.

“Who the fuck is Neil Young?” — a 19-year-old fan of Joe Rogan

I believe that if you cling to a view that you are morally superior to others chances are you are neither moral nor superior. That goes for Utopians on the Left and “Cancel Maus” Idiots on the Right.

The landscape is pretty easy to parse. The pandemic and subsequent dumpster fire of trying to mitigate its effects have proven once and for all that if malevolent aliens (or a giant Alan Moore city-eating squid) were to come down to destroy us, the only countries that survive because they put aside their pettiness long enough to fight them would be China, Australia, and New Zealand. The rest of us would focus on canceling JK Rowling, Dave Chapelle, and arguing that we no longer can spank it to a less slutty M&M.

Missing from the picture is the fact that no one really gave a shit about Spotify’s business model that, like almost all music streaming, pays pennies on the dollar to these musicians effectively preventing the Neil Young of today from doing much but starve to death while working 50 hours a week at a Dairy Queen.

So cancel your subscription to Spotify and pat yourself on the back for your moral superiority. The rest of us will focus on bigger, more relevant issues like the fact that the pandemic managed to create the perfect conditions to exacerbate income inequality to historic levels and answering the question on everybody’s mind: “Who the fuck is Nils Lofgren?”