A Letter to My Former Heroes
When the artists and musicians that I have loved my whole life line up in favor of silencing discussion, it’s time to start looking for new heroes.
Dear Heroes,
I’m a musician and a writer and I’ve followed you, bought your albums and books, and tried to emulate your work my whole life. I’ve tried to be inside your head, and see the world the way you do. Come to think of it, that’s probably a definition of what great art does: it makes us see the world in a new way.
So it breaks my heart to say this. That mind that I have so loved and tried to be inside and see the world like? It has been captured.
You don’t know you’ve been captured and that is what makes this so distressing.
You think you are taking a stand for what is good and right and true, against corporate tyranny.
I’m sorry to say you are doing the work of corporate tyranny. You are acting on its behalf.
I know you will scoff at this. You will point to your long career and many years of rebelliousness and say: “I have always been on the side of the people, fighting against their oppression.”
I know. You are right about that.
That is what makes your capture so painful.
This is what propaganda does: it makes people believe they are serving the cause of truth and virtue, all the while actually serving someone’s interests. That’s precisely what makes propaganda so insidious.
I understand it. You think there’s a pharmaceutical product that is wonderful and a miracle and saves lives. Certainly we’ve been told so. Over. And over. And over. And so anyone who dares to raise an issue with it is committing some kind of unforgivable travesty, right?
If you and I were sitting in the same living room, or across a dinner table, we might discuss it.
We could discuss your belief in the wondrousness of the pharmaceutical product, and you could make your case. And I could point to a growing mountain of evidence that the product is permanently injuring and destroying lives. I could point to the massive wall of cases and hospitalizations and deaths, indicating a complete failure of the product to do what it promised, as well as a higher mortality in 2021 than 2020, despite shots in billions of arms. And I could point out the corporations responsible who enjoy complete immunity to liability, and the stockholders who have gotten richer by the billions. And I could point to the fact that the FDA wants to hide the trial data from the public for seventy-five years, but that a court order has already forced them to release data which is shocking (1223 deaths and 158,000 adverse events in the first 90 days post-EUA alone). And I could point out that this is being inflicted on children.
If you think about it, these are all discussions that we should be having in any kind of society that makes sense.
I think you’d agree we should never just assume some new tech is automatically wonderful and silence anyone who brings up potential problems with it, right? That would be foolish and potentially suicidal. Imagine if we had done the same for other “safe and effective” products such as thalidomide, DES, DDT, asbestos, Agent Orange?
Can you imagine if, for each of those products, there was a powerful force to silence any detractors and, as a consequence, we were still living with these products? Can you imagine these products being mandated for public consumption? What untold injuries, disabilities, and disease would we be living with today (assuming we were living at all), if we had not only not stopped their use, but not even allowed for their criticism?
And what about other “safe and effective” products we are now still living with, which we know cause disease? Things like aluminum, benzene, PCBs, arsenic, triclosan, lead, mercury, opioids, sweeteners, fluoride, talcum, tobacco, HFCS, hydrogenated fats, seed oils, GMOs, glyphosate?
Should we silence the questioning of these products, too?
A rational society holds corporations and the products they release on to market to extra levels of scrutiny. Why? Because we know that corporations have a built-in incentive for profit over safety. We know this. You know it, too. A rational society is especially vigilant over the companies that are the most criminally-fined companies in history. And a rational society also recognizes the danger of regulatory capture, when the regulatory agencies that supposedly protect us from an industry, become captured and controlled by that industry.
A rational society, in the very least, monitors the results of a product over time to see how it’s going. And they fucking discuss it.
Heroes, you and I could do that.
But what you are taking a stand against now is the discussion.
And you are bringing your millions of adoring fans right along with you. A massive wave of people in favor of silencing free expression about corporate products, and feeling righteous and virtuous about it the whole way.
This does not oppose corporate tyranny in the least.
It serves it.
Can you not see that?
The boards of directors of Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Blackrock, Vanguard and other multinational corporations sit back, smile, and approve of your actions. You have their blessing.
Just let that sink in.
And when you grow weary of contemplating the lizard people bathing in their pools of money, consider real people for a moment.
Real, working people, including real heroes like firefighters, nurses, police, soldiers… thinking and believing they were doing the right thing by getting injected, suffering injuries, permanent disabilities, or who have lost loved ones. Just imagine their pain and rage and being told, by you, their heroes, that they do not get a voice. That they are crazy. That’s its all coincidence. That they are spreading “misinformation”.
And that you, their heroes, care more about silencing their voices than hearing them.
I want you to think about their pain, and how you could be using your immense power to stand up to corporate tyranny on their behalf. How you could be the voice of people who are being harmed by corporations and forced into silence and ostracism about it.
Instead you are using that immense voice to enforce the silencing. You are using it to enforce thought crimes on behalf of pharmaceutical companies who are richer by trillions, who have no legal incentive to make safe products that do anything, and who are protected by the very agencies that are supposed to function as a check on them.
Heartbroken does not even begin to convey what I feel.
I’ve always wanted to emulate you, to walk in your path, thinking that you had some insight, some special way of seeing the world.
But silencing free discussion is not good, heroic behavior. It is awful and heartbreaking.
So my hero worship, regrettably, ends here.
I step out of your path because it has led you somewhere I do not wish to follow.
I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but I will:
Free expression is for everyone. Full fucking stop.
Every living consciousness must be free to speak its mind.
I know, on some level, that you still understand this.
For one thing, you have benefitted from it. Of all the things you’ve written over the years, consider how much of it was something that someone, whatever their reasons, would have silenced if given the opportunity; or wanted to prevent reaching the ears of their sons or daughters; or even went as far as calling evil.
Imagine society had then agreed and silenced you. Where would you be today? What kind of miserable, poor, doldrum, unfulfilled existence would you now have? What years of joy and connection would you not have experienced? What riches and accolades and adoration? Where would we be as a society, without your voice guiding us all these years?
And now you want to use that accumulated power to silence other voices?
Is this really what you want to stand as your legacy? After all those years of fighting corporate tyranny, suddenly helping those same corporations to hurt people and to profit by it? And to silence those who want to call them out for it?
Just consider the society you would hand to the next generation of artists and musicians: one in which they are not free to speak their mind and call out corporate tyranny; one in which they have freedom of expression and can say anything they want, so long as it is approved by the Ministry of Truth. Is this what you fought for?
I hope we can get past this. I really do. I wrote out the words “Shame on you” but I deleted them. I’m trying to remember compassion. I’m trying to remember: “Forgive them; they know not what they do.” I’m trying to remember to direct my anger at the captors, not the captives.
Which is why I’m asking you now, the captives, to think. Break free of this thrall to the supposed pharmaceutical utopia that we’ve been led to accept, and think about what has been done to us as a society.
We’ve been absolutely bulldozed by those who want to remake the world so that it serves them. And we know exactly what they want to make it into, because they haven’t been shy about it: a place where authority sits in judgment of what is approved and unapproved thought and speech; in which we are expected to express our compliance with approved thoughts and even display outward signs or to shout slogans that show our compliance; in which every aspect of our lives, our family, our career, and even what we read or think has to be approved or permitted; in which we are terrified to speak our thoughts aloud or to take a contrary stance to the authorities or even people around us, for fear that the thought police will come to take away our livelihood, property, our ability to interact with the financial system, or travel, or even our lives; in which our neighbors or family members are encouraged to watch each other and report noncompliance to the authorities; in which we are deemed “undesirable” if we oppose the regime and we are put on lists or rounded up and placed in prison or a concentration camp while we are “re-educated”; in which it is impossible to even know what is approved and unapproved thought from moment to moment, since the whims of the authority change on this matter, or change when power changes hands; in which if we even have a hint of disagreeing with the prevailing beliefs, or show any sign of dissent, we have committed a thought crime.
If you think this is a farfetched or paranoiac view of what’s happening you haven’t been paying attention to Australia, or Austria, or France, or Canada. (Canada, for fuck sake.) The supposedly “free, democratic” nations of the world are falling, one by one, into a Black Mirror nightmare, where humans are chipped, tracked, traced, herded, masked, controlled, and above all, silenced.
Do you want to help bring such a world into existence? Keep right on with your campaign to silence the “heretics”.
Why silence an idea?
If an idea is wrong, refute it. If is truly bad, you should be able to do so easily. But if you attempt to silence it, it’s an admission… not only can you not refute it, but some part of you believes it to be true, and you are worried about other people finding out that it is true, too.
Here’s another thing I shouldn’t have to tell you: people with dissenting voices need to be able to stand up to power, even if (and maybe especially if) everyone thinks they’re crazy.
People in power need to be constantly held to account. Being in power necessarily means that the powerful are surrounded by popular support — otherwise they wouldn’t be in power. But we have to be able to challenge this. When new information or insights come to light, the powerful have to be made to answer to them. Forcibly silencing new ideas is not an answer — it’s a dodging of the question. By necessity, the only people bringing these challenges to the powerful are minority, dissenting voices. They must be given their voice, even if you find them incorrect or ludicrous or you hate what they are saying. You are free to make a case against them, you are free to heap scorn upon them, but you cannot be free to silence them.
Dissenting views must be allowed to persist.
You know this.
I know you know this, because you fucking taught it to me.
Please, heroes, wake up out of your captivity.
Until you do, I hate to say it, but you are former heroes.
And that’s okay, because there are plenty of actual heroes springing up all around us.
The protests you’ve heard about all over the world are not an accident. Censorship always backfires—it does not change anyone’s mind about anything. It only makes it appear as if those doing the censoring have something to hide.
There are good, decent people—people who are apolitical and probably never stood up and protested anything in their lives—now standing up to authority and corporate-serving mandates. Soldiers, firefighters, pilots, healthcare providers, teachers, truckers… These are heroes. Real heroes. They are calling for an end to this tyranny. This is happening the world over, by the millions. Realize that these are the people you should be serving. These are the people that are begging for your voice to be added to theirs and whom you are betraying when you add your voice to the cause of the pharmaceutical biofascists.
The more you attempt to silence good people, the more of them will come out of the fucking woodwork, and lend their voice to the growing chorus.
I have new heroes.
I don’t care about your politics. I don’t care how young or old you are. I don’t care if you’re pro-vaxx or anti-vaxx. It doesn’t matter if you’re Joe Rogan listener or a Spotify customer, or not.
I’ll say it again: Free expression is for everyone.
That is something worth taking a stand for.
If you did, I’d be proud to call you “hero” again.
To Dexter of "The Offspring".
You've fired your drummer of 14 years because he wouldn't take a series of experimental gene therapy injections. He had a serious adverse reaction decades ago to a vaccine and had already had Covid so he had natural immunity.
You have a legit PhD in biology. You don't get that without knowing that natural immunity wins. What did the promoters promise you? Double or triple your regular pay? What did you sell out your band mate for?
At least he's not DEAD like other musicians who took the clot shots.
As my super-talented musician friend said -- when I told him the Stones were "partnering" with Heinz Field and Giant Eagle to offer a "free covid [jab] clinic" prior to their recent concert in Pittsburgh -- "99% of all musicians are fucking whores."
As for Neil ... I have a meme that lays out the whoring:
Blackstone announces appointment of Jeffrey B Kindler, former chairman and CEO of Pfizer as Senior Advisor - Aug, 2020
Neil Young sells 50% of entire song catalogue rights to Hipgnosis - Jan 6, 2021
Blackstone and Hipgnosis Song Management launch $1 billion partnership to invest in songs, recorded music, music IP and royalties - Oct 12, 2021
Neil Young demands Spotify remove his music over Joe Rogan vaccine misinformation - Jan 2022