Five months after iconic singer-songwriter Neil Young removed his music when Spotify didn’t give in to his demands to fire podcaster Joe Rogan, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, the supergroup that features the star, is back on the streaming platform. The group removed its music in solidarity with Young after his petulant ultimatum that “they can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” The question is, did anyone miss them?
The musicians, hippies who have spent their professional lives calling for sticking it to the man, demanded that Rogan stop “misinforming” the public on COVID-19 because they didn’t agree with him. But Rogan and his guests were right. And often.
As PJ Media noted earlier this year in a piece by Ben Shapiro, “[O]ur public health authorities have informed us over the course of the past two years that lockdowns were effective, cloth masks worked, masking of children was necessary, vaccines prevented transmission, natural immunity was inferior to vaccine immunity, and the virus could not have originated with a Chinese lab leak — all pieces of misinformation later reversed.” Rogan was willing to interview experts who didn’t hew to the government line.
As I noted in a January PJ Media column, Rogan issued an Instagram message defending his choices of guests, such as epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough and mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone, as “highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is.” Rogan attacked the “misinformation” label, saying, “many of the things we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact.”
But Young and company claimed that any divergence from the ever-changing government COVID line was “misinformation.” They demanded a high-tech lynching of the comedian and podcaster.
The septuagenarian scolds did get some changes. Instead of firing Rogan, Spotify issued a treacly apology and then posted content warnings on his podcasts to mollify easily triggered Leftist wokesters — and Neil Young.
With Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young back on Spotify, Neil Young’s solo material can’t be far behind.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member