There Have Been Countless Elvis Movies, but There’s Never Been Anything Like Priscilla The Next White Duke Superstar May Be About to Break America Gnaw my conscience.” Trust me dude, it’s not that deep! If he stopped posting at will, writes Marshall, it would “erode my sense of integrity. As a sign of the times, we now have a banjo player invoking literally Winston Churchill- the guy who fought the Nazis-as a way to articulate an exasperating, world-weary sorrow (even if that quote wasn’t Churchill’s, after all). Fourteen years have passed since the launch of the platform, and society has grown disconcertingly feral in the interim. Nobody felt the need to unleash our threadbare, clueless, under-researched assessments of the daily news cycle back then, because we understood that there were certain things best left unsaid, and certain hills not worth dying on. Twitter was initially designed in 2007 so that Jimmy Fallon had a station for his scrapped monologue jokes, while the rest of us told our nine followers what sandwich we were eating for lunch. It’s high time we take that mindset down a peg: There is truly nothing brave or provocative about making posts on the internet. He writes with a certain satisfied gravitas, as if he’s living on the edge by unmuzzling his social media accounts and rebuking that dastardly RADICAL LEFT. The sweet, psychotic joys of posting are never worth detonating a career over.īut there is also something instructive about Marshall’s diction. There is no drug stronger than the Discourse. That’s like Smeagol sacrificing hot meals for the One Ring. Imagine wanting to tweet so badly that you’d happily give up a lifetime of future royalties. In his Medium blog, he quotes both the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and, more brazenly, an idiom frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill, which both aim to articulate the anguish at his core: to post or not to post? Marshall chose the former option, which has extremely grim implications for the rest of us. Ngo, Bari Weiss, and Meghan McCain have already shouted him out, and I greatly look forward to Marshall’s inevitable Joe Rogan appearance.* (I’m sure he’ll be moving to Austin before the end of the year.) Like so many others who have made this pivot from celebrity to reactionary-think Kanye West and Jerry Seinfeld-Marshall was eager to present his own self-cancellation as a martyring act of cultural defiance. He has firmly taken the leap into the political strata, throwing his hat into the ring as yet another exhausting personality within that inscrutable symposium of center-right weirdos who can’t stop concern-trolling about the perils of wokeness. Peterson Marshall found the answer to his question. Ultimately, Marshall stood by his initial praise (“reporting on extremism at the great risk of endangering oneself is unquestionably brave”), while distancing himself from a political stance (“my commenting the extreme Far-Left and their activities is in no way an endorsement of the equally repugnant Far-Right”), and teasing future speaking and writing projects in the hopes of putting an end to what he called self-censorship.A post shared by Dr. When Marshall apologized for the review, citing fear for his group mates and their families, the flak continued: He was seen as “caving to the mob.” The online backlash that ensued affected not only Marshall, but the rest of his bandmates, who were likened in some cases to “Nazi sympathizers.” Marshall explained in his departure letter that he rejects the “abhorrent Far-Right,” and that 13 of his family members were murdered in Holocaust concentration camps. I believed this tweet to be as innocuous as the others,” he explained. On Medium, the musician insisted that the review wasn’t out of the ordinary: “Posting about books had been a theme of my social-media throughout the pandemic. Mumford & Sons banjo player Winston Marshall apologizes and deletes a tweet calling Andy Ngo’s new antifa tome an “important book.” Music Mumford & Sons member takes ‘time away’ from band after praising Andy Ngo book
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