Editor’s note: The following article, from former Mumford & Sons co-founding musician/songwriter Winston Marshall, was originally posted at The Spectator in February of 2022.
In March 2021, Marshall committed the cardinal sin of tweeting praise for the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by courageous journalist Andy Ngo. The ensuing leftwing outrage prompted Marshall to take a break from the band “to examine my blindspots.” But in June of that year he wrote an essay defending his support for Ngo and announcing that he would be permanently leaving Mumford & Sons to exercise free speech about politics without involving his former bandmates. He subsequently launched a podcast to discuss controversial issues with fellow figures from the artistic community.
In this time of “cancel culture” and “soft totalitarianism,” when artists risk violent condemnation for expressing opinions that dissent from the Progressive orthodoxy in pop culture, Winston Marshall’s intellectual independence and courage are a vital antidote and inspiration.
* * *
“The mob’s going to want a chicken to kill and they won’t care much who it is,” wrote John Steinbeck. “Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.”
I’ve been thinking about those words in recent days as more “cancelled” headlines fill the news. I was a co-founding member of the band Mumford and Sons, which I quit last year. I praised a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States and all hell broke loose, so I decided better to leave my band and save my bandmates the trouble. Better that than stay and self-censor. Now that I am on this side of the parapet I thought I should use my voice to identify the totemic difficult taboo topics that we can’t talk about. That’s why I have launched a new show, Marshall Matters, on Spectator TV: I’ll be talking not to politicians but to musicians, artists, composers, comedians, everyone in the creative industries, and encouraging them to speak freely at a time when many feel they can’t.
You’ll have heard about the Jimmy Carr joke about gypsies and the Holocaust. It was distasteful, deliberately so, and I won’t repeat it here. What is strange is that it was broadcast more than a month ago online, yet the fuss has erupted only now. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who is pushing the online safety bill, called the joke “abhorrent and unacceptable,” adding ominously: “We don’t have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that. But very shortly we will.” You don’t have to find Jimmy Carr funny to be alarmed at a politician sounding so authoritarian.
The word “Stalinist” is overused but I take it seriously from the likes of Ignat Solzhenitsyn. He was born in Moscow just before his father was exiled for publishing The Gulag Archipelago. Now a pianist and conductor, Ignat tells me about the parallels he sees between the Soviet Russia his family fled and the culture war we have now, a world in which “problematic” remarks are reported to the authorities. “As soon as a view that somehow ranges outside an increasingly narrow orthodoxy is expressed,” he says, “it must be not engaged with, not defeated. Not exposed for the foolish or retrograde view that it surely is: it must be reported so the ‘appropriate’ authorities can deal with it. This is Stalinist.”
In another episode, I speak to the songwriter Don McLean, now 76, who has similar concerns. “People are a bit drunk with power,” he tells me. “We’ve cancelled God, we’ve cancelled religion, we’ve cancelled civility, we’ve cancelled the English language. In a sense isn’t that what ‘American Pie’ says? Isn’t that the day the music died?” Music, comedy, satire, conversation: there’s a lot at stake.
I believe in more speech, not less. The arts industries are quickly ossifying in orthodoxy. Dissenters are punished. For me it was far-left extremism. For the podcaster Joe Rogan it is going rogue on COVID. Those who happen to agree with dissenters learn to zip it. And so develops a culture of compliance. What is most disturbing, to me at least, is how freedom of expression has become an unpopular concept among those whose careers are meant to be about expressing themselves. It is musicians, comedians and actors all over the world who have been lining up to take aim at the once indomitable Rogan over his amazingly popular podcast. Rogan felt obliged to apologize and some of his older episodes have been scrubbed. The British comedian Stewart Lee — who I’m proud to say included me in this year’s Pedal Bin list of people he doesn’t like — is leading the charge to have Rogan removed from Spotify on this side of the Atlantic. “Artists big and small can band together to do something to change this where the money men won’t,” he says. What a strange way to think about the role of the arts in society.
There was a time when creatives — the likes of Steinbeck — understood mobs for the evil that they were. Today, the mob — in its Twitter incarnation — is marching across the internet swiping clean all that it disapproves of. And it is led by the great artists of the day. As with any mob, eventually they turn on their own. It’s not always “the left” — whatever that means now — that demands censorship. Supposedly conservative commentators do it too. The actress-turned-TV panellist Whoopi Goldberg is currently serving a temporary cancellation for uttering the flagrant flapdoodle that the Holocaust was “not about race.” No doubt by the time you read this, several other similar stories will be generating clicks all over the place. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect,” Mark Twain wrote. I hope my new show will help people do just that.
We need more artists like you, Mr. Marshall.
Funny, I never heard of these “ great artists of the day” you mention nor do I care to. Oh, and I never heard of you either. “Eye of the beholder…” and all that.
Now, as to challenging the left as you seem to be doing. Your prior buddies aren’t who you thought they were. You’ll be meeting them soon as they truly are. I am not sure that The Spectator is up to that task nor might you be. Whoever you are.
I wish you luck on your endeavor. I hope it isn’t too difficult for you or short lived.
Your arrogance is a big turn off. Good luck with that.
The lefties were always thuggish. Back in the 70’s I was a radical freethinker, and I learned quickly that you had to be the right kind of free thinker. Only certain opinions and styles were “cool.”
LSD and James Brown were surefire remedies for “cool.”
The left always devours its own
Yes, but never soon enough.
What’s surreal is that Marshall’s peers got upset over Andy Ngo for reporting on the brown-shirt activities of AntiFa. For his efforts, Ngo was viciously & relentlessly attacked by a mob of leftist scum, and nearly killed – twice.
If his band members were the type to shrink from defending that, then they simply lack courage, and cutting ties with such company was a wise decision.
Tea Party rallies tended to be festive tailgate parties, and the area they met in was always left clean & tidy. (Tea Party rallies never needed hazmat teams to scrub the area afterwards; OWS mobs always did.)
Yet, it was the Tea Party that was chronically slandered as “violent”, or usually “on the verge of violence”.
Think about that.
Andy Ngo bought a pistol (as did Bret Weinstein) as a direct consequence of being a target of mob violence.
If Ngo isn’t a conservative yet, I’m guessing his close encounter with leftist thugs might entice him to become one.
Andy Ngo doesn’t need the dreaded “C” word, conservative, next to his name, he’s already fighting the good fight
Q] what’s the definition of a Republican?
A] A Democrat who’s been mugged.
Tammy Bruce became a Republican.
Billy Dale became a Republican.
It’s more than OK to muse if Ngo goes the same route.
antifa are the same as The BLACK Shirt Fascist Brigade in Italy during the 1930,s they are not Brown Shirts like the Hitler youth… Im just sayin…
Leftism is essentially mindlessness, a devotion to unreason, emotionalism, and the tribal collective. A mob is mindless and therefore dangerous. The mind is an attribute of the individual, there is no such thing as a collective brain or a collective mind.
What has been the dominant musical and cultural art form in the West since 1955? Rock and Roll. Its very name connotes emotionalism over intellect. Emotional, adolescent, rebellion over a thoughtful maturity.
Look back to the beginnings of Rock and Roll culture such as the movies “The Wild One” and “Rebel Without A Cause”. Songs like “Tutti Frutti”, “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Good Golly Miss Molly”, and “Johnny B. Goode”. They are all predicated on infantile, adolescent, teenage, emotionalism, and empty, purposeless, aimless, rebellion.
Take a look at “Rebel Without A Cause” and you realize that the title is literal, there’s nothing here but an emotional and emotionalist young man loosing his mind before he ever discovers he has one.
There’s two American cultures that can be symbolized by two iconic American figures. There’s the America essentially dedicated to reason symbolized by Thomas Edison (whose movie technology made movie stars like James Dean possible) and there’s the America predominantly dedicated to mindless, infantile, emotionalism symbolized by James Dean.
Poignantly and ironically enough Thomas Edison died the year James Dean was born.
“Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.” – Ayn Rand
If that’s the case then we are doomed. The depravity that passes for music, especially Rap, is art at it’s lowest form. Netflix, HBO and other cable networks are basically piping raw sewerage into American homes and yet people pay for it. History is being rewritten while Government run schools continue to dumb down the students. H.G. Wells’ Time Machine was prophetic. We are becoming a society of Elio and Morlocks.
Bullshit. Rock and roll was joyful and life-affirming music, even when the lyrics dealt with teenage angst. You must lots of fun at parties.
My thoughts exactly regrading Rock N Roll, what makes you get up and dance, boogie, makes you a better person all round.
Like you wrote, that guy must be a hoot at a party…
Mr. Marshall. Tired old cliche’s abound. But always remember you are a very small minority. As a free thinker makes you a repository of a singular and unique SOUL, You are a minority of one. You decide. I will add, odd how one can never make a group happy, but singularly happiness is possible; this speaks to mob building. Tough to build a mob of the contented, to build a mob of the malcontent it only takes one megaphone. Build Happiness, nobody delivers Happiness. Odd that?
Henry David Thoreau wrote that when you are correct “you are a majority of one.” Those who are incorrect don’t count.
There is nothing quite like letting the cat out of the bag and spilling the beans about violent Bolsheviks like Antifa and BLM
And Andy Ngo has done just that.
And for the “crime” of doing the job that chickenshit journalists just won’t do, he’s been physically attacked by AntiFa scumbags, and dismissed by AntiFa jack-boot admirers/leftists.
At least if he’s surrounded again he can defend himself. Just like former Evergreen college professor Bret Weinstein, he now has a pistol.
I suspect neither will allow themselves to be subject to a violent mob again . . . not without a response to it.
“It starts when you’re always afraid
To step out of line
The man will come and take you away
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind.”
– Buffalo Springfield
How ironic that so many members of that musical generation – including Neil Young – have now become champions of censorship. And today’s “artists” are almost in lockstep in favor of censorship. They have become valuable tools of the state – part of the old “bread and circuses” routine.
Neil Young is a blinded idiot. Now he can add blinded fool to his resume’.
I think it may have been David Crosby, maybe Stephen, Still that wrote that great song, and now Crosby is a moron, just like his buddies, Young and Nash as they call for peace and then totally denigrate the one and only US President who said ”We must get out of these endless Wars”, but Crosby and gang think hes the bad guy…
What an upside down world we live in today..
Yes, but never soon enough.
Please ignore this. It was posted above and I accidentally repeated it here.
Van Morrison and Eric Clapton are some rare cat’s standing up to the Mob.
Disagree with the Whoppie Goldberg comparison. Call out her comments as asnine and hypocritical is not the same as calling for someone to be boycotted/fired or suspended. Didn’t hear any prominent Conservative do that. There is a difference.
Obese Whoopie got a two week suspension for what she said, anybody else would have been fired and ruined..