Neil Young, Leonard Peltier, Joe Rogan, and Reality

Standing Up to Trolls

More than four decades later, Leonard Peltier is still in federal custody

In the ongoing war for civilizational survival, last weekend’s Battle of Spotify was a pretty minor skirmish, but telling nonetheless. It actually began last year, when one Daniel Ek, the 4-billionaire owner of the music streaming service, decided to spend $100 million to acquire the services of one Joseph Rogan, a podcaster with a large audience devoted to his pugnacious on-air persona and the food-fights it produced.

            Last week Rogan (along with spotlighting a philosophy professor cum climate denier who treated listeners to a long explanation of why physicists shouldn’t be trusted) proffered his opinion that twenty-somethings should refuse the covid vaccine. At which point Neil Young, and then Joni Mitchell, seventy-something veterans of a different era, asked that their music be removed from Spotify, rousing many of us to follow. (Small consumer review: there turns out to be a service called Tidal, which is essentially the same as Spotify except somewhat better: for the same price you get higher sound quality and they send a little more of the money to musicians. Forty eight hours in, I like it).

            Cue the outrage machine. Ek announced that his company was not going to “censor” viewpoints (though they would add “advisories” to discussions of covid). Soon the internets were full of angry Rogan stans denouncing Mr. Young as a) old and b) a hypocrite. The first charge is undeniable, but the second is wrong. It’s true that he stood up against the Man when the Man was prosecuting the war in Vietnam (“four dead in O-hi-o”), but in this case the Man is the planet’s scientific and medical authorities, who have done their level best. They’re not infallible, and criticizing them is not out of bounds. But as a resident of the state with the highest vaccination rates—and the lowest hospitalization rates—it’s clear that their basic advice has been correct, and that had we followed it we’d be better off.

            In any event, no one is trying to censor Mr. Rogan—he had a huge following before he came to Spotify, and doubtless it’s grown. Instead, I think many of us were trying to say that paying him $100 million was a mistake—that it further elevated someone whose main contribution was just provocation. Provocation, of course, is the art form of our age, as music was of the 1960s and 1970s. Trolling is what we call it now, and the constant search for buttons to push has proved profitable—it’s what made Rush Limbaugh a fortune,  and what gets any obnoxious dude on Twitter enough attention to keep him preening. There’s a video circulating of all the times that Mr. Rogan has felt it necessary to use the N-word in his broadcasts (a lot). He seems to usually do it with a little smirk, the face of a naughty boy getting away with something on the playground. There is obviously no audience for a podcast of someone telling you to get a vaccination—that’s just a boring public service announcement. But there are enough other little playground tykes to make you real money for acting out.

            For me, the biggest cost of this kind of dumb attention-seeking is that it makes it hard to get us focused on actual reality—on the deep, important questions that we really have to face. Climate change, for instance—Joe Rogan deciding to further the entirely artifical controversy about whether global warming is ‘real’ simply serves as inadvertent cover for big, malevolent actors in the fossil fuel industry who want to keep on keeping on. Pretending to be outraged about physicists is just dumb performance art, profitable but pointless; meanwhile the Arctic melts, which is highly real.

            Or—to take another timely and not unrelated example—consider the oldest single injustice on our continent, which is the mistreatment of the people who were here when Europeans arrived. Neil Young has been a consistent champion of Native rights, penning important songs like Cortez the Killer and, when the Dakota pipeline fight was in full swing, the to-the-moment tune Indian Givers. Right now—this week—that injustice should be in the foreground, because Leonard Peltier, a founder of the American Indian Movement, seems likely to be dying in federal custody. Despite his request, he wasn’t given a covid booster, and now, at 77 and in ill health, he’s caught the virus.

            The Biden administration should obviously release him, and before the day is out. His trial featured a farrago of misconduct; last year the prosecutor who helped put him behind bars wrote the president to “ beseech you to commute the sentence of a man who I helped put behind bars. With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I have realized that the prosecution and continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is unjust.” In any event his incarceration serves no good purpose at this point; if he dies behind bars it will simply deepen the justified cynicism of Indigenous Americans about the professed commitment of the administration to open up a new chapter in relations between DC and sovereign Nations.

            But one knows why Biden hesitates. If he does the right thing, it will produce yet another round of howls from the eternal outrage machine that poisons our collective national mind. (In this case, probably not from Rogan, who expresses a “obsession” with books about Native American history). The masters of the sputtering anger contraption can’t write Big Yellow Taxi or Heart of Gold, but they do know how to throw an endless, effective tantrum. Another ginned-up controversy would dominate the news for a few days more.

            Reality eventually wins, of course. Neil Young had polio as a kid; that’s reality and doubtless helps explain his stand. Leonard Peltier very well may die; that will be reality, and awfully bitter. The temperature keeps climbing.