In Spectator.US, Dominic Green tells the story of Van Morrison’s brave stand against the cancel mobs. He writes (abridged):
The dopes with tropes are at it again. This time, their target is Van Morrison. But Sir Ivan is, as Billy Joel would say, an innocent man.
Morrison has been called a crank and anti-Semite because of the lyrics to his new single, ‘They Own the Media’. The Guardian, which really does have a problem with Jews, has called him a tinfoil milliner. The Forward, which used to be a serious Jewish paper, claims that Van’s title ‘espouses a classic anti-Semitic trope’.
No, it doesn’t. What the lyrics say is that our media are owned by a small number of people. That their outlets habitually lie to our faces.
That’s the truth in our brave new world of fake news and false narratives. The world where Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which prints fiction while telling us that ‘democracy is dying in darkness’.
The world where Jack Dorsey can gag the New York Post’s Twitter account for printing the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop, where senior Democrats can get away with calling it ‘Russian disinformation’ because the majority of American media will never call their team to account.
Yes, this is also the world where Mark Zuckerberg can silence a president and set up a digital Supreme Court. And yes, this is also the world where George Soros can tip truckloads of money into electoral races. But if you think Zuckerberg and Soros act as they do because they are Jewish, then you’re the one in the aluminum headgear.
They do it because they can — because the rich, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said, really are different. They want to remain different, so they are using money and connections to make sure that they remain what they are: secure in an unaccountable oligarchy where you can’t tell where the Democratic party ends and its corporate partners and media mouthpieces begin.
Dominic Green, PhD, FRHistS is a critic, historian and the deputy editor of TheSpectator’s US edition. The author of four books, he writes widely on the artsand current affairs, and contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion. His next book, The Religious Revolution, is forthcoming with Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
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