I’ll admit it: I’m a Mumford & Sons fan. The folk/rock band gets a lot of flak for being a faux hipster outlet composed of blue-collar posers who are really supported by “rich family.” But the music, even the Simon & Garfunkel cover, is catchy and honestly pretty good.
So, I was disappointed to learn earlier this year that Mumford & Sons banjoist Winston Marshall took a break from the band after a controversial tweet.
Getting a head start on his summer reading list, Marshall tweeted in March he was excited to read the new book by journalist Andy Ngo, who is best known for documenting the violence of antifa.
“Finally had the time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,” Marshall said in a now-deleted tweet.
The next few steps followed the typical cancel culture script: The innocent tweet promptly went viral, spurring angry readers to call Marshall a “fascist.” So he released another tweet apologizing for this first one and announced he would take a break from the band “to examine my blind spots.”
However, what happened next was different. Instead of staying in the band, resigning himself to a life of apologies after any disturbance of the mob, Marshall announced on Thursday he quit.
How do you fight cancel culture? Apparently, you take yourself out of the race.
It’s sad to see someone quit his career because his innocuous political opinions are making life too uncomfortable for himself or his colleagues. Reading between the lines, Marshall isn’t getting much support from his former band members, who seemed happy to distance themselves from the Wrongthinker after his tweet went viral. Not one of them came to his defense, not even with a bit of we-hate-the-sin-but-love-the-sinner diplomacy.
There’s no loyalty among famous friends. Harry Potter cast members were quick to criticize J. K. Rowling as she got canceled for being a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” (Robbie Coltrane, who plays Hagrid, was one of the few who came to Rowling’s defense, saying: “I don’t know why, but there’s a whole Twitter generation of people who hang around waiting to be offended.”)
How sad that any personal loyalties get thrown out the door when someone has the wrong opinion. Because now, spouting an idea the Left disagrees with doesn’t make you annoying or stupid or merely wrong. It makes you a bad person.
It increasingly feels like those who value freedom of thought cannot rely on traditional institutions to respect their freedom of speech. Of course, freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, and people often rightly get pushed out of their jobs for engaging in bigoted or simply stupid messaging. But reading a book by someone who has been falsely branded as a “far-right white supremacist” is a bridge too far? (To be fair, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that books are terribly problematic.)
Marshall’s story reminds us if you don’t want to find yourself self-censoring, the not “being true to yourself” as liberals often say, you may not be able to engage with many careers and institutions once supportive of unorthodox thought: art, academia, and more. These areas are increasingly becoming safe spaces for those too afraid to speak their own minds, much less to defend the opinions of others.
If conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, and others want to protect not just the legal right to free speech but the cultural value America has historically bestowed on pluralism and freedom of expression, we have to start leaving behind the institutions that hold us back. If we don’t, our whole society will suffer, and when we’re allowed to talk, there will be nothing left to say.
