Wow America! This is some freaky scary shit... My good friend and old label-mate Steven Seibold is one of the genuinely nicest people you could ever meet - kind without calculation, deep and philosophical without pretence, intelligent without arrogance.
Politics isn’t really his thing.
He and his wife, Michelle, could win an award for the kindest, non-judgmental, most tender-hearted people in the music biz. I kid you not. These two are like a pair of beautifully shining diamonds drowning in a sea of arse licking coke sniffers, who snivel and grovel for scraps of “cool” in their off-the-peg rebel uniforms.
But Steven has become the latest victim of cancel culture. Kicked off a tour and publicly trashed merely for being in a band with someone who has some right-wing views. I repeat, JUST FOR BEING IN A BAND WITH SOMEONE. In other words, guilt by association.
But wasn’t punk supposed to burn conformity to ashes? Wasn’t industrial built to bulldoze the herd? Individualism once mattered—now it’s outlawed by those who once swore to defend it.
It seems that somewhere along the line, the left abandoned its open-mindedness, its tolerance and its restless hunger for progress. It traded them in for dogma, rigidity, the comfort of the script. The faux left was born—and that’s why the corpse-stinkers and the morally bankrupt keep winning elections.
What happened? Well, I reckon the hippies of the ’60s taught their children to parrot the rules of leftism, but not to understand the underlying principles. Their little darling flocks of indulged echo-chamberlings memorised rules but never learned to think for themselves. And so they grew into rigid, brittle, self-righteous, little faux left soldiers as locked into their catechisms as the Bible-thumping bigots of the 1950s.
Because let’s face it: racism and sexism at their rotten core are nothing but intellectual laziness—the failure, or refusal, to step into another’s shoes and see the world through someone else’s eyes. So how can anyone dare claim the mantle of “the left” while mimicking the rigidity of the gun-toting lynch mobs they supposedly despise?
Cancel culturettes: I have some disappointing news, you are not true leftists. You are a pale Xerox of what was once a blazing, optimistic hope for the world - the very hope we so desperately need today.
So I ask again, America—what the hell happened? What did you do with the genuine article? Where is the progressive, intelligent, open-minded, anti-war, anti-monopoly, articulate and tolerant left, and why have you shipped this sickness across the Atlantic and infected us in England too?