A lifelong subversive rocker, Steven Patrick Morrissey – iconoclast rock star, radical vegan, and animal rights activist – has sworn off eating living things but is now doomed to be eaten by the "woke" European Left.
The woking dead should slow down if they’re capable of it. They’re about to lurch into French Revolution territory and take down one of their own.
Morrissey was woke before most of you were even born.
Today's woke mafia, essentially Maoist and French Revolutionary in character, runs its social media Reign of Terror against anyone who is insufficiently alive to its narrow, reactionary, and mostly ignorant view of the world. They understand no nuance. They ignore all context. What they do not understand, they smother to death.
You’ve probably seen headlines about Morrissey recently. You can’t read a music site without running across several hand-wringing articles about what an awful person Morrissey has become. They are going after Morrissey because he thinks thoughts the wokes don’t like.
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Screengrab from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon[/caption]
His latest sin was wearing a "For Britain" pin on NBC's The Tonight Show.
This crusade against Morrissey is tragi-comic.
He isn’t Ted Nugent, living on a Texas compound and hunting game with high-caliber rifles. He isn’t even Alice Cooper, who long ago became a Christian but keeps up the ghoul act on stage for his fans. He’s not Gene Simmons, who spent the 1970s and 80s dressed up as a devil and fostering the worst sorts of rumors about him to build his fan base but is a teary-eyed conservative American and Israeli patriot now.
Morrissey is and always has been a non-conformist.
He's left wing, sexually fluid, subversive, iconoclastic, vegan, and an animal rights activist.
He was all that when he burst onto the punk rock and new wave scene back in the early 1980s, fronting edgy bands that were too hot for radio.
He did a cover of “I Want a Boy for My Birthday” – that was transgressively transsexual – in 1982. He named his major band “The Smiths” to celebrate “the ordinary folk” with an ordinary name. He questioned “Americanization” during the Reagan and Thatcher years. The Smiths went on to record subversive albums with names like The Queen is Dead – he’s born to Irish immigrants and a British subject – and songs like “Vicar in a Tutu,” “Frankly, Mr. Shankly,” “Meat is Murder”, and the band’s biggest hit, “Bigmouth Strikes Again.” That title headlines the woke music media’s most unimaginitive articles about him now. Morrissey says politically incorrect things. “Bigmouth Strikes Again!” Get it?
After The Smiths broke up, Morrissey continued on in songs like “Margaret on the Guillotine” – about Margaret Thatcher.
In other words, Morrissey was woke before most of you were even born. Colleges and universities started teaching courses about his lyrics. Will they any longer?
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The Walking Dead[/caption]
Morrissey’s big mouth is in trouble now because he isn’t a fan of unaccountable Eurocrats, or unrestricted immigration from the more reactionary parts of the Islamic world, and he isn’t afraid to say so. He supports Brexit. He likes being British. He opposes London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan as he wraps himself in the Union Jack.
Morrissey didn’t so much leave the left, as the left left him when they abandoned everything they once said they believed in.
He questions #MeToo, with the novel idea that due process is worth preserving. Morrissey questions authority just as he always has – but now he questions the left’s authority, to control speech and thought and de-platform and destroy anyone who disagrees with them.
He’s paying the price now that the revolution he pioneered has turned against him.
Merseyrail in Liverpool has pulled down posters advertising his latest record, California Son. That record is getting panned by the music press. Record stores, including Britain’s oldest and largest, are refusing to sell his music. Whatever happened to rock ‘n’ roll rebellion? His answer: “It’s very Third Reich, isn’t it?”
He’s still available on Amazon, but for how long?
The woking dead are so narrow-minded and unable to separate the man from his art they say they can’t listen to any of Morrissey’s music anymore.
Conservatives have had to make this separation for decades, as most musicians and actors bash everything we believe in and denounce us as -phobes and racists of every kind. There’s nothing so predictably left as one of today’s rock idols appearing on Jimmy Fallon. But we watch and we listen and let the art stand on its own. So, anti-Morrissey wokes – welcome to our world. And grow up. Conservatives who came of age in Morrissey’s heyday with the Smiths enjoyed his wickedly funny and crafty lyrics, despite his politics at the time.
Nor has the snowflake left stopped to ponder why Morrissey takes the stands he’s taking now.
Morrissey didn’t leave the left. The left left him.
He believes in individual freedom of thought and expression, as the left once claimed to. He believes in accountable government that responds to the people it’s supposed to serve, as the left once claimed to. He believes in the creative arts, as the left once claimed to. He sees Great Britain as a protector of these things.
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The Walking Dead[/caption]
Many of the uncounted immigrants from the Islamic world, whom the wokes unquestioningly support, believe in none of those things. They march through the streets of London toting signs saying “Behead those who insult Mohammed,” and too often they act on that – killing the Charlie Hebdo satirists in France and a soldier on the streets of London itself, and beheading journalists and hikers from Afghanistan to Syria to Morocco.
The wokes have become a toxic cocktail of indulgence, ignorance and intolerance – and while they don’t see that, Morrissey does.
In America, Somali refugee turned Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar regularly trashes the nation that generously took her in, and the left applaud her for it. The wokes have become a toxic cocktail of indulgence, ignorance and intolerance – and while they don’t see that, Morrissey does.
Morrissey sees the wokes and the left as weak on human freedom because they are. He sees them as unappreciative of living in the West because they are. The left is making alliances with ever more radical and reactionary elements including old-line communists and radical Islamists.
The left is increasingly authoritarian and dismissive of everyday concerns that animate “the Smiths” of the world. They care much more about intersectionality than jobs and taxes. They despise men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson despite the freedoms they won for us, because they were human and men of their times.
Morrissey ought to serve as an object lesson for anyone on the left today. Question them and, no matter what left-wing causes you’ve advocated and for how many decades you’ve advocated them, they will turn on you and they will cast you out or cannibalize you.
But object lessons require some awareness of facts beyond wokeness. So Morrissey’s career demise, if it comes to that, will happen in vain. The woke revolutionaries will have their Robespierre, dead as far his career is concerned, and will eventually all turn on and devour each other.
A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR, a premiere millennial-owned communications firm in Washington D.C. Rice is a brand manager, star-whisperer and auteur media influencer, who has produced or promoted Laura Ingraham, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Steve Hilton, Victor Davis Hanson, Anthony Scaramucci, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and many others.
