Viewpoint: Neil Young’s GMO and biotechnology rejection preceding his Joe Rogan-Spotify awakening featured alliance with notorious anti-vaxxers

Prior to 2021, the demographic that overwhelmingly included vaccine deniers was Neil Young’s political tribe. Find a Whole Foods, and you found deniers of vaccines and medicine and nuclear power. They were all corporate conspiracies.

So there is a certain irony that Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify(1) because they didn’t get rid of contrarian pundit Joe Rogan when critics of COVID-19 vaccines use the same language and “precautionary principle” veneer against science Young and his ilk used until this year.

Embracing the science he hated until a year ago means that like a whole lot of partisan people, he only pretends to accept it because the issue is political. Writing in The Daily Beast, Louis Anslow reminds the public that just a few years ago Young released a whole album devoted to undermining the same biotechnology that is saving the world in 2022. He even named it “The Monsanto Years” and it was bought by people who think Science Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy and still do – unless they can dunk on Republicans about being anti-science.

Neil Young felt it okay to hate science when Republicans were for it.

He even donated money to a campaign to put warning labels on GMO foods, which played well with activists, despite science showing that a billion people and a trillion animals had been fed GMO foods without so much as a stomachache. At the press conference with him was Shiva Ayyadurai, a vaccine denier who began the #firefauci hashtag. The first claim made against the COVID-19 vaccine was identical to Young’s diatribes about GMOs; they could “alter” your DNA.

But denying vaccines and agriculture and energy science were cool in the tribe and two of them still are. Fellow crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied all three again last weekend.

Notes:

(1) Well, Warner did. The capitalism he claims to hate along with science netted him $150,000,000 for half his catalog so he has no ability to do anything and when he wrote his management to discuss pulling his music he had no authority to do so. They did it because the evil corporations he claims to hate are actually made up of genuinely decent people, just like most fields.

Hank Campbell founded Science 2.0 in 2006, and writes for USA Today, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and more. His first book, Science Left Behind, was the #1 bestseller on Amazon for environmental policy books. Follow Hank on Twitter @HankCampbell

A version of this article was originally posted at Science 2.0 and is reposted here with permission. Science 2.0 can be found on Twitter @science2_0