Neil Young Shows Yet Again: There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool

Remember Neil Young? You know, “searchin’ for a heart of gold” and all that? The fourth and most expendable part of CSN and sometimes Y, that is, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young? Yeah, only aging hippies and their likewise aging annoying younger brothers will remember ol’ Neil, whom a southern man don’t need around anyhow, but Young is indeed still around anyhow.

Neil Young is now 79 years old, and at an age when most of his peers are enjoying their twilight years in Burnout Acres Retirement Facility, Neil is still churning out hippie anthems. The hippie heyday, however, was many years and a lot of weed ago, and the old speak-truth-to-power types are now unthinking, kneejerk leftist conformists. Neil Young is chief among them. Young Neil would have wept to see it.

Not only is old Neil, in his fanatical determination to conform to whatever the leftist intelligentsia tells him to think, a repudiation of everything that young Neil once seemed to stand for; he has also entangled himself in a ridiculous self-contradiction in trying to go after the left’s Emanuel Goldstein du jour, Elon Musk.

Pitchfork reported Friday that Young’s new album, Talkin to the Trees (he’s a tree-hugging hippie to the bitter end, this guy) begins “with a reliably on-the-nose protest song, ‘Lets Roll Again,’ rallying the American car industry to ‘protect our children’ by manufacturing electric vehicles at a rate to match China, which is ‘way ahead—they’re building clean cars.’ (‘That’s hard to swallow!’ he adds.)”

Okay, so Neil wants us all driving electric vehicles, as it’s no surprise that he is a fervent adherent of the left’s climate change mythology, but there’s just one catch: he doesn’t want people getting the idea that they should go buy a car manufactured by the dreaded Musk. Pitchfork adds: “In verses to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’” (oh, brother), “Young zeroes in on Elon Musk: ‘If you’re a fascist, then get a Tesla/If it’s electric/It doesn’t matter/If you’re a Democrat, then taste your freedom/Get whatever you want, and taste your freedom.’ The video accompanies the verse with a ‘Heil Tesla’ image depicting Musk’s Nazi-style salute.”

Wow, claiming Elon Musk is a Nazi! That’s new, imaginative, and daring, Neil! What’s next? A song about how Trump is a Nazi, too? Never mind, I’m sure you have eight or ten of those already out.

Or maybe not. Young professes to be truly, deeply, madly worried that Orange Man Bad is going to go full-Nazi on him. A few weeks ago, old Neil was positively frothing at the mouth with paranoia and rage over Trump’s efforts to rid the country of illegal and criminal migrants, and warned darkly that he was afraid the boom was going to be lowered on him, too: “When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J. Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminum blanket. That is happening all the time now. Countries have new advice for those returning to America. You can read about it at the CANADA Desk. If I come back from Europe and am barred, can’t play my USA tour, all of the folks who bought tickets will not be able to come to a concert by me.”

Yeah, gosh, it would be a terrible loss for everyone concerned if they couldn’t go see Neil Young play music, but the senescent hippies need not worry, because contrary to Neil’s claims, that really isn’t happening now. If Neil Young is really worried about authoritarianism in America, he must have been enraged about the people who really were put in jail to sleep on a cement floor for walking into the Capitol as the police held the doors open on Jan. 6, 2021, and strolled around taking selfies, no? He must have been ballistic about the Biden regime trying to impose a Disinformation Governance Board upon the American people, and about how it sent spies into Catholic churches to watch pro-lifers as if they were terrorists, right?

Wrong. Neil didn’t care about any of that. The young rebel has become the old conformist. As he continues to churn out feeble music to reflect the point of view of those whom he allows to do the thinking for him, he reminds us of the truth of the old adage: there’s no fool like an old fool.