Winston Marshall has a new podcast, Marshall Matters, on Spectator TV. His guests have included Don McLean, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, and, like many of them, he was excommunicated from the Church of High Culture. What good is membership if it demands self-betrayal?
00:00:08.480He's been on Saturday Night Live, played the White House for Obama.
00:00:12.340He's worked with legendary producers, headlined major festivals, including both Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits two times.
00:00:20.880His voice, his guitar, his banjo have created music that has debuted on the top of the Billboard 200.
00:00:30.000I don't know how many times his songs have been played at weddings and dances and graduations and sporting events and funerals.
00:00:37.000And he always thought his career would stay on course, that he and his bandmates would tour the world until they were like the Rolling Stones and they just dropped dead.
00:00:47.220Then in 2021, 14 years after co-founding Mumford & Sons, he watched it all vanish like that.
00:00:56.380Like so many disasters these days, it started with a tweet and it wasn't even an unusual tweet.
00:01:02.960He had done tweets like this before it was a it was a book review, something that he had read.
00:01:53.380If you're only listening to this podcast, you're going to miss something special that I brought for this podcast in this box.
00:02:02.340It is it's something extraordinarily rare that I think he will really enjoy.
00:02:07.280You know, being from England and all that stuff.
00:02:11.320Anyway, let me tell you about our sponsor and then we get right into the podcast.
00:02:15.000Over two decades ago, the founder of Covenant Eyes faced the same questions many people face today.
00:02:19.700How can I teach my children to use the Internet and with integrity?
00:02:23.600How can my own heart remain pure online?
00:02:28.900How do I serve as an example to my family and to my church?
00:02:32.700So it was this mission that was in mind, the Covenant Eyes was created.
00:02:39.040Covenant Eyes is a world-class software and educational resource center, which is now used by over one million people in the country.
00:02:47.720Covenant Eyes wants to help equip you and if you're a parent or a grandparent with the resources that will help protect your family.
00:02:56.940And they want to give you a free parenting e-book called Connected.
00:03:01.720This book explores how strong family connection can protect children and their teens from the dangers of hidden pornography use.
00:03:09.300By the way, it isn't all that hidden anymore.
00:03:11.620It contains real life stories and practical tips for maintaining or reestablishing connection in your family.
00:03:17.680This book is going to help strengthen your relationship with God, with your spouse, with your children, so your family can live a life that is free from the evils that surround pornography use.
00:04:44.120Yeah, you're seeing this across the arts, really.
00:04:46.200I mean, it's not just in your great country, but also in Britain that artists are getting cast aside for having the wrong opinions or being forced to quit.
00:05:00.180For example, there's a woman called Rosie Kaye, who I recently interviewed, and she's a choreographer.
00:05:05.620She had a dance company for 14, 15 years.
00:05:09.320And because of her gender-critical opinions, she got ganged up on by the entire crew or the entire cast of dancers and was forced to resign.
00:05:17.820And, you know, she'd put her life into this project.
00:05:37.760But, I mean, they eventually, it goes around, eventually.
00:05:43.420I mean, I don't understand how artists in particular don't understand, and even homosexuals as well have been forced into the closet for so long, especially in Great Britain, how they don't understand.
00:06:00.820Wait a minute, I shouldn't be doing the same thing that was happening to me, because eventually it just eats its own, doesn't it?
00:06:09.620I mean, it just eventually consumes, you're never going to be politically correct enough for somebody.
00:06:33.980That's what we've been working on, civil rights.
00:06:37.240That's what we've been trying to stop.
00:06:39.000There's a serious free speech issue, and I don't mean necessarily legally, although in Britain, certainly there's been legal issues on free speech where people have been losing their jobs.
00:06:51.920And police come to the door if you're...
00:07:08.320But there's a culture of free speech that we've lost.
00:07:12.380So it's not necessarily that we still have the First Amendment, or you have the First Amendment here in the States, but there's this idea, I think, back to when Neil Young said he'd remove himself from Spotify if Spotify didn't get rid of Joe Rogan.
00:07:27.360Now, of course, I believe in freedom of association.
00:07:37.460It's the specific speech that people want removed.
00:07:41.220And for that to come from artists whose very career, who's founded on the premise that one needs to express themselves, how can one express themselves in that climate?
00:07:54.540How can one create art in that climate?
00:07:56.260How can one create music, write lyrics, write great prose?
00:08:00.440And I've been very puzzled within the creative industries.
00:08:05.660I'm not entirely sure whether there's a large group of homogenous thinkers where, let's say, this progressive thought has really taken hold, or whether a small minority of progressives have real power in self-censoring the masses.
00:08:26.700It's not entirely clear to me what is going on.
00:10:44.880And every other store in both those cities has some sort of token marker to a progressive course.
00:10:52.700Whether it's a rainbow flag or a trans flag or a BLM thing or some sort of virtue signaling to an identity group.
00:11:04.380And it seemed to me, and actually in San Francisco as well, there's a huge mural to Greta Thunberg outside my hotel, like the sort of matron saint of eco-anxiety.
00:11:16.880And it seems to me, it reminded me about in the scripture when the Jews marked their homes with the blood of the lamb so that the angel of death would pass over them when the plagues were for the firstborn.
00:11:31.300And it's almost, and I'm sure this is true in Portland, Oregon, it's almost as if people are marking their property so it doesn't get vandalized.
00:11:40.480Now, I don't want to be so rude about California and America because I absolutely love this country.
00:12:06.660Eventually, they come and eat everybody.
00:12:08.780What a great analogy of the lamb's blood.
00:12:11.900Well, this is what's got me into trouble.
00:12:14.260Originally, the reason I had to quit Mumford & Sons is because I tweeted about a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States by the author, the conservative author, Andy Ngo, journalist.
00:12:24.300And he documents in that book that the 19 killed in the first 14 days of the BLM riots and the many black businesses ruined and destroyed in the ensuing riots.
00:12:38.660And just to paint a picture of the climate in the music industry, in June 2020, in that heinous killing of George Floyd happened, the music industry en masse put up black squares and it became a picket line.
00:13:09.700Well, you should get them in to talk about this because apparently they didn't exist as a band, didn't put a black square up because they didn't exist.
00:13:19.800Their fans got so angry at the fact that they had to reform in order to apologize to the mob.
00:13:28.220And that shows how fervent the time was.
00:13:39.200So so I got into trouble because I I was I was critical of that specific or the the excesses of it, because if look, of course, we care about black lives.
00:13:50.680Of course, we want to see every American, every human lifted up.
00:13:54.820And we want to we want to create a level playing field from which to start.
00:14:09.660But the problem you get is people want to ignore the bad, the excesses of certain behavior if they believe it's a good cause, which means that bad things happen.
00:14:24.780So now, since I've come out and been in sort of trouble, I feel like it's my duty a little bit to speak out on these issues where I think that there are excesses.
00:14:37.940And having come from a liberal background, you know, my dad ran for the liberal Democrats in the U.K., I was brought up canvassing for liberals.
00:14:51.880And progressive is different than a liberal.
00:14:54.780A liberal here should be a somebody who believes in the Bill of Rights and will fight for the rights of the average person.
00:15:03.900A conservative is, over here, a person that wants the smallest amount of government so it can never get out of hand and do the things that it's doing right now.
00:15:16.720Progressives are the same in both countries.
00:15:21.320So I would distinguish myself as being neither conservative or progressive, but rather a liberal in a classical liberal, British liberal tradition.
00:15:30.180And I do believe that we need some government because I think that I don't believe in libertarianism.
00:15:37.920I believe that unchecked and unregulated, the system isn't totally fair.
00:15:44.100And then I guess there's a bunch of social issues that progressives have gone completely awry on.
00:15:50.660For example, I wrote a piece on Barry Weiss's Substack and I quoted Martin Luther King and his, you know,
00:15:58.760I have a dream speech where he said we should judge people by the content and the character and the color.
00:17:11.020My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.
00:17:12.460The idea that I'm called a Nazi now, given that 13 people in my family were obliterated by the Nazis in the camps and the death marches, is offensive to my family.
00:17:24.540Although, it's so absurd that it's, it's almost beyond offense.
00:22:19.160Another point, by the way, I found it very frustrating that the left-wing media in this country and in my country don't even talk about it.
00:24:03.320So this essay, which I encourage listeners to read, is about five pages long, includes a paragraph where it says something along the lines of,
00:24:14.980how dare you call yourself an artist if you are not prepared to live by the truth?
00:24:24.560And each time I read it, it hit harder and harder and harder.
00:24:26.780And this apology that was out there that I'd issue, it felt like to me that that apology would detract from all I could create moving forward.
00:24:38.240Because whatever song I write, whatever prose I write, how can I say that it's true if I have this apology hanging around my neck?
00:26:21.300I go through this, and, you know, when you have a good majority of people saying, you're a racist, you're a bigot, you're a Nazi, you're this.
00:26:32.400If you're a thinking, feeling human being, you take that at some point and go, I don't think I'm that.
00:27:40.920So that's what gets you through those difficult times.
00:27:44.620And had I not had God, had I not had Christ in my life, I'm not sure how I could have got through that period.
00:27:51.700I don't want to take too much of a sidetrack on this, but this is the third time you've mentioned God, and then you mentioned Christ by name.
00:27:59.220And it's my understanding that you have always said you're not a Christian, you're not religious, but you're spiritual, you're...
00:28:09.840So I was raised by a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in a sort of ecumenical household.
00:28:17.860I lost my faith aged 18, 19, and had my 20s, I would say, without faith, at points atheistic, at points agnostic.
00:28:29.240When I was an atheist, I probably had too many morals for an atheist.
00:29:53.320And through people like Jordan Peterson, his, his biblical series is great, exceptional.
00:29:59.560And it, it, it brought me back to scripture, but it was through the, the, the experience of suffering that I actually came back fully spiritually to Christ.
00:30:11.220And, and thank God I did because the, the period, it wasn't long too, too long afterwards that I went through, I went through, and as I said, had it not been for him, I'm not sure I'd have fared so well.
00:31:32.060You know, well, I've seen, I've seen, I've seen that not only in my own personal life.
00:31:36.280Like I, there was a period I made work, my God.
00:31:38.580And I was, I was quite literally addicted to touring and getting in the studio and working and working.
00:31:44.020But then if you talk on mass and, and I just had Michael Schellenberger, uh, environmentalist, um, on my, on my show.
00:31:52.740And he describes the environmentalist cause as a surrogate religion.
00:31:57.000And it's very true because we have lost God and there are people don't have the belief like, uh, that we used to in the West.
00:32:05.500And so they're replacing it with these, these other causes.
00:32:08.540And like I described earlier, it's, it's, it's, it's biblical how people are putting tokens outside their, their shops.
00:32:15.140And, and it's, it's biblical to put a mural of Greta Thunberg as if, you know, like she's the Virgin Mary or something, an innocent, an innocent girl.
00:32:24.940There's all these weird equivalents, but it doesn't have the found push for abortion.
00:32:30.440The way it's being done now, just this bloodlust almost is, uh, uh, is, is Moloch.
00:32:38.480I mean, it is old Testament worship, just not done intentionally, but we are doing the same thing.
00:32:45.880We are worshiping other gods, whether we know it or not.
00:32:49.160When the alarm clock goes off in the morning and you open your eyes is pain.
00:32:53.500The first thing you think about used to be for me, I would get up every day and I'd be like,
00:32:57.860and all I would want to do is get back into bed.
00:33:01.040And I would be like, I don't know how I'm going to get through the day, but I'll get through it and I'll come back and I'll sleep.
00:33:09.500Um, it was a problem that I thought would never go away.
00:33:13.380And it's a problem that I don't have anymore because I started taking relief factor and I got my life back.
00:33:18.960I can paint, I can write, I can even think in the morning without, you know, the first thing, ow, I hurt.
00:34:07.860They're incredibly talented musicians and artists and songwriters.
00:34:12.340And I have no doubt that they will have very important careers and, and they, I hope they continue to great, make, create great, uh, and, and I would hate for, uh, anything I do to impede that.
00:34:27.360So, uh, you know, I really, I really wish them well.
00:34:29.520Um, that is the nicest, most Christian thing I think you could say.
00:34:37.000Um, so you leave and, uh, you know, the good thing is there's a lot of openings for banjo players.
01:04:24.580I, uh, have no qualms whatsoever in saying that his recent spat of comments and statements have, are absolutely anti-Semitic.
01:04:34.820And, um, saying he'd go DEFCON 3 on, on Jewish people is, is horrible.
01:04:43.000Um, and, uh, I, I, I find it strange that so, um, few people find that easy to condemn him.
01:04:51.760Having said that, obviously he's lost now one and a half a billion worth of, uh, his business being dropped by Adidas and, and, and, um, the stuff.
01:05:00.720So is that cancel culture or is that just?