Penske Media's Animus Towards RFK, Jr.

A case study of corporatism vs constitutionalism

On the evening of Sept. 7, 2021, Late-Night comedy hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers all joked about America’s multitude of rubes taking “horse dewormer” instead of getting vaccinated. Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were the most cutting.

We’ve still got a lot of pan-dimwits out there. People are still taking this ivermectin. You know the poison control centers have seen this spike in calls from people taking this livestock medicine to fight the coronavirus. But they won’t take the vaccine, which is crazy. … Dr. Fauci has said that if the hospitals get any more overcrowded, they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed. That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. Vaccinated person having a heart attack, yes, come right on in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated person who gobbled horse goo, rest in peace, wheezy.

A month after Kimmel and his fellow Late-Night hosts all acted like ideologically possessed robots, Rolling Stone’s new editor, Noah Schachtman, started firing off tweets about how he intended to purify the journal of associations with artists whom he deemed “bad actors.”

As he put it in an October 12, 2021 communique:

Welcome to the new@RollingStone. We’re going to call out bad actors — no matter how big they are, and no matter how many times they may have been on our cover before.

EXCLUSIVE: Eric Clapton isn't just spouting vaccine nonsense. He's bankrolling anti-vaxx protesters. One of a bunch of WTF moments in @RollingStone's investigation into Clapton's long journey on the fringe, including some shockingly racist episodes.

That’s right, Eric Clapton—ranked by Rolling Stone in 2015 as the second greatest guitarist of all time—was declared a heretic and censured by the magazine’s new editor, who apparently regards conformity and adherence to vaccine orthodoxy as proper standards for evaluating a rock star.

At that point, I figured it was no exaggeration to say that we were observing a Fascist-Corporatist takeover of American popular culture. It sort of reminded me what happened to the wild cabaret scene in Berlin shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933 and his National Socialists set about “cleansing” German culture of its “decadent” elements. The Bob Fosse film Cabaret depicts this moment in history.

As I discovered, Rolling Stone was acquired by Penske Media in 2017, which also owns several other entertainment industry magazines such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. It seems to me that the ultimate expression of Penske Media’s fascist-corporatist spirit is its relentlessly rude, hostile, and imbalanced coverage of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Please check out my essay about Penske Media’s Animus Towards RFK, Jr.: A case study of corporatism vs constitutionalism, which was just published on the Kennedy Beacon Substack. If you enjoy it, please forward it to your friends, especially those who are interested in musicians such as Eric Clapton, whom Rolling Stone used to write about in an interesting way that expressed a love of music, and not obedience and ideological conformity.