The Nirvana Fallacy

by Mark Rock

They Love the Government, Embrace Censorship, and Despise Dissent: Welcome to America’s New Counterculture.”

Safely distanced from the peasants, former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters founder Dave Grohl takes his place in the Royal Box at Wimbledon. Photo: News Licensing/MEGA

Alice Cooper

The name had a ghastly aura. Like “guillotine,” or “black widow,” the very sound of it was evocative of evil – especially considering that the person behind it was a man.

I was barely eight years old when I first laid eyes on a Cooper album. A snake flicked its tongue menacingly on the front of the record jacket. Beneath the serpent – ominously scrawled in black felt marker with jarring psychotic script – was the album’s title: Killer.

Parents didn’t like Alice Cooper. Many wouldn’t allow his records in their homes. Towns banned him from performing within their city limits. So, when Cooper played New York’s Madison Square Garden in June of 1973, a good number of those in attendance were there not only to hear the music, but to agitate the establishment – to defy The Man.

Forty-eight years later, On June 8, 2021, the Foo Fighters took the stage at the by-then iconic Garden. Like Cooper a half-century earlier, doing so represented not just a musical event, but a cultural one as well. This time however, the sociological significance was not a celebration of subversion – not a raw display of broken boundaries, of constraints upended, of theretofore unexplored artistic and paradigmatic possibilities – but rather a call for allegiance to government dictates.

Working in lockstep with the Biden Administration, Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana incarnation allowed only those with government-issued Covid-19 vaccination papers to attend the show.

The Rise of the Sheeple Rock Stars

Some might reason that the cigarette-huffing, AIDS-denying Grohl was an unlikely choice as an ambassador for public health: not only did the Foo Fighters come down with COVID themselves – after being vaccinated – but shortly after that, their drummer dropped dead from a heroin overdose.

The real sham, however, had nothing to do with Grohl’s questionable medical credentials. Far more fraudulent – far more dangerous – is what his crusade portended:  the ascendancy of a state-aligned counterculture.

For a nation such as our own – birthed in the fires of rebellion in which conflict between competing ideologies is at the core of our self-governance –, a thriving, genuine counter-establishment, comprised of artistically inclined free thinkers and subversives, is a must. This is especially true during these unprecedented times, where big government and its allies in big business and education, along with the major print, broadcast, and internet media, have all coalesced into a unified axis with a singular message and no tolerance for dissent or diversity of thought.

Those who believe in the authenticity of artists such as Grohl, who markets himself in countercultural terms despite his obvious alliance with the establishment, are victims of an insidious mirage: that those with creative talent, long hair, and ripped jeans, are necessarily in step with defying The Man. In succumbing to this fallacy, such people become unwitting foot soldiers in our march toward a totalitarian abyss.

Counter-culture’s Jack White Becomes Mr. Establishment

While The Foos were busy entertaining a veritable theatre of sheep, the Biden agenda was rapidly metastasizing into tribunals, speech suppression, and banishments of those who so much as raised a question about the official narrative. Three years later, its agents are bringing their political opponents up on criminal charges and trying to remove them from the ballot.

Grohl was not alone in demanding unquestioning obedience to the machine, nor was such fealty limited to requiring one to goose-step down to the vaccination clinic. In fact, a disquieting number of well-known artists and public figures who trade on being edgy and hip are using their platforms to advocate for and enforce a vacuous, unskeptical loyalty to the state.

Consider Jack White. In a November 20, 2022, Instagram post, the former John Gillis raged against Elon Musk for reinstating Donald Trump’s Twitter account:

“You intend to give platforms to known liars,” begins the man who married Meg White, took her surname before divorcing her and then portrayed his two-piece band with her as a brother-sister act. At one point, White gets so carried away that he accuses Musk of “endangering democracy” for having allowed an opposition candidate to speak.

Clearly, there is something askance here. Far from calling for censorship of those challenging the establishment, counterculture icons of yesteryear put their careers on the line to give a voice to those without one. From Pete Seeger to Country Joe, from Three Dog Night to MC5, they denounced the idiocy of pointless foreign wars, the moral bankruptcy of racial segregation, and the unconstitutionality of government intrusion into our lives.

"Rage against the Machine" to Raging for it

Today, we have a counter-establishment that all but embraces oppression in the name of “saving democracy.” Those who should be spokespeople for the freedom to challenge the regime are instead enfolding the omnipotent Democrat Party apparatus and show open disdain for any opposition. Worse, this sham counterculture holds a frightening amount of sway over a society unaware of the defection. When did those with scruffy beards and guitars go from fighting The Man to fighting the people?

Much of the shift has to do with the selling of the narrative: If Grohl, White, Tom Morello, and others are marketed as being fashionably rebellious, then how could their loyalty to an entrenched all-powerful coalition of state interests represent anything other than a “resistance”? Many just assume that those donning the guise of nonconformity must be faithful to that presentation, and they are willing to assume the accuracy of the attribution without skepticism.

But much like a campfire that wasn’t being carefully watched, once the populist wind came up, the illusion morphed into reality, and what they thought they had under control quickly blew up into a nightmare. The subsequent conflagration engulfed the entire political apparatus.

Out of the ashes rose Donald Trump, the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement, and the phoenix of a new anti-elitism, all ensconced within a freshly reformed Republican Party.

For those who still believe our government operates purely for the public interest, this is simply too much to take in, as is the idea that the guy who banged away on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” could be anything other than a gritty rebel, spitting in the face of the establishment.

Once this ghost ship begins to list, the sham counter-culturists, having already defected to those in power, will be rowing away from the sinking vessel with their rulers alongside them. Those left behind, sold on the fantasy of an unsinkable Titanic, will be incredulous as they do.

What will the band be playing?

A likely choice might be a portentous ditty, penned and performed by none other than the Foo Fighters:

“There goes my hero.

Watch him as he goes…”

Mark Rock is a reformed Democrat who saw the light. Rather than a sword, he uses the pen to help others do the same. He loves his family, Rock and Roll, and Santa Barbara.