Cancelled Mumford and Sons bandmate learns the three lessons of cancel culture

Marshall does not want to live in a world where he must hide who he is, and is willing to break away from his dream to avoid cutting his mouth with a razor of lies.

Quoting the minds of Winston Churchill and Gulag survivour Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (twice), cancelled Mumford and Sons Banjo player Winston Marshall published a moving testimony on his personal website last week confirming his ‘personal’ decision to leave the band. The testimony can be read in full here.

As Marshall states, this all began when in March of this year, he tweeted his approval of author Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, writing ‘congratulations @MrAndyNgo. Finally had the time to read your important book. You’re a brave man’. Whether the arguments Ngo made were substantiated or not is inconsequential – Marshall was essentially bulled out of the band for reading the wrong book and holding the wrong opinion.

After he pressed ‘publish’, the outrage mob immediately pointed their pre-lit torches and pre-sharpened pitchforks towards the musician and set his career aflame. Within twenty-four hours, Marshall was brought up to scratch on how contemporary political discourse works, and the first rule of cancel culture: if you have the slightest disagreement with any spacebar happy keyboard militant, then you’re ten times worse than (insert genocidal dictator here). No logic is required and reasoning is frowned upon.

In his testimony, Marshall attempts to bat away accusations of his allegiance to the ill-defined and ever expanding ‘far-right’ by letting the reader know that he lost thirteen family members to the Holocaust. Yet, by this point, Marshall already knows that the dust has settled and the damage the cancel culture mob has inflicted is already irreparable.

Part two of his testimony involves the effect his tweet (which probably took fifteen seconds to make and a nanosecond to share with the world) had on his bandmates, in which Marshall learnt the second rule of cancel culture: character destruction operates on a guilt-by-association basis. In unveiling his support of Ngo’s work, Marshall unknowingly dragged his unassuming bandmates onto the chopping block. Imagine waking up to find your reputation in tatters for a non-offence not even you committed? This was the time when Marshall had to hold his hand up and, in his own words, ‘take a temporary step back.’

Then Marshall learnt the third lesson of cancel-culture: An apology does not mean the cancelled’s salvation but their total submission and summary execution. Although Marshall did nothing wrong, due to the unforgiving nature of cancel culture, his apology transfigured the baying mob into a pack of starving hyenas who ripped him to pieces.

With Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Live Not by Lies’ essay spinning around his cranium since the first mob onslaught, Marshall took the decision to leave the band out of a duty of care to his bandmates as well as to protect his soul. Marshall does not want to live in a world where he must hide who he is, and is willing to break away from his dream to avoid cutting his mouth with a razor of lies.

‘I could remain and continue to self-censor but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience. I’ve already felt that beginning.’

- Winston Marshall