After woke mobs began attacking him early in 2021 for his association with Jordan Peterson and his praise of journalist Andy Ngo, former Mumford and Sons guitarist Winston Marshall felt it would be better to leave the band than apologize or stay silent.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, in announcing he was parting ways with his longtime bandmates, the 34-year-old Grammy winner said he saw “nothing wrong with being conservative.”
“I could remain and continue to self-censor,” he wrote in his farewell letter, “but it will erode my sense of integrity. Gnaw my conscience. I’ve already felt that beginning. The only way forward for me is to leave the band.”
Now it looks like the musician is ready for new sort of gig. He announced on Twitter on Dec. 20 that he has partnered with the conservative British culture journal, The Spectator, to launch a new podcast titled “Marshall Matters.” Marshall promised it will include interviews with “people across the creative industries to find out what indeed is the state of the arts.”
“This is gonna be fun,” he added.
Since voluntarily leaving the multi-platinum Mumford and Sons, the banjo-player and guitarist has been busy calling for solidarity with the Uyghur population as they continue to face genocide at the hands of the Chinese government. In November, he co-sponsored a London fundraiser featuring Uyghur music, art, and food.
Marshall also appears to be enjoying a newfound freedom to speak his mind, posting photos of his meetings with iconoclastic intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and quoting such “dark web” thinkers as Bari Weiss. In October, he highlighted an essay by Weiss about the path out of wokeness titled “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage.”
Marshall quoted her, “Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion. In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all.”
He explained in June how he ultimately reached his decision to leave Mumford and Sons by quoting Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous essay, “Live Not By Lies.” At the time he said he read it “many times” after woke mobs started demanding the band kick him out if he refused to stop making positive statements about right-leaning public figures and ideas.
In the passage, the Russian novelist issues a clarion call to speak truth in the face of political oppression:
And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his “progressive” views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
Marshall’s new podcast will debut in 2022.