Hey, no one can say that rock & roll didn’t warn us. The Who sang it to us almost 52 years ago in “Won’t Get Fooled Again”:

There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are effaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight …

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

The new boss in this case has been the same as the old boss for a while, but perhaps no more so than today. Rolling Stone magazine, the most well-known of the countercultural publications from the “Won’t Get Fooled Again” era, has now squarely landed on the side of the Establishment and The Man. How else does one explain this shriek about Republicans actually having the ability to question the executive branch about its policies — especially when it comes to domestic surveillance, censorship, and corruption?

And especially the pandemic and Washington’s measures that locked down much of the US population under emergency decrees that are still in place nearly three years later?

REPUBLICANS LAUNCHED THEIR control of the House of Representatives with a sprawling, paranoid new initiative: The Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government, an interrogation of alleged efforts to silence and punish conservatives across federal agencies. The undertaking signaled the obvious political goal among Republican lawmakers to score points against the Biden administration and their Democratic opponents. It also signaled something more ominous: that Republicans intend to use their newfound power to turn fringe theories into mainstream politics.

The most noxious online conspiracies, the ones that a public official would once have been exiled for relaying and disseminating with any gravity, are now the focus of official congressional inquiries. The committee would also have full freedom to investigate any civil liberties-related issue and scrutinize how the federal government collected and used information about Americans, fueling right-wing paranoia about government overreach. But it’s not just this committee from which Republicans are launching conspiracies into the mainstream. Such thinking has leached into every corner of the GOP House’s agenda, from the first bills it passed to which Democrats will potentially be stripped of their committee assignments.

OMG, they’re gonna … ask questions! And demand answers from federal bureaucrats! Rolling Stone argues in their subhead that the GOP will do so to “put disinformation and falsehoods at the center of their governing agenda,” which might be the most accurate and most ironic part of this hot take. After all, Rolling Stone carved a niche for itself in journalistic infamy by pushing disinformation and easily fact-checked falsehoods about the University of Virginia in a story that fell apart … when people started asking questions and challenging their narratives.

In other words, this argument may be more on-brand for Rolling Stone than it seems.

It’s also an accurate statement because part of the House Republican effort will be to get people to testify under oath to clear away spin and “falsehoods” that government officials have deployed to deflect responsibility for their actions. That’s precisely what congressional oversight is intended to accomplish in our constitutional structure. For instance, would Rolling Stone 1971 have ever made an argument like this about open questions relating to the imposition of government control of marketplaces, churches, and even homes?

Comer has specifically noted interest in investigating the “effectiveness of the vaccines and the concerns that people are starting to raise with respect to side effects,” he told The Washington Post last week, and has vowed congressional investigators would “talk to the researchers” and “all of the people that were involved” in vaccine development. Under Comer’s leadership, Oversight Republicans had also previously raised questions about the Surgeon General’s pandemic-related social media guidelines, which had been an effort to combat the disinformation now at the about the virus and vaccines. Comer had slammed the effort as “actively censoring medical information and opinions on social media” in a letter to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy last July.

The committees’ chief preoccupation, however, is an unsupported claim that the pandemic began when the virus — either created through bioengineering or obtained from bats — escaped a lab in Wuhan, China. Both Comer and House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have asserted that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other Biden officials misled Americans about the virus’ origins because the alleged Wuhan lab received U.S. funding. “Fauci was warned early on that the virus appeared manmade and pointed to a lab leak and instead of blowing the whistle may have attempted to cover it up,” Comer alleged. Under the new panel, Republicans will investigate “what the U.S. government knew regarding the origins of COVID-19 and when the government knew it,” he said.

The so-called “lab leak” theory has never been substantiated.

True, but it has never been eliminated either — and even the World Health Organization has gone on record to insist it needs a more thorough exploration. Much of the reason that the lab-leak theory has never been substantiated is that government agencies and Establishment media quashed any discussion of the theory. And not just by discouraging and dismissing the issue, but as we have recently discovered, through national-security agencies pressuring social-media platforms to censor those who wanted it discussed.

Those are all good reasons to get answers on the record and under oath, but also because the US government funded the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab under Fauci’s direction. Should we continue to fund that research? Should we fund it under China’s control, given their desperate cover-up of COVID-19’s origins? How do we decide these without asking the right questions first?

It’s also strange to see anyone get freaked out, man, over just the ability to hold hearings. If Republicans ask stupid questions, then they will get embarrassed by the process. Voters can hold them responsible for it in 2024. Asking questions and getting answers under penalty of perjury for the purpose of oversight over the Leviathan of the federal executive branch is not just necessary and part of Congress’ congressional duty, it’s the kind of action that Rolling Stone 1971 would have cheered and likely demanded after three years of emergency rule by edict from DC.

Instead, Rolling Stone has discovered its inner Establishment identity. They don’t want to take it to the Man, man. They want to be The Man.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, only with a longer beard and a predilection for censorship. Don’t ask questions! Accept what you’ve been told! The authorities are always right and above suspicion! What a stunning transformation.

Addendum: My longtime radio partner and good friend Mitch Berg has argued for decades that “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is the most conservative rock & roll classic of all time. It’s tough to argue with that these days.

Correction: The University of Virginia’s campus in the RS hoax was in Charlottesville, not Arlington. I’ve fixed it above, and thanks to longtime reader Bob for the correction.