Why Morgan Wallen Terrifies the Left » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

There’s a peculiar talent NPR has perfected over the years: the ability to moralize and condescend in the same breath, all while pretending they’re simply offering insight. Their latest exercise in public character trial — disguised as cultural analysis — centers on Morgan Wallen, a man whose real crime seems to be success without permission.

Ann Powers’s review of I’m the Problem begins as a musical exploration but quickly morphs into a slow, simmering attempt at ideological control. She wraps her claws in velvet, sure, but the aim is unmistakable: to keep Wallen, a wildly popular artist with “unfashionable” fans, pinned to a cross fashioned from a drunken slur he uttered four years ago.

This is what NPR now calls journalism: reducing a man’s identity — his artistry, his redemption arc, his soul — to a lowest moment caught on camera. The piece repeatedly gestures toward complexity, but it’s the kind you get when someone reads the footnotes and skips the book.

Wallen, to them, is not a man; he’s a case study in what happens when the wrong kind of person refuses to disappear.

Let’s be clear: Wallen’s slur was ugly. But the thinly veiled suggestion that it should be his defining feature forever is nothing short of grotesque. Powers herself admits that he apologized, lost opportunities, was dropped by the radio, and missed a cycle of awards — punishments that would end most careers. But that’s not enough for NPR. The real problem, as she hints repeatedly, is that his fans forgave him. Worse still, they kept listening.

They didn’t ask the media for permission. They didn’t wait for the New York Times to declare the exile over. They heard the apology, weighed the man, and moved on. And that, to a cultural elite obsessed with managing consensus, is utterly unforgivable.

And that is what truly offends NPR — not the word, not the moment, but the fact that redemption wasn’t filtered through their approved channels. He didn’t go on The View to sob through a staged performance. He didn’t sit on The Drew Barrymore Show clutching tissues and talking about “growth.” He didn’t do a photo shoot with Ta-Nehisi Coates. He didn’t grovel for elite absolution. He just… kept making music. And it was good. So good, in fact, that even the ridiculously left-leaning SNL couldn’t ignore it (Wallen recently appeared as the musical guest and knocked it out of the park).

So, somewhat shamelessly, Powers tries a different tactic: ambivalence as smear. Wallen refuses to be pinned down, she warns, as though not fitting neatly into a culture-war checkbox is some kind of threat. He sings about Jesus and sex, small-town heartbreak and late-night recklessness, salvation and self-sabotage. That mix of contradiction — of someone stumbling through life without a script — isn’t dodgy, it’s human. But to Powers, it reads like evasion.

And it’s what makes his songs resonate. He’s not delivering sermonettes or TikTok-ready empowerment slogans. He’s wrestling with contradiction, the way most people do between 2 a.m. regrets and Sunday morning attempts at decency.

To the NPR crowd, that’s dangerous. They want clear lines. They want songs that come pre-approved by the DEI board.

Powers’s real gripe isn’t with the music — it’s with the man’s refusal to be permanently exiled. She admits to being “sucked in” by a Wallen song, then seems to scold herself for it, like a vegan caught enjoying brisket. The review becomes a public flagellation of her own ears, her own human reaction to something outside the parameters of polite listening.

This is the death spiral of legacy criticism: the reviewer is no longer just interpreting art but confessing to the sin of enjoying the “wrong” kind of art made by the “wrong” kind of person. It’s not a review — it’s an ideological exorcism.

Throughout, Powers invokes race, power, the South — you know, the usual suspects. But it all smells of opportunism, a reviewer exploiting a past mistake to signal her own virtue while pretending to dissect art. Wallen becomes a vessel for NPR’s lingering discomfort with populism. A working-class white guy who fuses country, hip-hop, and heartbreak and fills stadiums? That must be explained away, contained, cauterized.

There’s a perverse irony at the heart of NPR’s fixation. In their effort to keep Wallen’s sin on life support, they end up sanctifying it — elevating a nasty slur into the central pillar of his public identity. One lapse becomes a life sentence. A single ugly moment is inflated into a character blueprint, erasing every other note he’s hit since. They speak of accountability, but deny the existence of change. They demand reflection, then ignore the mirror. It’s not journalism — it’s moral necromancy, the ritual reanimation of a past mistake to serve a present agenda.

And in the process, they expose their real problem: they cannot abide a world in which their audience doesn’t listen to them. Because if forgiveness comes from somewhere else — from ordinary people, from the market, from the music itself — it means the cultural priesthood no longer controls the rituals. Morgan Wallen isn’t the problem. He’s proof that NPR’s cultural veto has expired, and no amount of performative outrage will change that.

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