Surprise hipster Antony Blinken made a Rolling Stone magazine move this week when he strummed his axe at Barman Diktat, a speakeasy venue in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was rocking out to the Neil Young song “Rockin’ in the Free World.” NBC called it “guitar diplomacy,” but it could also be heard as hypocrisy, further proof that the Left commands pop culture to the detriment of the American electorate and its traditions.

Playing that particular Neil Young tune to represent the American imperium was an insidious selection. President Trump’s use of “Rockin’ in the Free World” at a rally in 2020 drew a petulant response from Young, although the musician had no legal standing — owing to his Performance Right Organization licensing agreement. So far, no grumbling about Blinken’s performance in Kiev this week has been heard from the Canadian-born former-hippie mumbler and whiner.

But even Neil Young fans know that Blinken’s song choice came across as inauthentic and unrousing. “Rockin’ in the Free World” is a lesser Young composition that, when released in 1989, mostly appealed to pop music’s rear guard — those rockists (culture-vultures biased toward white-boy guitar-rock and indifferent to black R & B) who thirsted for an established genre to counter the burgeoning domination of then-ascendant hip-hop. (The next year, Young would be rewarded as a Great White Hope, winning the Village Voice music poll for his follow-up album Ragged Glory.)

With its chuka-chuka guitar riff — the easiest chord to learn, then flub — “Rockin’ in the Free World” is not one of Young’s beauties in the folk-rock American tradition (such masterpieces as Tonight’s the Night, American Stars ’n Bars, Comes a Time, Rust Never Sleeps, Greendale, Are You Passionate?). But the Kyiv performance suggests that Blinken never thought about the song beyond the fist-pumping, quasi-patriotic title. Its quote of George Bush’s “thousand points of light” rhetoric is politically disingenuous (ironically connected to lines bemoaning homelessness and the ’80s crack epidemic — issues the Biden administration has ignored, with today’s corresponding fentanyl epidemic).

Still, its most effective lyric is puerile: “There’s one more kid that will never go to school / Never get to fall in love / Never get to feel cool.” It alludes to abortion and infanticide, easing past them to emphasize the idea of the rock ’n’ roll hipster — feeling “cool” as life’s epitome according to a pop millionaire who, when he wrote the tune, was nearing 50 years old.

At age 62, Secretary of State Blinken apparently still wants to feel cool, despite his sheepish, often dejected appearance, and he’s probably told he’s “cool” by those in the Democrat Beltway bubble. His Ukraine rock show is as facetious as Bono’s visits to Zelenskyy, those grip-and-grin photo ops done in the middle of what the media tells us is a war. For celebs like Blinken and Bono, the status of wartime power must seem equivalent to cool.

Blinken’s appropriation of Young’s song was irrelevant to the reality of what’s happening in Ukraine, where U.S. dollars are endlessly guzzled without oversight or accounting. And positing the idea of a “free world” in a nation where elections have been suspended is both laughable and insulting. Blinken’s “free” interpretation of election interference is consistent with the lawfare being waged by the Democrat Party and the Biden administration.

Just two years ago, Young suffered Trump Derangement Syndrome, causing him to challenge First Amendment principles by withdrawing his catalogue from Spotify to protest the streaming company’s broadcast of Joe Rogan, out of favor with the Left for his stance against the Covid shot.

Now, by parroting Neil Young, Blinken confirms how Sixties liberalism has turned into Millennial authoritarianism. Old farts like Young and Blinken act as if they are heroes of the counterculture despite having become the cultural elite. This oddity was first apparent when Fleetwood Mac serenaded Clinton’s election. Veteran liberal dweebs fail to rethink their facetious principles in these scary, complicated times. Hippie dissidents flipped into OK Boomer authoritarians — a model followed by too many of today’s pop stars. Young was always politically ambivalent, bashing Bush I, then conveniently becoming pro-American after 9/11 for Bush II, and then switching back to his Sixties roots in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but always maintaining an outsider’s skepticism about U.S. policies.

Rock ’n’ roll diplomacy is not innocuous, but rock ’n’ roll and American diplomacy aren’t what they used to be.