Hip Capitalist Establishment's `Rolling Stone' Magazine Revisited: Part 1

"I think Rolling Stone is establishment. I think that rock culture...has become establishment in this country, and is the leading cultural establishment in this country right now."

--Rolling Stone Magazine Inc. Owner Jann Wenner in 1977

"...Jann Wenner's oldest and dearest friends--people who worked for him in the 1960s and after--could not help but notice the likeness between Trump and the Jann Wenner they knew. The crude egotism, the neediness, the total devotion to celebrity and power. Wenner and Trump were the same age and had met a couple of times at charity events in Manhattan..."

--page 503 of former Rolling Stone magazine and former Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Hagan's 2017 book, Sticky Fingers

Hip Capitalist Establishment's Rolling Stone Magazine Revisited: Part 1

In 2020 many music fans in the United States are now anti-capitalist, socialist or libertarian anarchist in their politics. Yet between the late 1960s and 2018, a magazine that published many articles about the music that many music fans in the United States listen to each month, Rolling Stone magazine, was mostly owned by a multi-millionaire white hip capitalist member of the U.S. Establishment named Jann Wenner, prior to it being sold to Penske Media Inc. in late 2017.

Not surprisingly, before Wenner became a hip capitalist music magazine publisher in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a member of the U.S. white corporate male hip capitalist media establishment by the end of the 1970s, he apparently was not much of a teenage rebel against the U.S. Establishment in his political beliefs or in the way he lived his life. As Joe Hagan observed in his 2017 book Sticky Fingers:

"Wenner...was...a Kennedy-worshiping preppy whose thwarted ambition to attend Harvard had diverted him to Berkeley...An inveterate social climber...Wenner crashed debutante balls and went on ski weekends to private resorts with rich friends...who knew Kennedys and Hearsts...As a teenager, he attended a boarding school in Los Angeles that housed the offspring of Hollywood royalty, including Liza Minnelli..."

In addition, during the 1950s, the Rolling Stone magazine owner's mother, Sim Wenner, "was involved in the California Democratic Council" and "befriended Democrat Alan Cranston, who later became a senator from California;" and, along with Jann Wenner's father, Baby Formula Inc. owner Ed Wenner, "socialized with...the Roth family, who owned the Matson shipping company," according to the same book. (end of part 1)