When Freddie Mercury sat down at the piano to write what became “Bohemian Rhapsody,” he wasn’t just composing a song. He was, in the telling of a new American Thinker column by Noel S. Williams, launching a six-minute operatic experiment that record executives could easily have buried. That it survived — and became one of the most streamed tracks in history — is the columnist’s Exhibit A in a broader indictment of the people he calls the “get to no” experts.
Williams’s September 14 essay, “Pox on the ‘get to no’ experts,” is less about any single song than about a recurring pattern he sees across music, literature, art, and invention: ambitious work runs into a chorus of credentialed naysayers, and only sheer persistence drags it into the world. The column opens with a blunt rhetorical question — do you enjoy Queen’s classic, or George Orwell’s Animal Farm? — because both, in his framing, “almost never escaped the ‘get to no’ prison.”
The long list of things experts got wrong
Williams rattles off a familiar roster of initial rejections. Music executives once thought John Lennon’s “Imagine” was too political, he notes — though he adds, with a wry aside, that he personally wouldn’t have minded if that particular song had stayed shelved. The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” by contrast, met pushback from broadcasters before it “infiltrated our musical consciousness.” Williams even mentions the irony that Keith Richards himself was lukewarm on the track at first, calling it a reminder that taste is impossible to account for.
The same pattern holds for books. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were both turned down before becoming fixtures of the culture. Williams cites Steven Goldberg’s The Inevitability of Patriarchy, a work arguing that male dominance is a biological constant, as racking up around 69 rejections before finding a publisher. “Go figure,” he writes.
Visual art, the column continues, is even more subjective, which makes the initial mockery of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream all the more predictable. And in Williams’s view, the stakes get higher still when the inventions involved are the ones that shape daily life. Aspirin and talking pictures, he writes, both faced early rebuffs from the gatekeepers of their day. Thank goodness, he concludes, for the innovators who lived by the old maxim about trying again after failure.
The upshot, as Williams frames it, is that far too many self-proclaimed experts simply “suck” — a verdict he delivers with the aside that they are worse even than the “get to no” women. That reference points to a related American Thinker piece by Olivia Murray titled “Don’t be a ‘get to no’ woman (or man)—you guys are awful!” — a column that has evidently become something of a house theme for the outlet.
A familiar genre, with a twist
Culture-war commentary about rejected genius is nothing new. Every few years, an essay circulates listing the publishers who passed on J.K. Rowling, the producers who passed on the Beatles, or the gallery owners who passed on the Impressionists. What gives Williams’s version its edge is the target: not anonymous bureaucrats or faceless institutions, but the more intimate figure of the expert — the editor, the record man, the critic, the programmer, the fact-checker, the person whose job is ostensibly to identify quality and who instead, in this telling, serves mainly as a brake.
The “get to no” label is deliberately gendered and deliberately colloquial. It borrows from Murray’s earlier column and applies it to men as well as women, which suggests the real problem isn’t any particular demographic but a mindset — the instinct to say no first and ask questions later. Williams doesn’t develop a policy prescription. He doesn’t call for dismantling publishing houses or record labels. He simply invites readers to notice how many things they love nearly didn’t make it, and to hold the experts responsible.
There is a real analytical point buried in the invective, even if the column doesn’t linger on it. Gatekeeping exists for reasons: quality control, risk management, the fact that most rejected manuscripts really are worse than most accepted ones. But the asymmetry of the cost matters. A publisher who passes on Harry Potter loses nothing personally; the reading public loses a world. A programmer who declines to play “Satisfaction” keeps the airwaves safe and dull. The people who say no rarely pay for being wrong. The people who say yes do.
Williams’s examples are mostly well-worn, and some are contested — the historical record on which rejections were decisive versus routine varies from case to case. But the cumulative effect is hard to dismiss. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was nearly six minutes long, had no chorus, and got an early critical shellacking. It went on to define an era of popular music. Animal Farm was a political allegory written by a democratic socialist at a moment when the Soviet Union was a wartime ally; publishers had every institutional reason to say no. It became one of the most taught novels in the English language.
The closing argument
Williams ends not with art but with speech. “Now more than ever,” he writes, “the ability to speak our minds is crucial to the republic we cherish.” The pivot is an American Thinker signature — cultural grievances folded into a broader argument about expression and its self-appointed guardians. The column is, in effect, a plea for tolerating the eccentric, the unpopular, and the initially unmarketable, on the theory that the alternative is a world without Bohemian Rhapsody.
Whether readers accept the full indictment is another matter. Not every rejection is a crime against culture; sometimes the experts are right. But the column’s real ask is modest: stop treating the no-sayers as authorities, and start treating them as one more obstacle on the way to something worth making. Williams’s essay is a reminder, delivered with a smirk, that the people who told the world no have a very long track record of being wrong about the things the rest of us still can’t stop listening to.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/pox-on-the-get-to-no-experts/