The Garth Brooks and Toby Keith drama, explained

We turn our attention now to the late Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, and our collective willingness to believe that cowboys want to punch each other.

First, in fairness: It’s understandable that Americans would think that Garth Brooks and Toby Keith had some bone-deep, possibly even violent feud. We are trained from birth to believe that any collection of two or more cowboy hats must end in a shootout, or at least an emotionally charged hoedown.

And, from time to time, stories have popped up on the internet that seemed to indicate that Keith and Brooks were about to come to blows. There was this piece from The Dunning-Kruger Times, claiming that Keith had given a “brutal interview” on the subject of Brooks, calling him a victim of “the woke mind virus” who was all “about supporting gay people.” Another, posted by acclaimed news source SpaceXMania not long after Toby Keith’s passing, stated that Brooks had been forcibly ejected from a memorial concert, as Keith “wouldn’t have wanted a woke person” present.

Toby Keith v Garth Brooks: Friends in no places?

Much of Keith and Brooks’ alleged corn-fed beef seemed to stem from Brooks’ groundbreaking assertion that his bar would serve Bud Light, even after a trans person was caught on camera being paid to say that they liked it. On a side note, sometimes it feels like this timeline hit a fortune teller with its Range Rover and was cursed to get incrementally stupider forever.

Speaking of which: All of the stories about a feud between Toby Keith and Garth Brooks appear to be, in journalistic terms, makey-uppy silly-time. The Dunning-Kruger Times is a satire site, penned by someone working under the pseudonym “Flagg Eagleton.” It features the sort of right-wing caricature that really worked back when The Colbert Report was still on the air, but which lost some of its luster once Republicans started trying to un-abolish child labor and fight culture wars over pizza in what only makes sense as a desperate attempt to court the Ninja Turtle vote.

SpaceXMania, meanwhile, labels all of their content “SATIRE” above the headline, in large part because there’s really nothing else distinguishing what they print from being, you know, lies. It’s a brand of comedy that’s not dissimilar from when kids give the substitute teacher a fake name, giggle for ten minutes, and then say “just kidding.”

Meanwhile, in reality, Brooks and Keith had no significant public disagreements, feuds, gunfights, or debacles. Brooks, for his part, dedicated a post on his official website in the wake of Keith’s passing, calling the late musician “larger than life” and writing: “What I learned from Toby is what I hope I am able to do when it’s my turn to wear those shoes. He was ALWAYS Toby…all the way up to his passing.” In Brooks’ memories, the late singer will forever be the “no-filter, very loud, honest guy.”