It’s going to be a shocker, but an abundance of Academy awards and Grammies do NOT make political opinions more poignant. Especially if they are ill-thought-out and disconnected from reality.
The attempts to find a Trump scandal since he won the election last year look set to play out like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Eventually something big could/will happen and no one is going to pay any attention to it because the ‘Never Trump’ crowd are too busy being intellectually dishonest.
One fanatically anti-Trump celebrity that has particularly bothered me is Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. In the run-up to the election, Armstrong made multiple Facebook/Instagram updates calling Trump a racist, sexist, fascist and to top it all off; ‘literally Hitler’. He then went on to endorse Hillary Clinton, which might not sound that bad until you remember the song ‘American Idiot’ and the message behind that.
The song was written in the midst of the Bush administration and at a time when the U.S. army were invading Iraq. Armstrong and his bandmates Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool felt alienated by the seemingly imperialistic behaviour of their own country in the Middle East. And this is understandable as America is a country that was founded on a revolt against imperialism.
So why, you may ask, was Armstrong’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton so hard to swallow? Well towards the end of American Idiot, the lyrics go as follow; ‘Don’t wanna be an American idiot. One nation controlled by the media. Information age of hysteria, It’s calling out to idiot America’. This is a biting criticism of the way in which the media controls people and manipulates their audiences with lies, especially those about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. And who voted for the Iraq war? Hillary Clinton.
Considering that the entirety of the American Idiot album was a very political, vocal criticism of George W. Bush’s lust for taking America into war for its own gains, it seems baffling to me that the very same man who wrote that song could honestly say that Hillary Clinton would have made a good president. She is just as much of a warmonger as Bush, if not more so. And had she won the election, things would have likely been a lot worse than in 2003. But this comes back to Armstrong’s pure hatred of Trump. He dislikes the man that much, that he was willing to trash his entire reputation by siding with the devil to bring him down.
And even now, Armstrong will post pictures of supposed hate crimes committed by Trump supporters (some may be legitimate, but a lot either look fake or have been proven to be fake), continues to call the President a fascist and even went as far as to chant ‘No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!’ during a performance at the American Music Awards. This chant was praised heavily by the media, but came off more as a silly, vacuous publicity stunt.
And during the continued hysteria from Armstrong and many other anti-Trump celebrities; we see groups like Antifa whose actions get legitimised and in some cases ignored altogether. This is despite there being video footage of Antifa and other groups like them attacking Trump supporters physically. The Berkley campus riots in February were a prime example of that, as were the riots during Trump’s inauguration. These people claim to be anti-fascist, whilst behaving in the most fascistic manner possible. And Armstrong and co. can’t even bring themselves to condemn this and endorse peaceful protest against Trump instead. They bury their heads in the sand and cry ‘Trump is Hitler!’. It’s truly pathetic.
If celebrities keep hyperbolically talking up the threat of Trump as some kind of Hitler reincarnation, it will soon reach the point where any legitimate Trump scandal will be ignored by most of the public, because eventually, the boy who cried wolf was ignored and got his just deserts. I don’t think the likes of Arstrong are neccessarily bad people. Many are well-meaning yet misguided and disappointingly, rely heavily on hyperbole and emotion to make their case.
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