Trump Threatens Springsteen

The president comes for free speech

On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen stopped his concert in Manchester, England, to say this before singing My City of Ruins:

There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.

In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.

In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.

They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society.

They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.

They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.

A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.

The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.” Let’s pray.

If you are a fan of Springsteen, you know that this is not atypical for him. He has always been politically conscious and routinely talks about social justice issues at his concerts. (As someone who has been to countless Springsteen shows over the past thirty years, I can vouch that he does this much more often than not, regardless of who is in the White House.)

Springsteen’s criticism rankled MAGA media, with Fox’s resident clown Greg Gutfeld calling Springsteen a “pussy,” among other things.

Gutfeld’s broadsides are one thing. But then the president of the United States got in on the action by threatening to use the power of the federal government to retaliate against Springsteen for expressing his opinion.

“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker… ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back in the COUNTRY, that’s just “standard fare.” Then we’ll see how it goes for him!”

The most powerful man on earth is threatening an artist for criticizing him.

If Springsteen is not safe for expressing his views, none of us is safe. If Springsteen’s First Amendment rights don’t matter, none of ours do. If Springsteen can be threatened — and worse — for voicing his opinion, so can we.

Springsteen sold his catalogue for half a billion dollars a few years ago, so he can afford the best lawyers and tax auditors on earth to defend him from whatever is coming next. Most Americans who oppose Trump cannot.

Just imagine the chill that this threat will pose for people who are considering speaking out about the criminality of the Trump regime. If this can happen to an American icon, they will reason, why even bother?

This is not about Bruce Springsteen, of course. It is about our rights under the constitution. It is about a tyrant in the Oval Office who has already intimidated too many in the mainstream media from reporting negatively on him and who has set up his own White House propaganda arm to disseminate MAGA disinformation to the masses. This is about a president who wants to be a dictator and dictate to us what we can and, more importantly, cannot say about him.

This is straight out of the dictator playbook. They have already come for the universities. Now, they are coming for the artists. The rest of us are next. It has ever been so every time a tyrant rises to oppress his people.

This is a Code Red. Even if Trump does absolutely nothing to Springsteen when he lands back on American soil, the threat is enough to chill the speech of too many others.

“Come on, rise up,” as Springsteen implores us in My City of Ruins. We have no other choice.