Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Randy Blythe of Lamb of God has shared his thoughts on the present situation in the United States on Substack, as per Lambgoat. In the article titled “All The Horrors Happening Around Us,” the frontman bemoans the growth of fascism while criticizing Donald Trump, ICE, and other organizations.
“It’s a nice evening, isn’t it?” she asked in a clipped British accent as we walked away from Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard.
“Indeed, it is!” I replied.
“Yes, it’s a rather nice distraction from all the horrors happening around us,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “And I think we all need that right about now.”
It was March of 2025, and I was in Los Angeles for a night before heading home after the first leg of the Just Beyond the Light spoken word tour. Donald Trump had been back in office a little over a month and a half, and the word horrors to describe the state of our nation was already slipping way too easily from the tongue of a foreign-born stranger on the street. She was a member of my tribe though, a fellow book lover, and as she walked away I recognized the purchase in her hands, a book that already sat on my shelf back home. In the Garden of Beasts- Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson. The book takes place in Germany in 1933, at the very beginning of the Third Reich— we all know how that story ends.
How fitting, I thought, but probably not a good distraction from all the horrors.
It’s not even a year later now, and I can’t muster the desire, much less the will, to look for distractions these days.
Like most of you… I am tired, y’all. So goddamned tired. The open moral collapse of all three branches our government is utterly exhausting. But it’s not just the fact that the current President of the United States is a man found guilty by a jury of sexually assaulting a woman, not mention 34 other felonies involving hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels (may her name echo eternal in the Halls of Liberty as an unlikely-but-true American hero for standing up to this vile impersonation of a real man.) It’s not just that that same deranged man now slumps like a giant rotting shrimp over the Resolute Desk in the gaudy faux gold-leafed remains of a half-destroyed White House as he fully embraces his bizarre Marie-Antoinette-meets-Liberace redecorating phase. It’s not just the fact that we have a perpetual failure of a business man cosplaying as some sort of national financial father figure, hell-bent on destroying our economy with his foolish tariffs and endless trade wars, raising the cost of groceries and health insurance and every single other thing under the sun all the while enriching himself to the tune of at least 1.4 billion dollars during his first year back alone. It’s not just because this poorly spoken buffoon, holder of the highest office in the land, flies to other countries only to publicly insult and demean our historical allies in endless slurring word salads of nonsense on the world stage, going so far as to threaten utterly pointless invasions of their sovereign lands in the name American national security, places like Greenland that we already have full access to through long-standing treaties. It’s not simply because this draft-dodging rich kid, who against all common sense is the Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces, has moved beyond threats and into action by invading another sovereign nation, kidnapping its admittedly terrible dictator in the name of stopping drug trafficking while leaving that dictator’s even worse second in command in charge, thereby changing absolutely nothing except millions of American tax payer’s dollars squandered. It’s not just that the “leader of the free world” was for years best friends with the most notorious child sex trafficker in modern history, Jeffrey Epstein, and is currently in the middle of a blatant cover-up in order to protect the interests of rich and powerful pedophiles (not to mention having made super-creepy pedophile-esque statements himself about his own daughter’s physical attractiveness.) It’s not just the fact that masked men now roam our streets, Gestapo-like, terrorizing the populace, openly killing two American citizens, shooting them in the face in broad daylight as their fellow citizens film these executions, then post videos of the killings to the internet, videos I cannot stop watching again and again.
A video of a smiling 37 year-old mother’s last words, words she spoke to the man who murdered her…”That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” A video that concludes seconds later with this masked thug calling her a “fucking bitch” as her dead body slumps over the wheel of her minivan.
A video of a 37 year old man, a beloved ICU nurse at a Veteran’s Affairs hospital, as he struggles on an icy street to shield a woman with his own body as more of these masked goons pepper spray him, throw him on the ground, batter him, disarm him, then shoot him in the back like the cowards they are.
Cowards.
Videos of the women of Minneapolis screaming; screaming, again and again on a snowy street… “What the fuck did you do? WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST DO?’’ The pain in these women’s voices, the horror in these women’s voices… it is burned into me.
All the horrors happening around us.
If you are a citizen of the United States and have not watched these videos, do so. Do not turn away. Do not ignore this, do your best to move on and put it out of your head because you keep telling yourself you just can’t handle it anymore. Do not be a coward. This is your country, and this is what is happening here right now, despite the blatant lies the President and his assorted cast of cartoon villains tell you to your face.
“Domestic terrorists”… do not let their lies make you despair of your sanity. You have eyes to see the truth of the horrors happening all around us.
You have eyes to see the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
No, my friends, you are not crazy. Things are bad. Really, really bad. This is not normal.
And again, all of this madness makes me so tired— it makes all of us so goddamned tired.
Yet it’s not just this unhinged American nightmare we are living through that is wearing me out. No, I’m also tired because I have been literally screaming at the top of my lungs in warning about all this for 30 years now.
I joined my band in 1995. The very first track we ever released, a song called “Ruiner”, was the first song on a split 7” single with the Philadelphia based band Zed. The lyrics are as follows:
“How light could be our darkest hour?
None will be left when they come to collect their blood debts
All accounts will run dry, a binary vessel full of nothing but dust
A vicious lust for control has turned us into pawns for the faceless kings
Sheds rivers of blood turned the color of their lucre greed
Fiscal commandments impel and we obey blindly
The fury of the sun has passed into the hands of men
Whose hands were already too full of abused strength and anger
Of abused strength and power
Bio-economics killing again and again.”
Obscenely wealthy people controlling and corrupting the national discourse. Bloodshed on American streets in service of the economic elite’s interests. A cruel, unprincipled man holding the nuclear codes with no other interests than his own. I wrote those words thirty years ago, but it might as well have been yesterday.
Every single release my band has put out since has had songs I’ve written warning against authoritarianism, the impending technocracy, environmental destruction for profit, human bloodshed for oil, rising xenophobic violence and racial strife, the worship of material wealth, political and religious extremism of all sorts, the disproven theory of trickle down economics, polarization of the body politic, and the foolhardiness of entrusting one’s well being to the whims of power-hungry men.
For thirty goddamned years I have been screaming about all of this stuff and more, because I am a student of history, and for those who know history, the signs are crystal clear. For thirty goddamned years I have been screaming a warning— because it is the right thing to do, because I give a fuck, because I HAVE A VOICE.
I am almost 55 years old, and while I have a very good life, I am living a split-screen existence. I can pay for my now-much-more-expensive health insurance without a second thought, I have more than enough money for groceries and rent and gas for my car, and I never worry about being hassled by masked men every time I walk out my door because of my accent or the color of my skin or the thing between my legs (because rapists have posed as ICE agents in order to sexually assault women)… but everyday I wake up there is a cloud of doom that hangs over my aching head and heart, simply because I know my good life is merely a dream for so many. It would be a lot easier if I could just keep my head down, avert my eyes, not speak up, and lose myself in some asinine distraction, but I am not built that way.
So yes, I’m tired after 30 years of screaming about all of this, but I guess I’ll just keep on screaming. What else am I supposed to do?
If you are an artist like me, do not remain silent in the face of all this cruelty, inhumanity, and corruption. Use your voice. Do not be a coward, because while I do not know how long this regime will last, I do know that it will eventually end— all of them do.
And know this: history will remember those who spoke and acted with moral clarity during these times, as well as those who plodded silently along with their heads bowed, hoping to reemerge once the coast was clear.
If you look at the history of authoritarian and fascist regimes, there is a very clear pattern repeated over and over, one we are witnessing play out in real time right now:
1. A cult of personality centered around a charismatic figurehead, one who mythologizes a supposedly glorious past.
2. A polarized populace, with the figurehead employing emotionally charged rhetoric to further divide that populace into “us” and “them”.
3. Ultra-Nationalism coupled with a victimhood complex.
4. The assignment of blame for all manner of societal ills on a group of “others”.
5. A rapid and destructive dismantling of existing governmental institutions.
6. Anti-intellectualism, the re-writing of history, and a highly effective propaganda machine used to spread unreality.
7. Repression of the free press, whether via destruction, coercion, or co-option.
8. Oppressive domestic militarization in the name of maintaining “law and order”.
9. Economic control exerted via the merging of corporate and state power, benefitting a group of elites, not the general populace.
Sound familiar? If not, pay closer attention. History does not exactly repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes.
To my fellow musicians, writers, photographers, and other artists of all stripes who may be scared to speak out, to use your voice… know that this is our time. Swallow your fear, and speak truth to power— this is what we were put here to do. So raise your voices now, motherfuckers— NOW. I will leave you with a quote from Frederick Douglass:
“”Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
I, for one, will not quietly submit to anything. I haven’t for thirty years so far— why would I start now?
To the rest of my fellow citizens of good conscious, hang in there. I know this is scary, but we must raise our voices every chance we get. Come together and take heart. As well, and I know this is difficult for some to swallow in the face of the recent brutal state sanctioned murders, but I believe we must remain non-violent. The Orange Man would love nothing more than for violence and chaos to take over our streets, thereby enabling him to invoke the Insurrection Act— after all, that’s what these ICE raids and violence is really about, not immigration. It’s a wanna-be dictator pushing the envelope, testing the edges of his ability to exert control via terror. Trump is an agent of chaos, governing by tweet, and he has zero long-term plan for anything but maintaining control and remaining in office as long as possible— riots across our nation would only serve his purpose. From there, in a state of martial law, the mid-term elections could be severely disrupted or “temporarily cancelled”- do not be foolish enough to think he would not attempt this.
These are not normal times, and we are not dealing with a normal politician— in fact, we are not dealing with a politician at all, but a malignant narcissist of a reality tv star who has managed to shatter the historic guardrails that protect our democracy. The complete moral collapse of the Republican Party and the cowardly, willful impotence of establishment Democrats is ample evidence that normal, status-quo politics are over. Wake up, motherfuckers— business as usual is done. I am neither Democrat nor Republican, so I don’t have a partisan dog in this fight. I just want this dementia-riddled sociopath and his cabinet of freaks removed from office and replaced with someone with a least semblance of care for the common good, hopefully before he drags us into World War III.
While there are some that are overjoyed with the current situation here, they are in the minority. Remember that. And if you are one of those who can do the mental gymnastics required to somehow still believe that Trump is a good man and fit for office, know that we do not have political difference— we have a moral difference. This is no longer about politics— two dead American bodies on the streets of Minneapolis should make that clear enough. But it’s not too late to come to your senses and see the reality here, and that reality is that you have been lied to by a grifter, a con-man, someone who cares about nothing and no one but himself. To illustrate this, I will leave you with two quotes from Donald himself.
Recently Trump was asked in an interview if there were any limits to his power as commander-in-chief. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,“ he replied.
So what is Trump’s morality and mind state? Well, here’s an oldie but a goodie that should sum it up nicely:
“”I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States of America. All hail the Sexual-Assaulter-In-Chief.
Fuck the fascists. Do not comply.
And the endless refrain of “Shut up and sing” plays on and on… what in the flying fuck do you think I’ve been singing about for all these years?
I’m still here, and I’m still screaming.
