During an appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show”, conservative rocker Aaron Lewis was asked for his opinion of Bruce Springsteen, who can best be described as Lewis‘s political polar opposite, having been a vocal opponent to U.S. president Donald Trump on many occasions. The STAIND frontman said of the New Jersey-bred musician who became rock ‘n’ roll’s voice of the working class (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I think that he is a disgusting display of not appreciating what was handed to him, in this country as being an American, the success that he has had. The fact that he duped us all with one of the most anti-American songs ever and called it ‘Born In The USA’ as some sort of celebration of how great it is to be born in the USA. I’m angry at myself for not seeing it for so long and actually giving him, in my mind, the credit of being a representation of blue-collar America.”
Lewis continued: “I think that [Springsteen] has forgotten where he came from. I think that if you’re not careful doing this, this career that that me and him have both been so blessed to have had, if you’re not careful, it will consume you. And it’s obvious that it creates a situation where you’ve lost sight of the reality of the country that you live in because you’ve lived such a cush… you’ve had so much, you have so much that it’s really easy to take a stance that is so anti everything that you were lucky enough to have, lucky enough to create, lucky enough to change your situation in life. And he’s just lost touch with the struggles. He’s lost touch with the struggle.”
Referencing the fact that Springsteen is a long and prominent supporter of Democratic presidential candidates, Aaron added: “It seems like most people who have lost touch with the true struggle of life, those are the people that vote for these fucking idiots. Those are the people that feel like they have to virtue signal. Those are the people that, somewhere along the way, they feel guilty for the success that they have had, so they somehow have to make it up with this nonsensical bullshit that… You grew up at the same time… I did. It was the most unracially driven… The verbal beating that we took over and over and over, our whole childhood of you don’t judge a man by the color of his skin, you judge a man by the content of his character… It was the best that our country has ever been. And I think that that didn’t work well for the Democrats and the Communists, because they thrive in the chaos. They want us at each other’s throats. They want us bickering internally so that we have no sense of shared country pride, that we have no sense of shared morality because they’ve created so many things artificially for us to fight about.”
Lewis previously called out Springsteen in his controversial solo single “Am I The Only One”. The song, which took aim at liberals and touched on American flags burning and statues that had been removed in the country, saw Aaron criticizing Bruce at the end of the track, singing: “Am I the only one who quits singin’ along every time they play a Springsteen song.”
Asked during a 2021 appearance on The Daily Wire‘s “Candace” show why he chose to call out Springsteen in the song’s lyrics, Lewis said: “Because he’s always portrayed himself as the all-American middle-class guy. And during all of this craziness, he said that if one man is re-elected to the office of presidency that he was gonna move to Australia. How American is that? You’re gonna bail on America just because you don’t like the guy that may have gotten into office?”
In his 2016 memoir “Born To Run”, Springsteen called “Born In The USA”, the title track off his blockbuster seventh album, “a protest song,” with the track’s lyrics telling of a local loser who’s railroaded into military service during the Vietnam War, scarred by his experiences in Southeast Asia, and completely forgotten about by his country when he returns home.
Lewis, who is widely considered to be one of the most politically conservative musicians in rock, made headlines in September 2021 when he urged his fans to chant “Fuck Joe Biden” during a STAIND concert in Pennsylvania.
Aaron told the Anchorage Press in a January 2020 interview that he considered the first Donald Trump impeachment by the House Of Representatives as the clearest representation of what’s wrong with America these days.
Lewis was a staunch critic of President Barack Obama, telling a crowd at one of his solo concerts in 2016: “Barack Obama should have been impeached a long fucking time ago. Every fucking decision he makes is against the Constitution, it’s against what’s good for our fucking country, and he is truly the worst fucking president that we have ever had in the history of this fucking country.”
That same year, Lewis told Billboard that he would support Trump in the U.S. presidential race, even though he was “disappointed” by the real estate mogul “with the bickering and the name-calling.” Lewis added that he voted for Senator Ted Cruz, Trump‘s closest competitor in the Republican nomination race, in the Massachusetts primary.
In June 2021, Lewis made headlines when he accused the U.S. Democratic Party of fighting against every major civil rights initiative and of having a long history of discrimination.
In March 2022, Lewis told the Los Angeles Times that he doesn’t blindly listen to information that is delivered by the mainstream media.
“I’m not uneducated; I’m actually really smart, and I look for myself. I seek other options of information,” he said. “I refuse to believe that a huge, gigantic corporation has our best interest in mind.”
Asked where he gets his news, Lewis said: “I have news feeds and people that I follow on Telegram. Dan Ball. Andrew Wilkow. Mark Levin. If I’m gonna watch any sort of news source on television, it’s Tucker Carlson.”
This past June, Springsteen ripped Trump during his “Land of Hopes And Dreams” tour, calling Trump a “treasonous” president who’s “persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent.” Springsteen later told The New York Times that Trump is a “moron”, but only partially responsible for the “tragic” state of America. “I think that it was the combination of the deindustrialization of the country and then the incredible increase in wealth disparity that left so many people behind. It was ripe for a demagogue,” Springsteen told The New York Times. “While I can’t believe it was this moron that came along, he fit the bill for some people. But what we’ve been living through in the last 70 days is things that we all said, ‘This can’t happen here.’ ‘This will never happen in America.’ And here we are.” He added, “It’s an American tragedy.”
