Alternative rock band Green Day faced backlash for their anti-MAGA lyrics change during a New Year’s Eve performance, and now Tesla CEO Elon Musk is weighing in on the debate.
“Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it,” the billionaire entrepreneur shared in an X post on Sunday evening, adding two laughing-crying emojis. He was responding to an article from Not the Bee about the altered line.
Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it 🤣🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2024
While performing the band’s 2004 hit song “American Idiot” Sunday night, the band’s lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong sang, “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda” instead of the original lyrics, “I’m not a part of the redneck agenda,” as The Daily Wire previously reported.
This performance aired on ABC as part of the “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” presentation.
“American Idiot” was made as a political statement. It was released following the 9/11 terror attacks as a form of protest against then-President George W. Bush and the resulting war with Iraq.
Armstrong has been an outspoken critic of former president Donald Trump for years. He said in 2018, “I f***ing hate Donald Trump so much,” and “I used to scream I hated George Bush. This one is a little different. This one is bad, it’s like acid gone bad. F***ing LSD and the American Right, man.”
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In 2016, the band popularized the slogan “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” per Business Insider.
Musk has been more critical of leftist policies in recent years. He’s criticized both Trump and President Joe Biden.
In the recently released biography “Elon Musk,” the SpaceX founder said Trump was “kind of nuts” but “may turn out okay.”
“Trump might be one of the best bullsh***ers ever,” Musk told biographer Walter Isaacson. “If you just think of Trump as a sort of con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.”
Musk also said Biden could plausibly “audition for role of Crypt Keeper – no makeup or special effects needed!”
“When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over,” Musk told Isaacson.