Judas Priest are tearing North America a new one with their current Firepower tour, and with the band enjoying great success on the charts and on the road, the band is also enjoying a renewed look at major media outlets.
Frontman Rob Halford was interviewed by Newsweek and noted (to the shock of few) that he is in no way a supporter of the Trump administration:
I'm not an American citizen, but I live in this country and eventually want to become an American citizen because I love this country so much. I'm not a Donald Trump supporter for a lot of reasons, but it's not only happening in America. It's happening in other parts of the world, as well, and it's very dangerous. I was born in 1951. We were still recovering from that evil bastard Adolf Hitler and the horrible things he did.
When I was a kid, trying to make sense of the world, I would think, “Well, maybe in about 10 years there will be no more of this.” And then it's still there. It's like what threatens the Force in Star Wars. It won't fucking go away. There's always a Darth Vader somewhere, fucking it up for the rest of us. Most of humanity just wants to live a peaceful life, don't we?
I absolutely love that Halford dropped a Darth Vader reference while discussing Trump. When asked to elaborate on what was so alarming about our current political climate, Halford said:
What's scary is how one person or a few people can have that much control and dictate such an outcome. It's your human right to push back against something you disagree with. You do that by voting for that guy instead of that guy, or that lady instead of that lady. If you're passive, that's when the trouble starts. Speaking as a gay man, when the horrible AIDS virus hit, one of the first big organizations to speak up was ACT UP. I had a T-shirt with the ACT UP slogan: Silence=Death. You can't be dismissive of important things. You have to speak out, even if you don't get the results you would like to have.
It's a very shaky time right now. I have so much faith in this country. But it does seem as though the brakes have been slapped on. It’s indeed disturbing, and it's such a shame, because throughout the Obama administration, tremendous things were achieved on the basis of human equality. That's the issue here. Treating one bunch of people this way, and treating this bunch that way. You can't do that. You have to give everybody the same rights.
But Halford made it clear, while he has his personal views on Trump, a Judas Priest show is an escapist moment of inclusivity:
[Trump supporters] won't [agree with some of those views]. There's a ton of metal heads that are supportive of [the Trump] administration. That's great. That's OK. You're not bringing that to the show. We're there to all join together, and that is the beautiful thing about a free, transparent society—which we don't appear to have right now. Some fans are completely opposite to me politically. But we can still be in the same room and have a good time and hopefully have a good discussion while respecting each other's opinions.
