Slipknot’s Corey Taylor Talks Trump: ‘We’re Going to Shut This S–t Down’
Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor said last December that Donald Trump running for president was the worst thing he’d seen in pop culture in 2015. Now he tells Rolling Stone he’s seen enough of the GOP candidate riling up “base, ugly bigotry and racism” that he’s reached a breaking point.
“The thing that bothered me was that people were taking Trump seriously,” Taylor says Wednesday, during an interview about his new Beats 1 radio show on which freedom of speech was recently a talking point. “I’m not going to let that [racism] stand. I may have bullshitted myself into thinking we were a little further ahead when it comes to race, but what we’re seeing right now is a lot of the far right fringe coming out of the woodwork and wearing their hatred right on their sleeves. That cannot be what our legacy is. Too many people died during the Civil War, during the Civil Rights Movement. We should not be asking, ‘Jesus Christ, what decade is this? How is this OK?'”
The singer says he’s felt conflicted about the way Trump takes advantage of his right to freedom of speech, citing the treatment of reporters at rallies as disturbing. “Did you see the video of a Secret Service agent choke-slamming the reporter?” he asks, referring to footage that came out Monday. “What country is this exactly? And the fact that [Trump] absolutely bulldozes his way through questions instead of answering them, it brings such a horrific reaction to people. It’s shocking that nothing is sticking to him. I want to encourage people to stand up for freedom of speech, but as much as I would love to not hear anyone talk the way that Donald Trump does, unfortunately, freedom of speech covers him, too.”
The general public needs to “stop posting photos of their lunch” and “raise their voices in dissent,” the singer says. “I’m damn sure not going to shut up about it,” he says. “This is not what people fought and died and sacrificed everything for, and I’ll be damned if I let my country go down that road again.
“I know that as soon as people hear cursing, they tend to tune it out,” he concludes. “But if you’re not cursing, you’re not pissed off enough. You really need to get that in your blood because that’s the only way we’re gong to shut this shit down.”
In a previous interview, Taylor said there was a presidential candidate he liked. “Bernie’s the one who’s got my interest,” he said. “Everything about Hillary seems prepackaged and planned.”
Taylor’s radio show, A Series of Bleeps, airs weekly on Beats 1 on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EST and is repeated on Thursdays at noon. In addition to the radio show, Taylor will be fronting Slipknot on tour this summer in a joint trek with Marilyn Manson.