Jack Black has said he’s cancelled the rest of the Tenacious D world tour after his bandmate Kyle Gass sparked an outcry with a comment about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The comedy rock group were on stage in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday when Gass was asked to make a wish after being presented with a cake for his 64th birthday.
He appeared to reply: “Don’t miss Trump next time.”
Gass also split with his agent following the incident.
What you’ve done is proposong a solution without clearly defining the problem. That makes your question sound appealing, it makes it sound rhetorical, but actually is meaningless without context.
Supposed the shooter had succeeded in his objective. One might imagine that Joe would win in November, maybe. But four years from now there would be a different candidate with just as bad views on those same issues, and the institutional problems that allowed Trump to gain power would still be in place.
Is gambling on 4 years of possible peace worth legitimatizing the policy of executing people whose political views you don’t like? That’s something you have to decide for yourself.
Many fundamental issues facing the country today go back decades. Pick your poison. Stacking the courts is an old strategy. Citizens United happened long ago. Redistricting and gerrymandering have been happening for decades if not centuries. All of those things matter, none of them were caused by Trump, and none of them would be fixed if Trump were gone. The systemic weaknesses can only be fixed by implementing systemic solutions, whatever those might be.
I don’t think I need a complete solution to be of the opinion that Hitler needed to be met with violence at some point. Of course we can’t know that Trump will be the same, but is there a possibility that his election in November leads to at least decades of Christofascist laws being enacted, if not a civil war? Perhaps by the time it becomes obvious that we’ve reached that point it’ll be too late.
Maybe Joe’s win this year will only put off the inevitable. But maybe it’ll lead to someone the next election with enough guts to give SCOTUS what they want and show them what a president with immunity can do, and the 6 who voted for making the president a king will end up in a black site until their more suitable replacements can be installed. At which point hopefully the corrupt ruling can be overturned by justices who aren’t being bribed. I don’t know shit about the law but I trust that if someone like Kagen says political assassinations are now legal, that’s further into fascism territory than I want our country to be.
You ask if gambling on 4 years of peace before something worse happens is worth it. I’d ask if gambling on a Trump election in November is something the US will survive. I guess we’ll see, because there’s no way in hell Biden’s doing anything illegal-- oh sorry, I meant any of the now legal things that Trump won’t hesitate to do when he’s “dictator day one”.
I sure hope we find out. I sure hope all of the candidates live well past election day. I hope that we have massive voter turnout and Trump is destroyed in a landslide election. Metaphorically. I don’t want him to get crushed with real rocks in a real landslide. Let him lose the election, retire from politics, get locked up for a while for his crimes, and live out the sad remainder of his life until he dies of old age. Given his general health now, it probably won’t be too long anyway.