Steel Panther guitarist makes complete sense...

[auslander]

Here's a quote from an interview with Russ Parish posted today on the interwebs:

"I don't try to get political with that shit, but I do think that our band separates the wheat from the chaff right out of the gate.

"If you are offended by us talking about ass fucking then you're probably not going to come to the show in the first place.

"There's gonna be different opinions on certain things but I try not to go to a political place usually, especially our shows.

"I don't give a fuck whether people are Republicans or Democrats at our shows, I don't care whether they're pro-vax or anti-vax, I don't give a shit.

"But when it comes to speech though, I believe that everybody should be able to say whatever the fuck they want whenever they want. And that's what makes our fucking country great.

"I do think that there's plenty of people in Canada that are figuring out that there are some big differences between America and Canada, and one of the main ones is you can pretty much say whatever the fuck you want.

"Although let's face it, you can't say whatever you want in America anymore, that's going away. You can't say what you want and it's not because the government's clamping down.

"It's because big tech is clamping down. So if you say, 'Hey, I don't know about the vaccine,' for instance, 'Oh, well, if you don't know about it, we're just gonna take you off, you're spreading dangerous rumors.'

"And I think that's just a way for people to shut down their political opposition and I think it's a bullshit excuse. But unfortunately, that's where we're at with America now.

"Now political rivals can go, 'Hey, we don't like what they're saying so let's get Big Tech to remove it. Let's get Big Tech to get it the fuck out. And if you don't like what we're doing...'

"I think political opposition doesn't have to use the government to silence people anymore, they're using companies.

"If you can get Nike to mandate something for all their employees, or get Starbucks to mandate something and say, 'Hey, everybody who wants to come in our store has to wear a mask,' or something, the government can step out and go, 'Hey, they're private, they can do whatever the fuck they want.'

"But that's not really true because what if Starbucks said, 'Hey, we don't like black people anymore, black people can't come in,' the government would say, 'Hey, motherfucker, you can't do that!'

"So the government steps in when they want to step in, but when they don't want to step in they go, 'They're private, they can do whatever they want.' So you can see how that is going for people.

"But we definitely don't have freedom of speech as we used to in our country, and that changed a lot over the last 10 months now."