Rapper Lupe Fiasco was thrown offstage and escorted off the premises of a Washington, D.C. concert hall during a pre-inauguration concert Sunday night, after going on an anti-war, anti-Obama rant, according to concertgoers.
Josh Rogin, a reporter with Foreign Policy magazine, tweeted late Sunday, “Lupe Fiasco just got thrown off stage here at the Hamilton Live after he went on an anti-Obama diatribe mid set.”
“So Lupe played one anti-war song for 30 min and said he didn’t vote for Obama,” he continued, “and eventually was told to move on to the next song…Lupe refused to move to the next song so a team of security guards came on stage and told him to go.”
Another attendee at the StartUp RockOn event tweeted, “Things going terribly wrong at @lupefiasco performance during#SURO. Kicked off stage, bashing obama…”
Watch:
This isn’t the first time the rapper, born Wasalu Muhammad Jaco, has been vocal about his dislike for the president.
During an interview with CBS in 2011, he called the president a terrorist. Lupe said, “My fight against terrorism, to me, the biggest terrorist is Obama and the United States of America. I’m trying to fight the terrorism that’s actually causing the other forms of terrorism.”
“You know, the root cause of terrorism is the stuff the U.S. government allows to happen. The foreign policies that we have in place in different countries that inspire people to become terrorists.”
Lupe has also criticized Obama’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has stated that he does not vote in elections because of his anti-establishment views.
StartUp Rock On, the concert’s organizers, claimed shortly after 2:00 a.m. Monday that Lupe “left the stage earlier than we had planned. But Lupe Fiasco was not ‘kicked off stage’ for an ‘anti-Obama rant.'”
“We are staunch supporters of free speech, and free political speech,” the organizers said. “This was not about his opinions. Instead, after a bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance that left the crowd vocally dissatisfied, organizers decided to move on to the next act.”
This story was updated after publication to include a statement from Startup Rock On. Video courtesy NowThisNews.
