Billy Corgan, the lead singer for the multi-platinum rock band Smashing Pumpkins, is getting bashed on Twitter for comparing social justice warriors (SJWs) to the Ku Klux Klan during an interview with radio host Alex Jones, but its not the first time he’s spoken out to defend free speech for everyone.
On his Tuesday InfoWars broadcast, Alex Jones called social justice warriors “hateful, dumbed down”, and referenced a masked “tranny” who took off his mask to spit at a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon. Jones said it was “just this made-up thing in their head when we don’t hate them”, but added that he – “personally” – would like “to punch them in the nose.”
“Well, there’s two schools of thought: One is, they’re gone,” Corgan responded. “They’re Maoists. They have the Little Red Book in their hand. You’re not gonna get them back.”
Then both Corgan and Jones agreed that SJWs were “a cult.”
Corgan suggested that “the only thing that’s going to adjust their ideological fixation is reality,” and said he was “horrified” free speech believers “are gonna be coming for me.”
“It may not be tomorrow, but it’s soon enough because I said the wrong thing on the wrong day because I was tired and I didn’t take my X2 that day, or whatever,” Corgan told Jones. “You know what I mean? It’s like, to live like that, to live where every word is a landmine – you know what I’m saying – it’s not the world I want to live in.”
Later in the interview, after defending the First Amendment rights of KKK members, Corgan said, “I’m not saying America doesn’t have a racist bent, so let’s put that out there to start with, but let’s go back to a time where racism was accepted, it was institutionalized. OK? If you could go back to Selma 1932, and the Klan member spitting in some person of color’s face, don’t you think that guy thought he was right, too?”
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On Twitter, fans mocked his weight, decline in record sales, and shaved head.
“When did Billy Corgan become one of the #SNL “Da Bears” guys?” one user joked, before changing a line from his hit song, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” to “‘Despite all my rage, I’ll have 17 bratwursts.'”
Another twitter user said, “Billy Corgan actually looks like an albino pumpkin now. Jesus.” And TheChangeU12 tweeted, “If Billy Corgan is still alive I can’t think of any good reason people would be talking about him.”
Corgan was accused of being transphobic in 2011 when he said on Facebook that guitar pedal maker Devi Ever was a “he/she” and an “ugly pig.”
