Billy Corgan ranks high on the list of music’s most vexing personalities, but The Smashing Pumpkins frontman seems to have finally found his match in conspiracy theorist and noted crazy person Alex Jones. When Corgan appeared on Jones’ Infowars talk show last month, he achieved an almost transcendental level of ignorance by comparing “social justice warriors” to the KKK. But, whoo boy, it looks like he was just warming up.
As Stereogum points out, another segment of that interview has been posted online in an Infowars video that introduces Corgan as a “musical icon and great patriot.” Corgan certainly expresses a lot of, ahem, patriotic ideas in the interview, expounding on how he feels about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Let’s just say Corgan isn’t feeling the Bern:
“I can’t believe that we’re even having this discussion, if you can understand when I say that to you humbly. To be talking in America in 2016 about Mao is a good idea, and a socialist is running for president and that’s OK, and we’re going to go back to these crazy tax rates where we’re going to completely disempower the innovators in our country because the new technocratic class wants to keep their position and they want to keep anybody else from coming in the game… I mean, it’s just crazy to me.”
Corgan seems to have Sanders’ message of social empowerment mixed up with somebody else’s, but why stop him while he’s on a roll? After making the broad generalization that “people in the entertainment industry do not care about facts,” he delivered a hard-hitting take on the people who protest outside of Donald Trump rallies:
“When I watch some of the clips that you guys have been been putting up at some of these protests, I have no respect for what these people are doing. They’re shutting down free speech… If they have that level of vitriol for let’s say Donald Trump as a candidate, because they feel it’s antithetical to what they believe in, where is the five times greater condemnation for those societies that are treating their people far worse than just words and ideas? It’s always interesting to me how people kind of pick their spots.”
Corgan’s talk on free speech then devolves into the typical New World Order stuff Infowars is known for, complete with some totally eye-opening comparisons to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and The Matrix. If you feel like losing some IQ points, watch the complete interview below.
