A member of the metal band GWAR says the band was contacted by the Secret Service after it performed a mock execution of President Donald Trump onstage.
GWAR has been known for decades for its comically violent and over-the-top live shows, which involve dousing the audience in gallons of fake blood and other bodily fluids, as well as performing faux executions of various world leaders and other famous people. Reason’s Christian Britschgi wrote in a 2022 review of a GWAR concert that the show included “beheading a rambling Joe Biden, dismembering a MAGA hat–wearing January 6 conspiracist, performing an onstage plunger abortion, severing Vladimir Putin’s nipples with an axe, and killing Xi Jinping while demanding he fork over some General Tso’s chicken.”
GWAR has always escaped cancellation over the years by being an equal opportunity offender, or perhaps equal opportunity dismemberer, but in a recent interview with Rocking With Jam Man, the band’s lead vocalist, Mike “Blöthar the Berserker” Bishop, said the Secret Service apparently didn’t get the joke.
“We killed President Obama. We didn’t hear from the Secret Service,” Bishop said. “But you kill Trump, and you better believe that there’s gonna be some shit going on. And that happened to us. It happened to us not too long ago.”
“So the Secret Service has actually been after you guys before?” the host Remzi Yates asked.
“Let’s just say that GWAR is on some lists,” Bishop said, laughing.
In an emailed statement to Reason, a spokesperson for the Secret Service declined to confirm if the agency had investigated or contacted the band.
“The U.S. Secret Service investigates anything that can be perceived as a threat toward our protectees,” the spokesperson said. “Out of concern for operational security, we do not discuss matters of protective intelligence.”
GWAR’s publicist did not return a request for comment.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech advocacy group, says that the band’s bloody performance art is clearly protected speech.
“The obviously over-the-top theatrical context of Gwar’s mock execution, and the fact that the band has done the same thing to other politicians and public figures, make clear that they weren’t actually threatening the president’s life,” Angel Eduardo, a senior writer and editor at FIRE, wrote on the group’s blog. “There’s also no credible argument that the performance amounted to unprotected incitement, which applies only to speech intended and likely to result in imminent unlawful action.”
Although the Trump administration has insisted it is fighting cancel culture and federal censorship of private citizens, it has frequently proven to be thin-skinned and censorial in all the ways it claims to hate.
Last year, a video clip of GWAR’s president-killing schtick went viral due to outrage from MAGA influencer accounts. For a band that’s pushed the envelope of onstage mayhem for years, to suddenly be targeted for something as blasé as mutilating an effigy of the president is a strange turnabout.
“For years, GWAR would do whatever the fuck we wanted. We would kill politicians from both sides of the aisle. We would kill famous people. We never had any backlash,” Bishop said. “I mean, granted, when we killed Princess Diana, people got a little upset. When we pulled a fish out of Laci Peterson’s pussy, people got a little upset. But until Donald Trump got in office, that’s when people started getting extremely upset about politics and music and politics in art.”
“People acted as if GWAR had changed, but GWAR didn’t change,” Bishop continued. “The world frickin changed. The way people felt about politics changed. The way people felt about comedy and humor changed. Comics like to complain about, ‘Uh, well, college campuses and censoring speech.’ And yeah, it is true. College kids are fricking stupid. There’s no question about it. And being uptight about identity politics is absurd, but we still never got any heat from that segment. It’s not like feminists or the politically correct squad, they didn’t really come after GWAR. Who came after GWAR was fucking Trump fans. That’s who came after GWAR.”
