BLÖTHAR THE BERSERKER Says TRUMP Supporters 'Came After GWAR' Over Satirical Killing At RIOT FEST

In a new interview with Rocking With Jam Man, GWAR frontman Mike "Blöthar The Berserker" Bishop addressed the backlash he and his bandmates received for gutting a President Donald Trump dummy while onstage at Riot Fest in Chicago last September. Footage from the concert showed a performer dressed as Trump being theatrically attacked on stage, a hallmark of GWAR's long-standing use of satire, gore and political parody. While fans praised the act as free expression and protest art, critics called it provocative and offensive, reigniting discussions over the limits of political satire in live performances.

Asked which of their onstage "killings" resulted in "the biggest backlash", Bishop told Rocking With Jam Man (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Probably the biggest… All in all, I'm gonna say this, that 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. 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. That marked the moment that suddenly GWAR was... People acted as if GWAR had changed, but GWAR didn't change. The world fricking changed. The way people felt about politics changed. The way people felt about comedy and humor changed."

Bishop continued: "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. It was people that once... Suddenly they can see that they're on the outside of a cultural moment. And it's a weird thing, man."

Blöthar The Berserker added: "We [fictitiously] killed President Obama. We didn't hear from the Secret Service. But you [fictitiously] 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. And the truth of the matter is that people think that you live in America, and you look around the world and you're, like, 'Oh, well, we're free. They're not.' That's bullshit. It's absolute bullshit. They don't have to call the police on you. What they have to do is make it hard for you to make money. And that's what they try to do. And especially a company like Live Nation, which is a big concert company that does shows and stuff like that, they are susceptible to pressure from the government. They need the government to kind of look the other way on some of their bullshit, like antitrust laws and things like that. And when you upset them, they can lean on you, and that is fucking censorship, no matter what you call it. so, we have faced that. GWAR faces it all the time. It's a real fucking thing."

Asked to clarify if the Secret Service has actually been after GWAR before, Bishop laughed and replied: "Well, let's just say that GWAR is on some lists."

It would be hard to find a public figure GWAR hasn't mockingly killed in the past 40 years. Over the years, the shock metal band has staged faux executions of every president of the last four decades (Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump and Biden),as well as Hillary Clinton, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and even Jesus Christ.

In 2008, GWAR "beheaded" a Barack Obama lookalike at D.C.'s 9:30 Club and then tore a life-sized Hillary Clinton doll limb from limb. Moments earlier, they disemboweled a John McCain body double. In 2016, they had performers dressed as Clinton and Trump. Both were gutted. And they had been decapitating a Joe Biden dummy for years.

After video of GWAR's Riot Fest concert went viral, conservative-leaning web sites and social media accounts called GWAR's performance an act of "incitement," adding that, "Democrats can't help themselves. They love promoting violence."

A representative for GWAR pushed against an article in the New York Post criticizing the band's Riot Fest skit. "Normalizing violence? Humans don't need GWAR for that," the representative said. "There is nothing normal about the Looney Toon violence acted out on a GWAR stage. GWAR is absurdist spectacle. GWAR is to violence what the New York Post is to journalism. Ridiculous."

This past April, GWAR guitarist Mike Derks (a.k.a. Balsac The Jaws Of Death) told The Guardian about the controversy over the band's Riot Fest skit: "In a sense, it's just laughable, but it was scary when we were getting death threats over social media. It did get me very upset when people were trying to say: 'Oh, you can't do that.' This is the country where we're supposed to be able to do that. People were saying we can't do it after we'd been doing it for 40 years."

Bishop previously played bass for GWAR during various stints in the 1980s and '90s and replaced Oderus Urungus as the band's frontman in 2014.