Green Day’s New Year’s Eve performance of their 2004 protest song “American Idiot”—in which lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong substituted “MAGA agenda” for “redneck agenda”—wasn’t well received by Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, who claimed that the real punk figures were actually… Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.
On Fox News’ The Five, Gutfeld described the band as “the opposite of punk rock,” a sentiment which just so happens to echo Musk’s own comments accusing them of “milquetoastedly raging for [the machine].”
“You have four aging hipsters mimicking exactly what you would hear out of the mouths of Joe Biden, the legacy media, and, most important, the establishment,” Gutfeld began.
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“And I would say Green Day is essentially an establishment corporate identity in music. They pretend to be giving it to the man, when they are just giving him a reach-around. Do you know what they’re like? They are like your high school English teacher who bought a shirt at Hot Topic to make him cool with the kids,” he said. “But this is so the opposite of punk rock.”
Gutfeld then claimed that “it doesn’t matter” which Republican is the party’s standard-bearer because Green Day will still be against them.
“You think, ‘Oh, Trump’s different?’ No. The next Republican will be seen as Hitler and a Nazi,” Gutfeld said, before offering Fox viewers two alternative voices to Green Day.
“You want punk? You look at the people thinking outside of politics like Joe Rogan, like Elon Musk,” Gutfeld said, even though the latter, for instance, explicitly urged people to vote for Republicans in the 2022 midterms—right after he shared a meme featuring a Nazi soldier.
And Rogan, a self-described “fucking moron,” has claimed that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” and has pushed conspiracies that some election outcomes are manipulated.
Yet perhaps it makes sense that this is the duo that people should look to, according to the man who declared just a few months ago that “elections don’t work.”
“Those are the punkers!” Gutfeld insisted. “Real rebels threaten the establishment. They don’t appease it.”
“[Green Day] turned into everything they hated. I love it because their music is overrated. They are no Vandals.”
