STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis has accused the U.S. Democratic Party of fighting against every major civil rights initiative and of having a long history of discrimination. The outspoken conservative rocker, who reinvented himself as a solo country artist in the last decade, voiced his views before performing a new song called "Am I The Only One" during his June 4 concert at The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I wrote this next song because I'm sitting here as a 49-year-old father of three watching a very small handful of people destroy the country that was handed down to me by my forefathers — the country that my grandfather and my uncles, they all fought for. "You know, it's kind of crazy," he continued. "I watched the Joe Biden speech the other day. I don't even know why I do it, but I do. And I heard him tell the story about this massacre that happened in Oklahoma a long time ago. And I listened to him throw out all these facts and spit out all this information about the KKK and about systemic racism and everything else. "So, I'd like to point something out that is very obvious yet no one seems to bring it up or talk about it, that every racist law that's ever been put into place, every scar on America was the Democrats. All of it. It's there if you go and look. Every racist law was come up with and voted through and unanimously passed by fucking Democrats. The KKK was fucking Democrats. "I am sick of this fucking bullshit," Lewis added. "It's all fucking lies. It's called projection. Do you know what that is? When you point at everybody else and tell them that they're guilty of what you're guilty of." According to a "fact-check" article that was published by USA Today in June 2020, historians agree that although factions of the Democratic Party did majorly contribute to the Civil War's start and the KKK's founding, it is inaccurate to say the party is responsible for either. As the Democrats introduced policies to support voting rights, it became the favored party for most black voters and has remained so since. With that realignment, many racist voters who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 left the Democratic Party to become Republicans. Lewis originally performed "Am I The Only One" in March at another solo concert in Texas — a state which removed all pandemic restrictions that same month. The as-yet-unreleased track, which finds Aaron asking if he is the only one fed up with the state of the country right now, features such lyrics as: "Am I the only one, who can't take no more, screaming if you don't like it there's the fucking door, this ain't the freedom we've been fighting for, it was something more, yeah, it was something more." Apparently addressing the removal of Confederate statues, Lewis sings in the song: "Am I the only one willing to fight for my love of the red and white, and the blue, burning on the ground as the statues coming down in a town near you, watching the threads of Old Glory come undone, Am I the only one. I can't be the only one." Lewis also criticizes Bruce Springsteen at the end of the track, singing: "Am I the only one, who quit singing along every time they play a Springsteen song." Springsteen can best be described as Lewis's political polar opposite, having been a vocal opponent to former U.S. president Donald Trump on many occasions. Last August, Bruce went as far as to allow the use of his song "The Rising" in a video that aired during night one of the Democratic National Convention. Lewis, who is widely considered to be one of the most politically conservative musicians in rock, told the Anchorage Press in a January 2020 interview that he considered the first Trump impeachment by the House Of Representatives as the clearest representation of what's wrong with America these days. Lewis was a staunch critic of President Barack Obama, telling a crowd at one of his solo concerts in 2016: "Barack Obama should have been impeached a long fucking time ago. Every fucking decision he makes is against the Constitution, it's against what's good for our fucking country, and he is truly the worst fucking president that we have ever had in the history of this fucking country." That same year, Lewis told Billboard that he would support Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race, even though he was "disappointed" by the real estate mogul "with the bickering and the name-calling." Lewis added that he voted for Senator Ted Cruz, Trump's closest competitor in the Republican nomination race, in the Massachusetts primary.
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