Neil Young has eviscerated Donald Trump in new editorial urging Americans to “rise up” in the wake of the Minnesota ICE shooting.
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In a new op-ed on his website, the musician shared a post titled “It’s ICE Cold Here in America”, in which he took aim at the growing civil unrest in the country, which he sees as a result of the President’s “inept government” and lack of “conscience”.
“Wake up, people!” he wrote. “Today the USA is a disaster. Donald Trump is destroying America bit by bit with his staff of wannabes, people with no experience or talent, closet alcoholic wife beaters, inexperienced leaders who only know how to lie to keep favor with Trump’s falseness so they can hold their unearned positions in his inept government, a Congress full of Republicans acting like idiots with no conscience.
“He has divided us. How did we elect these creeps who have no spin, no values, no conscience, no way to save the USA.”
“We need to take Trump at his word,” Young continued. “Make America Great Again. It won’t be easy while he is trying to turn our cities into battlegrounds so he can cancel our elections with marshal law and escape all accountability.”
“Something has to change this. We know what to do. Rise up. Peacefully in millions. Too many innocent people are dying.”
The editorial arrived just days after the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, which triggered widespread protests across the country. Good, a prize-winning poet with a wife and three children, was killed during a large-scale immigration enforcement operation.
She was a volunteer in a network of “neighbourhood patrols” keeping track of ICE operations in Minneapolis and was shot in her car by a federal agent.
“It’s ICE cold here in America,” he wrote of their actions. “There was no ICE before Trump. No soldiers in the streets before Trump. Every move he makes is to build instability so he can stay in power… He knows nothing about love. He does not know you are. Use your love of life, your love of one another, your love of children and theirs and ours. Peacefully. Now.”
While ICE have been active before Trump -created from two predecessor agencies in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 – the violent and aggressive actions seen of late are unequivocally connected with Trump’s vows to crack down on illegal immigration.
This is far from the first time that the ‘Harvest Moon’ songwriter has used his platform to make a political stand. Back in January, he announced that he was removing his music from Spotify – who this week confirmed that a controversial ICE recruitment ad campaign on their platform has ended – after episodes of Joe Rogan’s controversial podcast spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines (at the time, the podcast was signed exclusively to Spotify).
He later confirmed that he would be removing his discography from Amazon Music, and urged his fans to boycott corporations like Amazon, Meta, and Whole Foods. Similarly, the singer-songwriter also deactivated his Facebook and Instagram accounts over Meta’s reported “unconscionable use of chatbots with children” earlier this year, and in 2023, he quit X/Twitter after Elon Musk appeared to endorse an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
On his website, Young wrote at the time: “We are stopping all use of X we can control. For reasons that should be obvious to the richest man on Earth, we are taking this action against his company.”
Young has long been a vocal opponent of Trump, too, and even joined Joan Baez, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, where he performed songs live in opposition to the president.
More recently, he shared a song criticising Trump called ‘Big Crime’, where he hit out at the Republican party leader, and he also told his fans earlier this year that Trump was “out of control” and “we need a real president”.
Other protest songs of his that reflect the message put forward in the new ‘As Time Explodes’ video include ‘Let’s Roll Again’, which sees him sing “If You’re A Fascist, Get A Tesla” – a jab at Elon Musk and the billionaire class.
Young also previously expressed concern that he would not be allowed to play his current US tour due to his comments about the president, whom he noted had been a fan of his music “for decades”.
