Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Water railed against President Trump in an interview released Friday and said he did little while in the White House besides make it acceptable for Americans to be racist.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the British-born musician and activist also expressed his support for the protests against police brutality and systemic racism that have taken place across the U.S this year.
Mr. Waters, 77, also indicated during the interview that he recently determined nonviolence might not be the way to respond to a government he described as conducting itself quite to the contrary.
The former Pink Floyd singer, bassist and songwriter made the comments during a video interview conducted earlier in the week for Rolling Stone’s “Useful Idiots” podcast and later uploaded online.
Mr. Waters, who now lives in the Hamptons, New York, recalled seeing “miles and miles and miles” of the president’s supporters in pickup trucks covered in pro-Trump, pro-police and Confederate flags.
“So if there’s one thing that Trump did — apart from be a buffoon and make everybody, you know, point and laugh — he made it acceptable to be a racist, supremacist, good ’ol boy in a pickup truck, which shows us that it never went away,” said Mr. Waters.
Discussing the Black Lives Matter activist movement and recent nationwide protests held under its name, Mr. Waters said that he hopes it “struck enough of a chord” that it continues for some time.
“I realized half-way through this — and it’s not half-way through, we’re just at the beginning of this set of protests — that one shouldn’t try and be non-violent about this,” Mr. Waters added.
Protesters demonstrating against the U.S. government and for police reform are “fighting a monster that is the most violent thing that certainly that any of has ever experienced,” he said.
“This is the most violent country in the world. Not just because there are more guns than there are people, which is pretty weird, but because they get used on people,” said Mr. Waters.
Mr. Waters co-founded Pink Floyd and 1965 and wrote some of the group’s best-known material before leaving the band two decades later. He still performs and records as a solo act, and he was set to tour the U.S. this summer before the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic halted virtually the entire live music industry.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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