He has some books to grift onto his sizable audience, so it’s not all that surprising, but Skillet’s John Cooper is back with his latest opinion on the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. At this point, he might as well have replaced Trapt’s Chris Taylor Brown as (arguably) rock’s biggest pariah – except this time, a cross is attached. While it doesn’t appear to have affected their streaming stats or tickets sold much, John Cooper has brought Skillet under increasing fire the past few years. Not for writing formulaic music that is becoming more rehashed with each record, but for spouting off opinions that are increasingly working to divide their fanbase.
It’s almost hard to believe this is the same band that actually tried to actively bring in the lost, the hurting, and abandoned. Songs like “The Last Night” actively sought out those who wanted to end it all, but all it took was a cover of Three Days Grace’s “Animal I Have Become” for Skillet to pivot towards the mainstream rock market. Wait, you’re telling me it’s not a cover? And I thought I was awake and alive.
As helpfully transcribed by Blabbermouth (with the full video below), John Cooper sure had some loud opinions about the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies.
“Hey, guys. What’s up? I’m about to go on stage right here, but my phone’s blowing up from all these people sending me videos of the opening ceremony for the Olympics of insane, crazy stuff because we don’t live in a normal world any longer, okay?
“For all the people that are always saying it’s so polarized, we gotta get along, everybody stop yelling at each other, we just gotta agree we all want the same things. Do we, though? Do we?
“Let me explain this to you,” he continued. “This is what tolerance looks like in the new world. According to all of these global elites that want to change all of Western civilization and remake the world in their image, this is the way tolerance works for them. You sit down to watch the Olympics with your kids. They’re going to start the show with drag queens who come out and mock Christianity. They’re going to mock the number one largest faith in the world. They’re gonna mock it on TV in front of the whole world.
“The way that tolerance works is this: if you’re sitting with your kids and you go, ‘What the heck’s going on? I don’t want my kids watching drag queens. That’s not my values.’ If that’s what you say, well, then you’re a bad person. You need to change. You’re old school. You’re the person that is causing all the hate in the world and they gotta shut you up. At the same time, the way tolerance works in the new world is that it’s okay for the drag queens to mock Christianity. Christianity is okay to mock. All right? So they can do whatever they want to, but you can’t.
“You see, this isn’t normal,” Cooper added. “This is not normal. It’s not the world that I wanna live in. I don’t think it’s the world that most people in the Western civilization wanna live in.
“They are, in fact, coming after your kids, because the global elites are perverts. They are coming after your kids. The question is, what are you gonna do about it? Are we gonna stop watching? Are you gonna stop watching? Say, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’
“What in the world does sexuality have to do with the Olympic Games?” John said. “Can we just leave your sexuality out of the opening for the Olympics? Something we all try to do together around the world, and they make it a celebration of sexuality. That should tell you something.
“So I reject the new world. I reject their false tolerance. It’s not real tolerance anyway. I reject it and I say this: God will not be mocked. Go for it. Go for it. God will not be mocked. You will reap what you sow.
“I don’t know about you, but I am not bowing down to this new regime.”
“Global elites” tells you all you need to know here. We all know about the other people that use terms like that, which is really quite the rabbit hole to dive into. It’s really quite sad that someone with Cooper’s platform couldn’t have talked about how fucking cool it was that Gojira performed at the opening ceremonies. Oh wait, then again, that band’s environmental and precious resource-conserving music + message would clearly be too wimpy, weak, and woke for him to praise.
You really have to wonder who Cooper’s target audience is here. Actually, we know – it’s the far-right, Fox News reactionary fanbase that many of their fans identify with. The ones that don’t? Yeah, they’re leaving Skillet in droves. So much for a band whose core mission used to actually be reaching the misfits.
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