For more than 40 years, the members of thrash metal costumed rock group GWAR have been schlepping their giant intergalactic monster costumes across the planet as part of a wildly over-the-top theatrical show featuring the beheading and/or comically absurd disemboweling of every president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

The band’s fans gleefully push to the front of their gigs in order to get blasted with any manner of fake bodily fluids that erupt from the towering, cartoonish dummies. But over the weekend, some folks who apparently just discovered the band, allegedly got into a tizzy over one aspect of GWAR’s current show — a mock beheading of Tesla CEO and former DOGE boss Elon Musk. The tweets appeared to be an attempt to gin up outrage over the formerly uncontroversial bit, at a time when Donald Trump and the chairman of the FCC have been sending ominous messages about their view of the limits on the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

“The idea that GWAR is normalizing violence is patently absurd,” lead singer Michael “Blöthar the Berserker” Bishop tells Billboard about a hair-on-fire headline from the New York Post tabloid earlier this week that read: “Heavy Metal Band Stage Phony Beheading of Elon Musk, Murder Trump in Shocking Festival Performance.”

The show in question was the band’s appearance at the Riot Fest in Chicago, which, as noted above, was in keeping with their performance style of the past four decades, during which they have taken their prop chainsaws and swords to public figures left, right, and center, including former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber and Pope Francis, as well as America’s most recent non-Trump president, democrat Joe Biden.

The Post piece was seemingly inspired by a tweet in which someone — credited as ”Billboard @hottakekaren, which many suspected was a fake account — said the band’s act was not “edgy, it’s grotesque and reckless and normalizes violence against a real person. This is not okay.”

Bishop was both annoyed and surprised by the alleged outrage, noting that the band have been at this for a long time — and that GWAR has always been, like punk rock in many ways, “chaotic and indecipherable” in its politics. “We’re not millionaires that are afraid of what people are going to say when they see what we do,” he says, questioning if the tweets allegedly denigrating the band were posted by actual humans with a bone to pick or bots. “Yeah, it pissed me off! We’re a group of artists that makes art, and it’s really the idea that what we have done is normalizing violence
 there’s nothing normal about the violence that goes on at a GWAR show. It’s a cartoon, it’s Looney Tunes.”

The fake blood-spurting bits are the way they are for a reason, he says: because the band doesn’t want people to see what their doing and think of it as a realistic depiction of violence. “It’s a parody of violence,” Bishop says of the seven-foot-tall Musk puppet in a DOGE shirt who got his prop head lopped off — in a costume the singer says is frequently switched out to represent whoever the band says it does based on the story they’re telling on that album cycle. “It’s trying to make violence into a spectacle and show humanity’s absolute absurdity. That’s what GWAR is, it’s absurdism. To say it’s normalizing violence is really reaching.”

And while it’s nothing new, the headline came in the midst of the national debate over ABC pulling Jimmy Kimmel off the air last week, after the late night host made a joke related to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The joke resulted in Nexstar, which owns more than two dozen ABC-affiliated stations, saying they were going to yank Kimmel’s show indefinitely. A day after the monologue, FCC chair Brendan Carr appeared on YouTuber Benny Johnson’s show and appeared to make a threat to revoke ABC affiliate licenses over Kimmel’s comments.

“What people don’t understand is that the broadcasters 
 have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest,” said Carr. “When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” The comments from Carr were interpreted by many as a threat to chill free speech, or, as similar conduct featuring informal government pressure to influence private action is referred to: “jawboning.”

“The First Amendment protects expression in the form of music,” Kevin Goldberg, vice president and First Amendment expert at the non-partisan First Amendment education organization Freedom Forum tells Billboard. “What you’re seeing and what you’re hearing [from GWAR] is fully protected by the First Amendment, as is the right to engage in parody and satire as part of that performance.”

At at time when Trump — who has been the target of multiple assassination attempts — has complained that “97%” of what the media says about him is negative, Goldberg says that while GWAR’s act is protected speech, there are two unprotected areas that are not covered by the First Amendment that have been bandied about over the past two weeks. He says both of them are currently being widely misinterpreted.

While the unprotected area of speech is “much narrower” than you might think based on the current conversations in the public sphere, Goldberg says one of them, “true threat,” requires the person using that speech to intend or know that their speech is going to make someone fear for their safety. “That’s a very specific type of threat, and parody and satire is so rhetorical and over-the-top that it can’t be taken plausibly by the subject to be an actual threat,” he says.

The same is true for the other unprotected area, “incitement to imminent lawless violence” — which, he says, by its very name requires an intent to have people go and immediately carry out some kind of lawless act. “That’s not what’s happening here. That’s not what they want people to do,” Goldberg says of GWAR. “They want people to understand that they’re making a political statement and that’s why we have this broad protection for speech that may even seem like it incites violence because we want to protect political speech. And that’s what I would say this is, political speech.”

Yes, it it unconventional and perhaps startling speech, but that’s the point. Though, Goldberg adds, that “everything is contextual at all times,” meaning that a gesture that might have been laughed off as pure, fantastical parody might feel a bit different during a time when actual, deadly, political violence has shaken both democrats and republicans over the past few years.

“GWAR needs to understand that in this moment in time suggesting the beheading of the president or Elon Musk could be taken more seriously by some members of the public who have no idea of their intent based on past history,” says Goldberg. “Their [GWAR’s] understanding is, ‘We’ve always done it this way — but now you’re paying attention.’”

Regardless, Goldberg adamantly reiterated that, of course, what GWAR is doing is “completely” protected by the First Amendment, even if it is an “extreme version” of political speech. Not for nothing, Goldberg notes that back in the 1985, it was democrats — led by Parents Music Resource Center co-founder Tipper Gore — who formed a bipartisan U.S. government committee aimed at policing children’s access to music that they deemed to have sexual, violent or drug-related content.

“The threat of censorship has always lingered over the music industry from both sides of the political aisle,” says Goldberg.

GWAR singer Bishop says he’s “absolutely” worried that the nation’s bedrock free speech rights are imperiled at the moment. In a Truth Social rant posted just before Kimmel’s return on Tuesday night (Sept. 23), Trump — who the comedian noted in his emotional monologue, said in 2022, “if we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country” — took another ominous shot at the show and parent company ABC.

“He [Kimmel] is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do,” Trump wrote in a comment that some media pundits took as a threat of further legal action against the Disney-owned network. (ABC News settled a $16 million defamation lawsuit filed by Trump last year over remarks from anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately claiming that the president had been found civily liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.)

While Bishop doesn’t see anything funny about what he feels is a clear and present danger to free speech right now, the organizers of Riot Fest took a very different tack when responding to the alleged outrage over the set.

“Like I know this is a rage bait engagement farming twitter account, but “GWAR crossed a major line” is one of the funniest f–king things I’ve ever heard,” read one mocking tweet among many from the fest, with another adding, “The dumbest people on the internet are still mad today. Got to love it. As long as they keep posting that awesome video and mentioning our name for the free publicity it’s a win for me.”


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