STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis has urged his fans in Nevada to vote for Republican gubernatorial candidate Joey Gilbert, an attorney and former professional boxer who in the last year has become one of the state’s most prominent voices calling into question the 2020 election result and decrying coronavirus vaccines.
Lewis, an outspoken conservative rocker who reinvented himself as a solo country artist in the last decade, voiced his views on Gilbert before performing his new single called “Am I The Only One” during his December 18 concert at Silver Legacy Casino in Reno, Nevada.
Aaron told the crowd (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “All I’ve gotta say is this: do your state a favor. Vote Joey Gilbert in for your next governor. Do it for your kids, for your grandparents, for yourself.” He then paused while some members of the audience started chanting “Joey! Joey! Joey!” He continued: “I’d like to hope that everybody in this room knows who I’m talking about,” before adding, “All I’m saying is if my driver’s license said ‘Nevada’ on it, I’d be voting for Joey. The next governor of Nevada.”
Gilbert, who campaigning throughout Nevada ahead of the Republican gubernatorial primary next June, has questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election and was outside the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. He has also spent much of the past 18 months fighting in court over coronavirus restrictions and mandates, including representing a church in Las Vegas, which, along with another in rural Nevada, won an appeal challenging a statewide capacity cap on religious gatherings. Gilbert has also called COVID-19 vaccines the “Fauci ouchie” despite the fact that almost 90 percent of Nevadans 70 and older have received at least one dose.
Lewis, who is widely considered to be one of the most politically conservative musicians in rock, made headlines in September when he urged his fans to chant “Fuck Joe Biden” during a STAIND concert in Pennsylvania.
Aaron told the Anchorage Press in a January 2020 interview that he considered the first Donald 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 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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