KISS frontman Paul Stanley has blasted President Donald Trump for claiming his opponents may steal November’s election.
Earlier in the week, Trump once again warned his fellow Republicans that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” attacking mail-in voting and falsely claiming it will lead to widespread fraud — despite evidence showing such fraud is extremely rare. Experts say mail voting has proven remarkably secure.
On Thursday (August 26), Stanley took to his Twitter to urge his followers to vote in November, and he included the following message: “REGARDLESS of who you support, it is incendiary & abhorrent for ANY candidate to say ‘If I lose, the election is rigged’. It’s an insult to those who have fought for the free, safe elections we have and dangerously implies that citizens who don’t share your views are the enemy.”
Earlier in the month, Trump also told a crowd at a Wisconsin rally he would run for a third term if he is re-elected in November, because he claimed his campaign was spied on in 2016 — even though the FBI found no evidence of illegal spying.
This is not the first time Stanley has weighed in on the current political landscape. Last month, he also encouraged his social media followers to vote in November, saying that “we have a responsibility to our past and to our future.” In April, Stanley blamed a shifting media environment for sharpening partisan divides, saying that Fox News and CNN viewers and live in “different realities.”
“Any conversation I’ve had with somebody who feels contrary to [a particular point of view], they stick to their guns because their reality is based on information that they’re getting from a source that has their own agenda,” Stanley said during an appearance on Richard Marx‘s “Social Distancing” talk show. “I’m not saying that CNN is guiltless. It’s really become the network of the Democrats versus the network of the Republicans, and your reality and what you see as the truth, not coincidentally, is based upon which network you watch. And that’s terrible. We’re living in separate universes. If you go from one channel to the other, you think you’re in a different time.
“If I were to watch whatever network I watch that’s called ‘The News,’ it’s going to feed me what I believe to be reality,” he added. “That’s the basic truth of it. And, unfortunately, there seems to be different realities, alternate realities… There’s gotta be a truth.”
REGARDLESS of who you support, it is incendiary & abhorrent for ANY candidate to say “If I lose, the election is rigged”. It’s an insult to those who have fought for the free, safe elections we have and dangerously implies that citizens who don’t share your views are the enemy. pic.twitter.com/V9vZYPf1eE
— Paul Stanley (@PaulStanleyLive) August 27, 2020
