Right-Wing Rock

Coming soon to a school near you, and at taxpayer expense.

By Brian D. GreerWednesday November 16, 2005

First there was Ted Nugent. Then Foghat. (Okay, that was just an ugly rumor.) Now there’s a new right-wing band to vying for the hearts and minds of America ’s youth: Junkyard Prophet. But, instead of trying to beg its way onto MTV to build its audience, this band is performing directly inside of America’s high schools. Oh, and the federal government is footing the bill. That’s right. Over the last few years, a band called Junkyard Prophet (through its youth outreach organization, You Can Run But You Cannot Hide) has been touring across Middle America, spewing its ultra-conservative message at hundreds of school assemblies along the way. And it’s received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for its efforts. Armstrong Williams, eat your heart out. To be fair, unlike the Williams situation or the grossly misleading abstinence education program that the Bush Administration promulgated, there’s no allegation that the federal government is promoting or even tacitly endorsing Junkyard Prophet. Nonetheless, the band’s activities stand as yet another example of the publicly-funded, conservative indoctrination of America’s youth, and someone should put a stop to it. I first learned about Junkyard Prophet from my hometown newspaper, after its controversial appearance there last year. What I found in that article (reprinted here, scroll down) and in my subsequent research alarmed me. The story is relatively straightforward. My old high school hired an unknown, out-of-town band to perform at one of those nauseating educational school assemblies that most of us remember all too well (think: “My name is Matt Foley, and I live in a van down by the river”). As the paper tells it, “The purported content of the compulsory assembly was characterized by the performing group…as ‘drug and alcohol awareness,’ but the program’s actual content addressed a much broader list of concerns.” Rather than focusing on drug and alcohol awareness, the band instead delivered a conservative message of intolerance and extremism. What’s most alarming, however, was that this was far from an isolated incident. After some quick research I found articles from several other towns describing almost exactly the same sequence of events. In the group’s numerous school assembly appearances, frontman Bradlee Dean has covered most of the right-wing topics du jour. At one stop, for instance, Dean strongly defended the Second Amendment and said that “blaming Columbine on guns is like blaming spoons for Rosie O’Donnell being fat.” Invoking another favorite target of conservatives – the “liberal” media and entertainment industry – Dean has repeatedly criticized them for supporting and promoting adultery, homosexuality, and abortion. On religion, Dean has praised Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” and members of his entourage distributed religious literature at several stops. He has also told students that “there is nothing in our Constitution or founding documents about separation of church and state” and criticized the theory of evolution.

Reads the complete text in its original place: http://www.campusprogress.org/features/650/right-wing-rock