Dee Snider on Letting Gun Control Advocates Use ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’: ‘Sometimes You Have to Say Enough is Enough’
Dee Snider isn’t gonna take it anymore. The Twisted Sister singer says the time has come to stand up to those who would use his band’s most famous song to promote conspiracy theories.
“QAnon uses it all the time as their battle cry,” Snider tells Billboard about the long-running conspiracy theory that posits that the world is run by a shadowy group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles that allegedly includes prominent Democrat politicians and Hollywood celebrities.
“And people are like, ‘Dee, you support QAnon?’ No I do not so I need to speak out,” he adds as an explanation for why he recently agreed to a fan’s request to use his band’s 1984 Billboard Hot 100 No. 21 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as their anthem in the decadeslong fight to ban the type of military-style assault weapons frequently used in mass shootings in the U.S.
So, when it came to tying the song to intelligent gun control, Snider, a proud gun owner, said the answer was simple: “Yeah, I support this cause. It’s an important one.” In fact, when the request came in, Snider’s exact words in an enthusiastic tweet were, “I am a gun owner… That said, HELL YEAH YOU CAN USE ‘WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT’ AS YOUR ANTHEM! Assault weapons were never meant for anything but combat!”
Asked if he made the decision in the wake of the recent mass shooting at Nashville’s Covent School in which the assailant killed three 9-year-old children and three adults, Snider said, “it goes on and on. In the wake of the one before that and the one before that. It’s just insane, it’s ridiculous and it’s something we just talk about forever.”
As Snider suggested, following the nation’s 132nd mass shooting so far this year — there was yet another one on Monday (April 10) in Louisville in which four people were killed and eight injured — gun rights advocates are afraid “to give an inch because people will take a mile. We’ve seen that with so many things before, but sometimes you have to say enough is enough.”
Snider — who was revealed last week as Doll on The Masked Singer — said that when he wrote “We’re Not Gonna Take It” he purposely left the meaning open to interpretation, even as he confirms that the underlying message is one about “everybody’s freedom and rights.” But, as he’s been vocal about in the past, he sometimes “disagrees strongly” with some of the people who’ve co-opted it and made it seem like he supports their cause.
Case in point, after initially giving his Celebrity Apprentice boss and friend Donald Trump permission to use his band’s signature rebel anthem on the campaign trail during the recently indicted one-term president’s first White House bid in 2016, Snider later asked The Donald to stop playing it at his rallies.
At the time he said, “It wasn’t an endorsement. We all have friends who have different views politically but you can go on vacation with them… But I had to ask him to stop using the song. I said, ‘I didn’t realize some of the things you were going to represent — the wall, banning Muslims. I can’t get behind some of these things,’ and he said ‘OK’ and stopped using it and that was it.”
Check out Snider’s tweets below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
