Rock band The Killers released a politically charged song attacking President Donald Trump for his border wall plan and for not doing enough to limit America’s Second Amendment rights.
Without mentioning the president by name, The Killers’ new tune, “Land of the Free,” plows familiar liberal ground by complaining about anti-immigrant sentiment, and “gun violence.”
In a Facebook post about the release of their new left-wing anthem, frontman Brandon Flowers claimed that he had been contemplating the gospel-tinged tune since the murders at Sandyhook Elementary School in 2012.
The band also became involved in the response to the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 that claimed the lives of 58 concert-goers, raising $700,000 to help the victims.
One verse of the song takes on “gun violence,” saying, “So, how many daughters, tell me how many sons, do we have to have to put in the ground before we just break down and face it, we got a problem with guns.”
But the song also takes on Donald Trump’s immigration policies with an attack on his border wall plan and a lament over anti-immigrant sentiment.
The lyrics continue saying, “Down at the border, they’re gonna put up a wall, concrete and rebar steel beams (I’m standing crying) high enough to keep all those filthy hands off of our hopes and our dreams.”
But the song assures listeners that illegal aliens are only, “People who just want the same things we do, In the land of the free.”
The first verse also presages the attack on Trump talking of ancestors who “came over on a ship.”
The song also plies a liberal narrative of prison incarceration rates with a verse decrying that minorities have to grow up “looking over both shoulders” and that the U.S. has “got more people locked up than the rest of the world.”
The Killers frontman Flowers insisted that now is a “very important time” to releases such a song.
“And ‘enough was enough’ is basically where it comes from,” Flowers told Beats 1 Official. “It started in my mind around when Sandy Hook happened, and as a father how that affected me. And then it just started stacking up — it was things like Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, things like what’s happening at the wall. This stuff didn’t seem to be in harmony with the values that I believe my country was founded on.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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