Rage Against the Machine guitarist and left-wing political activist Tom Morello was captured on camera grabbing an audience member’s phone and tossing it across the room.
Leading a rowdy set over the weekend at Chicago’s Piqniq, Morello reportedly invited fans on stage but warned them against taking selfies. When one fan did, the Prophets of Rage frontman apparently grabbed the phone and threw it into the crowd below.
“Put a phone in my face onstage and I’ll throw it,” Morello later said on Twitter, his message accompanied by video of him tossing the fan’s phone.
“When you invite guests to YOUR stage and CLEARLY TELL THEM ‘if you stick a cell phone in my face I WILL THROW IT’ and then their uncontrollable entitled selfie urges overcome their sense of reason they get their f*ckin phones thrown. Simple,” Morello said, also acknowledging that he would take selfies with fans on stage.
The political crooner is no stranger to controversy.
The 55-year-old rocker headlined a nationwide concert tour in the summer of 2016 to protest the Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) international trade deal.
Member of rock band “Prophets of Rage” Tom Morello performs during the Resurrection Fest music festival in Viveiro, northern Spain, on July 14, 2018. (Photo by MIGUEL RIOPA / AFP) (MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP/Getty Images)
A week after announcing that tour, Morello published a video in which he called then-presidential candidate Donald Trump a “frat house rapist.”
“When it comes to race relations, he’s like an old-school segregationist,” Morello said in the video titled “Tom Morello Standing Up Against Old Man Trump.”
“When it comes to foreign policy, he’s like an old-school napalmist. When it comes to women’s issues, he’s like a frat-house rapist,” the rocker said.
Last June, Morello suggested that military veterans form a “Children’s Liberation Army” to dismantle the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
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