Ted Nugent bashes “total idiots” Jack White and Eminem on his YouTube channel
The “Stranglehold” rocker went on a YouTube rant trashing White, Eminem, Green Day, and Tom Morello’s politics—but he thinks Yungblud, of all people, is preserving the “piss and vinegar” of real rock and roll music.
Why didn’t anyone tell me that Ted Nugent is a YouTuber now? America’s least favorite uncle is a webshow host these days, using what little guitar talent he has to shoehorn embarrassing politics into his Spirit Campfire series online. He’s taking a page out of the playbooks of Ben Shapiro, the Nelk Boys, and Steven Crowder by getting on his knees for extremist weirdos and force-feeding the same anti-immigrant, anti-trans, and anti-Democrat drivel to his followers in every video—and now he’s even dragging much-better musicians into his soup of panicky white nationalist hokum.
Nugent, a long-time gun-toting conservative whacko, doesn’t like Jack White’s political views—obviously—but he sure did like White’s halftime performance at the Detroit Lions game on Thanksgiving Day. Good on him for separating the art from the artist, I guess. “The guy in the White Stripes—I can’t think of his name, but he played the halftime show with Eminem for the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving. A big deal,” Nugent said in a video titled “Let’s Talk Music” on New Year’s Day. “Don’t they always lose? The Lions are a football team in Detroit, by the way.” (I’d like to interject here quickly and mention how chuffed I am that Nugent, who was born in Michigan, felt like he needed to explain the Detroit Lions to his fanbase.)
“Jack White, is that his name? Jack White. No, I think the White Stripes—is that his name?” Nugent continued, stammering. “Anyhow, he was great. It wasn’t, like, a ten like Sammy Hagar or James Brown. I think Sammy Hagar and James Brown and Steven Tyler, those are tens. Angus Young of AC/DC, that’s a ten. The guy’s a maniac. Billy Gibbons in the rhythm and blues, soul music category… he’s a ten.”
Look, I’ve listened to Ted Nugent’s music before. My father was a high schooler in a mid-1970s rural Midwestern town. Weekend Warriors was on a time or two. But this isn’t Chuck Berry or Pete Townshend we’re talking about. Of course the guy who pissed his pants over and over for a week on purpose just to avoid getting drafted would compare Sammy Hagar to James Brown. “Stranglehold” isn’t a good enough song to warrant such delusion; not even Hagar himself would buy into this crock of shit.
“Now, is that his name, Jack White?” Nugent asked again in the video, because he is clearly recovering from a stroke or dealing with some kind of aphasia. “Jack White, he’s not a ten. He’s a four and a five, but he really delivered real rock and roll. Real Detroit piss and vinegar.” Unfortunately, Uncle Ted has never made anything as good as Elephant, White Blood Cells, or even White’s recent solo record, No Name, but boy, does he hate what the bastions of his beloved Detroit, Michigan, have become. “And Eminem, the guy’s a… Both of those guys, Eminem and Jack White: total idiots.”
“They don’t want their country to have secure borders. They think men should destroy women’s sports,” he continued, before momentarily developing a sense of self-awareness that he would go on to ignore entirely. “Well, that’s not… That’s exactly what they stand for. When you hate Donald Trump, you want men in women’s sports to destroy women’s rights. That’s what these guys stand for. They don’t think our border should be secured. They think we should invite jihadists in who announce they want to kill the infidels. They announce they want to kill Americans. And Jack White and Eminem say, ‘Yeah, bring them in. Bring those guys in.’ Freak idiots.” Later in the video, Nugent claims that he “doesn’t stand for hunches” yet he’s got a few about White and Eminem. He’s mastered the art of right-wing MadLibs. Transgender this, border wall that. It’s exhausting to keep up with, quite frankly, because guys like this don’t even know what or who they’re mad at anymore.
Sure, Jack White and Eminem have been loudly anti-Trump, with White in the news recently for his crushing ridicule of the president’s recent comments about the death of filmmaker Rob Reiner, but those two Detroiters weren’t the only musicians caught in Nugent’s bootlicking crosshairs. Green Day and Tom Morello got ragged on, too—odd, considering that Morello has talked at length about his friendship with Nugent, telling The Guardian that “Ted Nugent’s a good friend to me” in 2017. “We have very similar views on freedom of speech, His libertarian edge and my anarchist edge overlap considerably. Sometimes, if he says something outrageous that will fire up his racist base, I’ll text him to say, ‘Dude. What are you on about?’ We’re able to talk about it as friends as opposed to people on the opposite sides of the barricade.” Clearly Nugent feels differently all these years later.
“Tom Morello, Is that his name? Tom Morel? Morello, who played with Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine, when actually they are the machine,” Nugent said, showcasing yet another sign of early onset dementia. “Come on Tom, you got to know that. You’re not raging against the machine. You are the machine. They don’t believe that America should have secure borders, which means they don’t believe in America. Which means they want to have a great successful life in America, but they don’t think you should be able to have one. Hey, Tom! Come on my show. Explain… make your case. Good luck.” After his diatribes against White, Eminem, and Morello, Nugent gave Green Day a swipe just for good measure. “Their music is soulful,” he said. “Just like Green Day. Green Day, there’s not a brain amongst them, I don’t think. But man can they play really, really killer stuff.”
It’s no surprise to me that Nugent thinks good rock and roll is getting made by brainless guys. He’s been doing that dance himself for 50 years; it’s all he knows. What is surprising is his fascination with Yungblud, an Englishman who’s more stylish than he is musically talented. Ted Nugent doesn’t know dick about either of those qualities, to be fair, but I guess the Aerosmith rub really did something for Yungblud this time. “Limey freak madness,” Nugent called him, ostensibly as a compliment. “This guy’s the Real McCoy. Watch this Yungblud that’s working with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. It gives you hope that the real piss and vinegar—the James Brown, the original Chuck Berry, Little Richard—is alive and well in this kid called Yungblud.” I can excuse pretending to not remember Jack White or Tom Morello’s names, but I draw the line at putting Chuck Berry or Little Richard in the same sentence as Yungblud.
None of this is shocking. Ted Nugent’s spineless views are marginally more relevant than his god-awful rock and roll in 2026, but he’s made his opinions known for decades. He is pro-gun and anti-animal rights, pro-Confederacy and anti-vax. He said “all men are not created equal” when the apartheid ended in South Africa and called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization”; he thinks global warming is bullshit and defends mountaintop removal mining; he thinks Islam is a “voodoo religion,” called COVID-19 the “Chinese shit,” and dubbed the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors “mushy brained children” who “have no soul.” He even got investigated by the Secret Service for his comments against Barack Obama (“If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year”) in 2012. Of course the guy who wrote “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” is grifting on YouTube, posing as this patriot fighting for freedom and truth, logic, and common sense. But what he really does is sit in his garage, ensconced in amplifiers, camo print, and crossbow arrows, regurgitating the same bile that right-wing loons have been choking down for ages. There is no truth, logic, or common sense in the church of Ted Nugent. Racist dogma is the language of the few, the proud, and the gun-toting, and it’s got a stranglehold on him. Let’s get you back to bed, Ted. Those bags under your eyes are looking mighty heavy.
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