System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan has criticised Democratic Party politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a recent conversation about cancel culture.
Dolmayan, an outspoken conservative, recently sat down with Uncle Dad Talks podcast, in an interview that saw the drummer air his grievances towards the Democratic party, and the unproductive nature of cancel culture.
“I’ve gotta tell you, I’m really disappointed in a lot of people, a lot of liberals — ’cause I have a lot of liberal friends. Most of my friends are liberal,” Dolmayan began. “I’m a conservative, as some people may or may not know. But at the end of the day, I change my opinion on things based on information. So if I get new information, I re-evaluate, I look at things, and I make a decision based on that.”
Dolmayan went on to compare cancel culture to the era of McCarthyism that dominated America in the 1950s.
“What’s happening right now with this cancel-culture bullshit is really destructive, and it always backfires on the people that are instituting it,” he explained. “And we have to be really careful because in the ’50s, we had something called McCarthyism where people that were hyper-liberal and a lot of people that were considered communists, basically they lost their entire lives — that whole generation of great artists and writers that were just ostracized. And we have to be careful because if we allow that to happen in any way, it could always come back to the other side.”
He continued: “I will tell you, this generation is very liberal, but the next one might be more conservative and so on and so forth. It does tend to turn around. And especially now with social media and all this bullshit, people go back and they check things, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, really? This is how you felt?’ And you’re judged on that for the rest of your life.”
Elswehere in the interview, Dolmayan criticised the US Democratic Party, admitting that he takes umbrage with “the agenda of a lot of the Democratic platforms” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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“I’m a conservative,” Dolmayan said. “I want what’s best for everyone, but I want everybody to have the freedom to do these things. I don’t like big government. I don’t like the agenda of a lot of the Democratic platforms these days. I think AOC is a moron. I just have to put that out there; I like to say that in every conversation.”
Despite the jabs, there’s a kernel of goodwill to Dolmayan’s bizarre conservative mindset. He concludes: “Look, at the end of the day, I just want everybody to have equal opportunity to be successful in whatever that success is. And I want people to be motivated by doing the right thing in life, not rewarded for doing the wrong thing. So that’s my philosophy.”
