Glenn Danzig has never been a particularly political artist, unless it's political to say that he killed your baby today. At the peak of his eponymous band Danzig, the man spoke out against censorship without getting too deep into anything else. But when Danzig does voice a political opinion, bad things can happen. In a 2017 interview, for instance, Danzig voiced support for Donald Trump's travel ban and said that Planed Parenthood shouldn't "be selling baby parts like a chop shop in Brooklyn, OK?" This past weekend, Danzig wrapped up a short tour that included at date at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. At that LA show, Danzig sold merch that sure appears to feature the Black Sun, a symbol used by Nazis and neo-Nazi groups.
The Black Sun, or Sonnenrad, is a wheel of SS logos once employed by Heinrich Himmler. It's since become a favorite of neo-Nazi extremists. When a mass shooter targeted Black customers at a grocery store in Buffalo in 2022, for instance, he wore the Black Sun on his body armor. As Metal Injection points out, one of the shirts that Danzig sold at the LA show appears to be a cartoon drawing of Danzig himself, with the Black Sun behind him. People at the show posted photos of the shirt on Reddit.
Nazi merch at the Danzig show last night.
byu/jankyclothing inDanzig
Glenn Danzig has plenty of plausible deniability here. We don't know whether he specifically commissioned this shirt or whether he understands the meaning of the Black Sun. Wikipedia tells me that the symbol "is also used by some modern pagan and satanist groups as an esoteric symbol," which honestly doesn't seem like much of a defense. Glenn Danzig hasn't commented on the shirt yet. It's probably worth noting that the Danzig tour's main support act was Down, whose singer Phil Anselmo has his own troubling history with Nazi iconography.
