CW: This post is about sexual assault allegations and uses a lot of strong language

It was late spring in 2004. I was about to finish my first year of college, had some down time alone and decided to have lunch at my local Burger King. I placed my order and as I slid down the counter to wait for them to call my number, I heard a booming voice from behind me – “SIMP!” Simp was my nickname in both middle and high school, long before the term took on its derogatory meaning in the late twenty-teens. It was one of my high school classmates and fellow punkers, Ricky. He had just sat down with his order but he jumped up, gave me a big hug then offered the other side of his table to me.

We sat together and caught up on how life had treated us both in the last year and started chatting about some of our old mutual friends. What was Brad up to? And Teddy? And Josh? And then the question of David came up. Ricky grew solemn and started to tell me about how David was currently living in Woodridge in Johnson City, a known psychiatric hospital and rehabilitation facility. David had gotten into drugs and in just a short amount of time, they had negatively affected his brain. “Simp, David as we know him is gone. He’s fucking crazy now, man,” Ricky squeaked out between sniffles before bursting into a loud sob. It was hard to hear but even harder to see Ricky so heartbroken over the mental demise of our old friend. We sat in silence for a while as we finished our fries.

Before we parted ways for the day, Ricky said he had plans to let loose a little over the summer to help him get over the emotional ride he’d been on. I told him I loved him and told him to have a great summer.

Ricky and I met during our freshman year of high school and we immediately bonded over our mutual love of heavy music, the band Rancid and the Sifl and Olly Show on MTV. That first year we saw each other daily both in our Word-Processing class as well as our Art I class the following semester. And while we were both into many forms of metal, we both veered more and more into punk the following year. 

One afternoon during our sophomore year, I sat in the parking lot with my windows down, probably listening to something like Rancid or Lagwagon, when Ricky came running over to my car with a CD. “Simp, holy shit, man, you gotta listen to this right now.” He held in his hand a CD called “Die for the Government” by a band called Anti-Flag. Emblazoned on the cover was a photo of band members Justin Sane (guitar/lead vocals), Andy Flag (Bass) and Pat Thetic (Drums) standing shoulder-to-shoulder, blindfolded as if before a firing squad. The trio stands in front of an inverted American flag, the universal sign of distress. I popped the CD in and Ricky reached through my window and skipped to track two: Die for the Government.

A screechy voice began shouting through my speakers, You’ve gotta die, gotta die, gotta die for your government – Die for your country? That’s shit! What followed was 3:39 of anger and dual protest. On one end of the rage, there’s the idolatrous attitude many United States citizens take regarding our military. You’re never allowed to disagree with military actions and if you do, then you’re un-American, you don’t “support the troops” and you should probably “move to Russia.” On the other end of the indignation is the very real paradox of how we celebrate the military while the US government continuously uses soldiers as pawns worldwide – Not in the name of protecting freedom and the homeland but to progress the political and bureaucratic agendas of the politicians who send them.

In that moment, and maybe even to this day, Die for the Government was the most punk rock song I’d ever heard in my life. It embodied everything that made the punk scene so attractive to me. I had to know more. Fortunately by this time, Anti-Flag had not only released Die for the Government (1996), they had also released Their System Doesn’t Work for You (1998), A New Kind of Army (1999) and had just dropped Underground Network (2001). I got my hands on the latter two and my punk rock education had officially begun.

I followed Anti-Flag as best I could in the years before social media and kept both A New Kind of Army and Underground Network in regular rotation. “Got the Numbers” taught me about the role big business plays in government and policy making, “Free Nation?” woke me up to the harsh realities of being anything other than a straight white male in the workplace and “Underground Network” opened my eyes to the fact that the news is simply a money-making machine ran by capitalists with no respect for facts they can’t sell ads against.

In college I wrote essays based on a number of Anti-Flag songs. I wrote about the propaganda machine and how it helped cover up the murder of thousands of Panamanian civilians in 1989 as described by “The Panama Deception.” Another topic I covered was mindless patriotism accurately portrayed by “Red, White and Brainwashed.” And I received high praise for my paper on the suffering of indigenous peoples at the hands of “new world” Americans in the name of Manifest Destiny, citing the song “Stars and Stripes.”

The Dead Kennedys may have been the ones who introduced me to explicitly political punk rock but Anti-Flag made it more relatable as they were a modern band singing about modern issues with modern references. Up until I got into them, punk was still very much just a music scene and a fashion style. Anti-Flag helped me figure out how to apply a punk mentality to life. In fact, many of my passions today – LGBTQIA+ rights, the Black Lives Matter movement, Feminism, health care availability and many others – were set into motion because of the example Anti-Flag set in my life. They not only gave me an outlet for my anger but they encouraged me to be educated and to use my education against the systems that angered me so badly.

Fast forward again back to the summer of 2004. It was late in the season and hot as shit at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Charlotte. I was there for my second Vans Warped Tour and I was with my then-girlfriend and my good friend John (he was a young teenager at the time and this was his first “punk” show). The second band of the day (meaning their set started at either 12:30p or 1:00p) was Anti-Flag and they were at the top of my list of bands I wanted to see. We passed the first stage and tried to find a good vantage point from which we could see the band when they started. It was here that two wild-ass things happened.

First, as the three of us made our way to a clearing about 20 yards from the stage, I heard a familiar voice – “SIMP!” I started to turn my head to see the source and just as I caught a glimpse, Ricky tackled me to the ground, hugging me tightly and expressing how hyped he was to see me there. Somehow neither one of us mentioned we were going to Warped that year when we’d ran into each other at Burger King earlier. Yet here we were, two ants in a mound of other similar-looking insects swarming around us and we somehow were able to find each other. He was hyped about Anti-Flag and so was I … and it was almost showtime.

Next, I realized that we may be a little too close to the stage – get too close and you’ll end up getting crushed near the front; Don’t get far enough away and you’ll end up accidentally getting in the pit – so we backed up a little. Now about 30 yards away from the stage, I noticed a bald, shirtless man standing behind us with his fists clenched and hopping from side to side. He growled “Man, I am so fucking hyped for a good pit …” We moved back a little further. Despite now being a good distance from the stage, when the band stormed out, slamming an open chord, the pit started … From behind us. The band greeted the audience and immediately went into the opening of one of their classic tunes, “Fuck Police Brutality.” My girlfriend got sucked into the pit and I had to dive in, throwing elbows and fists to break through until I could pull her out. Once we were out and safe, I looked up to see a mob of angry punkers slamming into each other, a cloud of dust surrounding them kicked up from the dirt underfoot and my friend Ricky right in the middle of all of it pumping his fist and shouting “Fuck police! Fuck police! Fuck police brutality!”

It was an incredible set. They ripped through some of their classics from “Die for the Government” and “Underground Network” to tracks from their recently released The Terror State (2003) including “Rank-N-File” and “Turncoat.” And since it was Warped, I got to see a laundry list of other incredible bands like Billy Talent, The Bouncing Souls, New Found Glory, NOFX, Taking Back Sunday, The Used, Coheed and Cambria, Flogging Molly, the Vandals and Yellowcard. Highlight of the day, however, is later in the afternoon, I’m walking by some of the bands’ merch booths and see none other than Anti-Flag frontman Justin Sane. 

He was short in stature but had a towering black mohawk, wore black jeans and a black button-down shirt separated by a chrome-studded belt and finished the look with solid black sunglasses. I told him I had been a fan for a long time, that he had taught me a lot growing up and what it meant for me to see them in person finally before he signed my Underground Network CD booklet and posed for a photo.

It was a moment I would not soon forget.

***

The band would go on to release around 18 records (including live albums) between then and the present day and I have to admit that I haven’t kept up with them as closely as I once did. My music taste has remained largely the same but has evolved considerably. Their most recent effort, however, Lies They Tell Our Children is a punk rock masterpiece and is highly likely to land on my year-end best-of list. Listening to this year’s release reignited that passion I had for the straight-edge, activism-driven band. I had re-fallen in love with Anti-Flag.

The opening track “Sold Everything” begins thusly:

Well, they sold all our bodies, collected our names
Sold all our fears, stole all our birthdates
Every thought we have exchanged for windfall
If they gave you nothing, you’d have nothing at all
Fuck all their borders and fuck all their wars
The violence of Wall Street and profiteer cures
Neoliberal white saviors, Murdoch and Fox News
Fuck the Pittsburgh Police and the president, too

They’re the same band I’d fallen in love with in high school and had largely the same lineup they’d had since the day I bought my first Anti-Flag record in 2001. It was a beautiful thing.

Until it wasn’t.

I had gotten off work yesterday and was mindlessly scrolling Instagram when I saw a startling announcement via @23punk_: Anti-Flag Has Disbanded. All we were given was a vague announcement from the band via their Patreon. All of the band’s social media channels had disappeared as well as their website. Additionally, lead man Justin Sane’s social presence vanished as well as those of bassist/co-lead vocalist Chris “Chris #2” Barker.

My heart sank and I felt like my house was now on top of my chest. I spent the next hour or so just thinking about all the things they taught me and what an impact they had on my life. I grabbed the photo above and posted it to my social with a memorial blurb about the band and reasoned with myself that they’d been a band in one form or another for nearly my entire life (Justin and Pat formed the band in 1988) and that’s a long time to be in a band together. Maybe it was just their time and I was to be grateful for the gifts they gave us while they were together. Still, the abrupt cutting of all social presence and the stern, borderline ungrateful, tone they used on their Patreon messaging left me wondering if there was more to it than I’d realized. I dug a little deeper.

Upon further investigation, I learned a grim reality that turned my stomach. Enough is a podcast hosted by Kendra Sheetz and Rich Gill that shines a much-needed light into the fully black world of sexual assault in the music industry. I’ve been on edge a little about this topic lately anyway thanks to a tune released earlier this year by Scene Queen in response to rape allegations against a member of pop-punk act All Time Low. Scene Queen put many bands on blast, revealing that sexual assault by bands on their fans is an unfortunate reality that happens way more often than I ever realized. As I fell deeper into this rabbit hole, I started to see that not only was it more common than I thought, but this one woman’s boldness gave other women the confidence to come out with similar stories of their own.

Enough gives these women a platform to tell their story and on Wednesday, July 19, an episode dropped with guest Kristina Sarhadi called “People don’t hang their whole lives on a music scene, but we do.” Over the course of an hour, Sarhadi tells her heart-wrenching story about how she was taken advantage of by her punk rock idol. She goes into graphic detail about how he singled her out after a show, how he tried to force her into having sex, how he – a straight-edge role model – intoxicated her and, ultimately, assaulted her. She never says his name but all the details from the style of music he played, his position in the band, other projects he was involved with, his age and his stature point to one Justin Sane.

Anti-Flag deleting their entire social media presence and going radio silent on the same day this podcast was released is not a coincidence. A man who fronted a band for three decades, singing anti-violent and pro-feminist songs has not only committed sexual assault on an unsuspecting fan, but other women are starting to come out with similar stories about him as well. He’s been doing this for who knows how long.

I sat on the couch last night, my head spinning, almost even on the verge of tears as I realized that the man who fronted a band who formed who I am to this degree isn’t the person I always thought he was. How long has it been happening? Was he actively engaging in this behavior when I met him in Charlotte in 2004 when I told him how much I admired him? 

They say it’s unwise to ever meet your idols because they so often can’t live up to the hype and the esteem you’ve bestowed upon them. I’ve always thought this was the case because your heroes, grandiose though they may be, at the end of the day are still just people. And people have the ability to be abominable, horrendous and detestable.

Yet, while Justin Sane may be a piece of shit, the values his band stood for and the gallantry they exemplified are still very real and very valid. Assuming they were in no way involved (right now it doesn’t seem like it), I wish nothing but the best for Pat Thetic, Chris Head and Chris “#2” Barker. I also pray for healing and peace for all survivors of sexual assault the world over.

As for Justin Sane: May he get exactly what he deserves not only for years of repeated sexual abuse but for intentionally misleading an entire generation of punkers who held him up and made him a god-like fixture in the scene. No punishment is too severe for people like him.

None.