Dying Scene OP ED: Punk Rock’s Secret Wars

As I was editing an interview a few weeks back, I was listening to Spotify. The subject of the interview had given me a playlist related to it: ten songs by some underheard bands in the Hawaii punk rock scene. When the ten songs were up, it pivoted to recommended music and started playing mostly classic punk rock songs. I let it ride. As I got deeper into my editing and a playlist of songs I was very familiar with, I started to tune out until something didn’t sound right. The music was aggressive, as expected, but the lyrics carried a particular kind of hate. When I looked at my phone, I was shocked to see it was playing Skrewdriver.

For those who are unfamiliar, Skrewdriver is arguably the most recognized white power band from the late 1970s and 1980s, founded by Ian Stuart Donaldson. They were peers with other skinhead bands of the time, including Sham 69, but Jimmy Pursey and crew clearly went in a different direction than Donaldson. Skrewdriver went on to become a prominent White Power band and was instrumental in setting up a network of Neo-Nazi music promotion. Despite this, Skrewdriver is the only one of these bands that is remembered. Donaldson died in a car accident in 1993. The universe occasionally does the right thing.

I tried to report the account that had uploaded Skrewdriver to Spotify. Racist content is supposed to be against their policies on what’s acceptable or not, but the setup to report was confusing. Even when I did figure it out, there wasn’t a clear way to put in a specific dispute for the music that had been uploaded. Hearing Skrewdriver on a mainstream platform wasn’t an algorithmic mistake; it’s a reminder of how easily hate slips into spaces we thought were protected. It’s a reminder that the walls punk rock built aren’t as solid as we believed. 

Punk rock is in a weird place. Well, it’s always been in a weird, strange place. That was part of what drew some of us to all of this in the first place. Whatever the reason was that you found and got into punk rock, you’d know there’s something rotten in the pit. With the current political climate, a lot of people are feeling emboldened now, conservatives, racists, and Nazis in particular. This trio of groups has done its best to co-opt punk rock in the past, and they don’t seem to be letting up. Growing up in punk rock, one thing that was an undeniable fact was that all of these people had no place in our scene. While that sentiment is true in spirit, lately it doesn’t feel that way in practice. 

There are a decent number of people who are passively conservative or have had their morals influenced by conservative principles. While misclassified as a pivot, these ideals slowly creep in until they take root. It’s not something that gets talked about. I’ve lost more friends to conservatism than I have over the clichéd reasons sitcoms showed us growing up. This disconnect feels closer to that Friends meme of Phoebe trying to teach Joey something he can’t grasp more than I would care to admit.

While heavy metal’s right-wing slant has always made sense with its “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out,” attitude, punk’s descent into the conservative realm has nearly baffled me. What started as a counter-culture movement in response to the popular music of its time eventually morphed into a movement about the injustices of our government. This was the reason why punks were gatekeepers about this music, keeping it from jocks who were too soft for metal but could handle punk rock. Metal’s glorification of women, booze, and destruction got mixed with the message punk initially sought.

While I’m sure this isn’t the case for every fan of punk rock music who played sports or used a baseball bat for its intended purpose, it seems most likely to be the reason. Yet, there’s no doubt that even some of those art kids’ and rejects’ opinions evolved to conservatism, as well. While those are often due to other factors, if you were someone who put time into showing someone else punk rock only to have them completely miss the mark, it seems like time wasted.

What do you do when some of the people who seem to be missing the mark now, helped draw the line in the first place? There are plenty of members of bands who now support Republican ideals because it fits their narrative of what punk rock should be. It’s no secret that Johnny Ramone was one of the first, if not the first, openly public conservative punk. Just because you helped create the buzzsaw sound of barre guitar chords, doesn’t mean you honored punk’s best intentions over the years.

While there are a lot of smaller punk rock bands that actively speak out against what’s happening in the current administration, it seems like the more successful bands are keeping their heads down. In fact, the only bands with years of tenure under their belt who seem to be actively pushing back are Fishbone (whose latest record, Stockholm Syndrome, was one of the best protest albums in years), and Green Day, who we all know gets treated like shit because they are rich despite doing great things for the community and speaking out against the current administration. We’ve made Green Day the Guy Fieri of the punk rock scene.

Now to the Brew HaHa of it all. A line has been drawn in the sand in the last couple of weeks in punk rock, but it goes back to a moment almost a year ago. Back in April of 2025, the Punkerton Records Facebook page had made a post calling out Brew HaHa owner Cameron Collins for donating $250 to Donald Trump during the 2024 election. Brew HaHa had been the company behind several punk rock festivals, first locally in California, but eventually expanding shows to twenty-four states, most notably for the Punk in Drublic shows with NOFX’s final run of shows. However, their bread and butter seemed to be their Punk in the Park Festivals.

Collins’s $250 donation to Donald Trump is starting to cost him and the scene a lot more than its face value. The reveal of his donation ruffled plenty of feathers. Fans demanded refunds or stopped buying tickets altogether. When they started questioning their favorite bands about their continued participation, a good number shrugged or said the best way to take down the opposition is to say something to their face, opting to use their stage time as a form of protest. The most vocal about this was Ken Casey and the Dropkick Murphys, who vowed to honor their contract for the fans who had already purchased tickets but would not continue playing Brew HaHa’s shows.

While there are atrocities on both sides of our two-party system, it’s hard to deny that one side is sliding further and further each day toward fascism. Spoiler alert: it’s the one that’s in power. This is what nearly fifty years of punk rock were preparing you for. Hell, this is what history class prepared you for, if you weren’t sleeping during it. If you are unable to see the parallels or heed the warnings, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not to say Democrats don’t have their cracks, but it isn’t the open descent into fascism we’ve been dealing with for the past year. 

When Brew HaHa announced the Punk in the Park Roadshow, the lineup seemed scant and scaled down; not just the venues, but also the bands that had been announced for it. It seems most of the bands that had honored their contracts previously weren’t too keen on signing another. Three dates were announced in Vallejo, CA; Orlando, FL; and Pittsburgh, PA, featuring sets from the Dead Kennedys, The Adicts, Screeching Weasel, and others. The weird part about all of this is that Collins’s donation was very well known at this point, and some of these bands had even played other shows when the news came out last year.

As pressure mounted from fans, bands started dropping off. The first domino was Naked Aggression, then it was N8NOFACE, 8Kalacas, and Manic Hispanic, whose participation was confusing to begin with given everybody’s stances. Yet, when it came down to one band, the response was head-scratching to say the least. The Dead Kennedys, or at least the Frankensteined corpse that used to be them, said they would honor the shows they booked, but nothing more going forward. Something original singer Jello Biafra said wouldn’t be given a second thought if he were still in the mix with the band. It was clearly about the money, something that was easily sacrificed by the smaller bands that had already dropped out with much less stature or legacy. The Adicts took a little longer than expected to drop out, but at the end of the day, they did. Ben Weasel, without surprising anyone, announced he had not pulled out of the festival. However, with Punk in the Park’s lineup gutted, the festival dates were canceled.

While it’s not the official end of Brew HaHa as a company, this has to leave a dent in its business. Locally, Brew HaHa has one show on the books: The OC Super Show in Irvine, but even that show is starting to run into the same issues. The show was to be headlined by Orange County hometown heroes, the Aquabats, but they recently announced they will not be playing the March 14th date. Remaining bands like Story of the Year, Fenix TX, and Lit, have also opted to keep their spots. Lit guitarist Jeremy Popoff’s now-defunct Slidebar will be celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a pop-up set up at the venue. For those unfamiliar with the story behind its closing, do a Google search for Kelly Thomas’s beating and subsequent death outside of the shuttered club. 

One band that doubled down on their appearance at the OC Supershow was Save Ferris. The band released a now-deleted statement to their socials that was tone deaf to say the least. The post cites that the band has had no communication with Brew HaHa’s owner, Cameron Collins, and believes that he should have stepped down before the other shows were canceled. It feels like Save Ferris is opting for a wait-and-see approach; specifically waiting to see if their check will be cashed or not. Their statement goes on to say that everyone is welcome at Save Ferris shows despite a political stance they may not agree with, stressing that their shows create a space for unity. To quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

It’s been alluded to that Brew HaHa is also co-producing the Me Gusta Fest, celebrating the life and music of Brad Nowell and headlined by Sublime 3.0 and featuring bands like Pennywise and the Interrupters. With Sublime being a band that is ingrained in the punk and pop music lexicon, it will take a lot more work to cut the head off that beast. While Punk in the Park may have taken less work to topple, Me Gusta may take more than a village. If one thing is certain, the contracts here will be much more ironclad than Punk in the Park’s had been.

Still, it makes you think maybe that account that uploaded Skrewdriver was just ahead of the game. If punk rock is going to completely sell out its ideas and do a one-eighty on fascism, racism, and everything else it once stood for, maybe the infiltration of those types of records was inevitable.

The roadblocks with Spotify led me to DistroKid, the online music distributor that allowed the albums to be uploaded in the first place. When I finally got an email back from DistroKid, it asked for my account information and credit card information. I told them neither of those pieces of information was relevant to my complaint; they said it was necessary to continue. Maybe the algorithm wasn’t wrong and it was telling us something we didn’t want to hear: The progress in the fight against racism and fascism we assumed we were winning is further behind than we thought.

This Punk in the Park thing is going to have a bigger effect than we know at this point. While it was assumed a lot of these issues had been worked out previously, it seems we’re just getting started. Was punk meant to be gatekept so that these in-scene squabbles stay hidden and localized, or was this jump to corporatize the genre a good way to fish out the posers—the people who never took punk’s true intentions to heart to begin with? There’s going to be a rift, and pretending otherwise is what got us here in the first place. Pick a side.

Update: I started this article a week or so back and things keep developing. Save Ferris’s response to not dropping out was not well-received and they have decided to dig their heels into the ground on the issue. Their initial post started with a big declaration that they would not back down, but later took down that same post and replaced it with the message that the original post had served its purpose.

As I was putting the finishing touches on this article, I wanted to include a screenshot of the account posting the Skrewdriver records. At the time of this writing, the tracks have been removed from Spotify, but the account and the album artwork still appear on the front end of the streaming service. I’m not sure where the complaint was received, but as someone who relates more to Hank Hill when it comes to technology in his old age, I feel somewhat seen. The universe occasionally does the right thing.