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Shannon Watts is big mad at Jason Aldean for telling her what she doesn’t want to hear

Aaron Walker
Aaron Walker  |  5:56 PM on July 19, 2023
Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP

As you know, CMT has recently said “hold my Bud Light” and removed Jason Aldean’s video for the song “Try that in a Small Town” from their network. 

We have previously covered the controversy here, here and here, but let’s start with basics. Whenever a work (whether it is a song, book, speech or whatever) becomes controversial, whenever possible you should start with examining at the work itself. Don’t let someone else tell you what it is. Go and look and make up your own mind.

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In that spirit, here’s the video for the song:

So, let’s break that down. First, every word of that song is protected by the First Amendment. Many think it is incitement of violence, except the legal test requires that you are attempting to cause an immediate reaction and it’s silly to suggest that is happening here. We won’t say a music video could never qualify as incitement of violence, but we can only imagine it happening in highly abnormal situations.

But the test also requires advocacy of violence, and is it that, really? Or is it making a prediction that might be accurate?

First, let’s not be coy. Let’s all be adults, here. He is imagining some kind of violence happening to many of the people he is discussing. He is suggesting that if you try to “carjack an old lady at a red light,” for instance, someone will violently stop it. Maybe that would involve shooting, maybe it wouldn’t. But it's imagining violence (although the violence might be legal).

But here’s a key point to remember: He isn’t saying he would do it. He’s saying someone would do it, but not necessarily him. Heck, his official Twitter account gives his location as Nashville, which is not a small town. So, if someone tries those acts in a small town, he might be nowhere to be found.

So, if we assume he is speaking for himself, all he is technically doing is making a prediction of what would happen. This author is a huge supporter of freedom of expression. Please note, we didn’t say “the First Amendment.” We said “freedom of expression.” The First Amendment protects much of the right of freedom of expression, but we define that term as going beyond what the First Amendment protects—even when applied to the states. We believe that freedom of expression is at least the right to express yourself without being subjected to any kind of violence—whether it is the violence of the government  (including imprisonment), or private violence. Thus, a government doesn’t protect the right to freedom of expression by merely not violating that right, but by positively acting to protect citizens from private violence. The government prohibiting the sale of a book violates freedom of expression, but freedom of expression was also violated when Salman Rushdie was horribly injured in a stabbing:

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We continue to pray for him.

But back to Aldean, suppose we sang a song that said “if you go to Iran and blaspheme against Islam, you are likely to end up dead.” Call that song: “Try that in an Iran Town.” Would CMT ban us for saying that? Because that is the simple truth. The government of Iran would kill a hypothetical blasphemer as much as surely as they would kill Rushdie if given the chance and even if the government didn’t kill this hypothetical blasphemer, we would be very concerned about private violence. Yet no one could credibly claim we are advocating violence.

And to return to the lyrics, some parts of the song can’t be supported. An appropriate physical response is justified as a matter of law for all of the physical violence, such as pointing a gun at a clerk in a store, carjacking, even spitting on a person. Check your local laws, but even spitting is considered in most part of America to either an assault or a battery, justifying violence in prevention (but not in retaliation). On the other hand, Aldean suggests that person might face violence for cussing out a cop or burning an American flag. Cussing is free speech, so the law does not allow violence in response. Burning anything might create a fire hazard, justifying potentially violent intervention, but violence cannot be legally justified to stop a safe burning of any flag, even the American flag.

But we all know that people are more hot-headed than that. It might not be legal or right to attack a person because they are burning a flag, but we also know it might happen. And do we have to tell you that cussing out a cop might get you a billy club to the gut? Yes, that would be wrongful police brutality, but it’s a reasonable prediction of human behavior to say it might happen.

Second, did literally all of his critics forget that sometimes songs are fictional? Take for instance, these lyrics about a creepy man in the music business trying to use his power to ply a woman for sex:

You're never gonna make it

All by yourself

You're gonna need a friend

You're gonna need my help

I have so much to offer

If you just be nice

If you do what I say

And don't make me say it twice

And who wrote that horrible song? Sheryl Crow. She has said this was about someone she worked with in the music industry before she had her breakthrough with “Tuesday Night Music Club,” but it is plainly written from the perspective of the creep. So, she’s not advocating this kind of behavior and these attitudes in the song, she is just portraying them.

So, if she was a little more introspective, she might have considered the very real possibility that Aldean doesn’t agree with the views being portrayed in the song before denouncing him.

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And she’s hardly the only one. Sarah McLachlan sang a song people mistakenly think is romantic called “Possession.” Listen closely to what she is actually saying, however…

…and you might realize that the song is actually kind of dark. That is because it is about a stalker and she sang it from the perspective of the stalker. But would anyone be foolish enough to think she sang a pro-stalking song?

And for that matter, does anyone think Johnny Cash actually shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die? Would CMT actually put that song on their channel today?

Heck we are old enough to remember that weird time when Garth Brooks pretended to be an alt-rock singer named Chris Gaines. Yes, really:

But, of course, we all know what would trigger Shannon Watts in Aldean’s song. We touched on it in a prior post but she was upset about the part where Aldean says “Got a gun that my granddad gave me/They say one day they're gonna round up/Well, that s—t might fly in the city, good luck.” 

That's a dubious interpretation, but let's get at what he is actually saying. Again, we aren’t going to be coy. In the song, he is saying gun control will be resisted. We tend to think he is imagining more of a passive resistance scenario, like Lauren Boebert’s joke about boating accidents. But we admit it is open to interpretation that might include violent resistance.

Still, first, we go back to the point that maybe he is portraying an attitude rather than speaking for himself—much like Sarah McLachlan did in her song about stalking. Second, it is at worst a prediction, not a threat. After all, Aldean has a history of pro-gun-control statements:

So, if anything that bolsters the argument that maybe Aldean is playing a character and sharing that character’s views rather than his own.

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On the other hand, to be fair to Aldean, he might have significantly evolved on the right to bear arms since 2018. In 2018, Aldean was speaking after being the witness to one of the worst mass shootings in history, in Las Vegas. It’s not hard for us to imagine that he was responding emotionally, without thinking things through and later when he had more perspective, he changed his mind. Ideally, one's emotions should never overrule one's judgment, but it is pretty human.

Furthermore, after 2018 came 2020 and around a year of riots where very often authorities let the rioters run rampant and threatened to prosecute anyone who resisted them, while many others declared they wanted to defund or abolish the police. Kyle Rittenhouse is still being pursued for daring to defend himself:

We have said for a long time that the defund-the-police movement and the George Floyd Riots are when the left lost the gun control debate. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to say that if someone is trying to break down your door and you call the police, they might tell you no one would come. Today it is not so unthinkable. And this “tolerance” of rioting is a relatively new phenomenon. 

Naturally, there were reactions to Watts, and not all of them are screaming gun control banshees:

The full text reads:

My experience is that in a small town, everyone has a gun! Everyone! Even the little old grannies.

I think it’s because if they call the police, it takes them a while to come. Some towns don’t even have a police force at all and just have a county sheriff and that guy isn’t coming out until the morning. It’s a different way of life indeed.

This author once lived in a town where the nearest sheriff was over a mountain in the Rocky Mountains region, and crime was insanely out of control. In the long term, we moved away. In the short term, we kept guns handy.

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We checked the video’s credits and it suggests he did write it, although we are not sure how reliable that is.

And for some reason Tom Arnold (who became famous as a gold digger when he married Roseanne Barr) decided to personally attack Aldean:

And since he no longer has a blue check, we went through Twitchy’s archives to verify that is truly his account. And in the process we were reminded that Arnold is another gun grabber who talks about wanting to commit murder. We have long said that many of the gun grabbing types actually believe they can’t be trusted with a gun because of their own violent tendencies, and, therefore, none of us can have them either.

Actually, we explained how the gun control types lost the debate about as clearly as we could. Assuming they’ve truly lost Aldean (we hope), a little introspection might be in order.

Emmett Till was accused of making a wolf whistle at a white woman, provoking racist anger that led to a murder that was unjustified even if he had truly made the sound, which is a tad different than the things Aldean is talking about.

Numerous gangsta rappers could not be reached for comment.

We’re not sure on his statistics, but there is a bunch of violent gangsta rap songs, including in many songs this author has enjoyed. To give one of hundreds of examples, Cyprus Hill once did a song called “Hand on the Glock” where they describe a shootout where “self-defense turns to the offense” which is about as explicit as one can be that the force you are using is not purely lawful self-defense. 

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Gosh, it’s almost as if maybe he was talking about people other than himself, or something. Next, she will discover that Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno or anywhere else.

We will never understand the warped view of manliness some leftists and Lincoln Project members (but we repeat ourselves) have. If someone is shooting at you it is not “manly” to just stand there and get shot. What that kind of behavior is, is “stupid.”

It’s not quite a Streisand Effect, but it is certainly Streisand adjacent.

Heh.

Really, if you are in the gun control camp, or at all on the left, the song is telling you things you need to hear. People are fed up with the lawlessness. This author doesn’t support vigilantism, but adults understand that it is the predictable result that when people think the government doesn’t sufficiently control crime, vigilantism will rise. Likewise, any effort to take guns away from Americans will be met with resistance—maybe even violent resistance. We aren’t saying they should do that, but we are saying they will do that. Part of your policy argument should take that into account.

Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter once wrote about the deadly consequences of every law:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

Indeed, to build on his point, accidental deaths in custody will inevitably happen as well. For instance, a man might be so upset about being arrested that he has a heart attack.

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But Carter isn’t arguing that this means we shouldn’t have any laws, only that death is a consequence of every law that we should consider when we pass them: Is it really worth someone’s life? Very often it is, sometimes it isn’t, but we should always ask that question.

Whatever you make of Aldean’s song, even if you don't like the music or the singing, he is warning the world about the dangerous consequences of certain laws and even of failing to enforce other laws. Agree or disagree with him, he is telling people something they need to hear and account for in their policy arguments. But, apparently, Shannon Watts just wants to stick her fingers in her ears and tune it out.

***

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