The Bad Penny (beta)

“This is what Joe Strummer prepared us for.”
-The Gunshy’s Matt Arbogast

—

Yesterday, The Bad Penny had the privilege of catching up with alt-folk artist Matt Arbogast of the Gunshy a day after he participated in No Kings 2 in his hometown of Chicago, the epicenter of the latest round of anti-Trump, anti-fascist protests. We were initially scheduled to only speak about his project’s new record, Hurricane Umbrellas, which will hit stores on Dec. 5.

Indeed, we dug into the record, and we’ll bring you those parts of the interview in the coming weeks. But with No Kings 2 on the brain, we’re first delivering Arbogast’s first-hand account of the protest in which he and his family participated on Saturday – a protest that amassed 7 million participants nationwide, making it the largest social mobilization in American history.

What was No Kings 2 like in Chicago?

So, we’re at Logan Square, a little bit northwest of downtown, and the park by the train that we usually go to was having a pre-protest kinda thing. We went over there thinking it was just gonna be a few people just kind of hanging out. But it was packed, and everybody walked over to the train together.

This is the first year we took my daughter, who just turned 8. She’s been very present and aware of everything going on around here. Her school’s like 75 percent Latino, so the kids are coming to school worried about family, and it’s pretty scary. We’ve been going out in the morning and afternoons, volunteering when we can, to just keep an eye out [for misbehaving ICE].

They were out there Friday afternoon. We were getting messages that they were just a couple of blocks away. What they’ve been doing is … it’s happened a couple of times now at schools around here … they’ll cut off the school pickup at the end of the line, so they can just get out and check all the cars and the parents picking up their kids and take the people they want to. Which is insane on so many levels.

We all got whistles [we use to communicate to each other if we see them coming]. We’ve been hanging whistles from our fence for people to take as they walk by, because we’re only about a half-block from the school, and we’ve already run out of our second big bag in a week. We gave out between 80 and 100 whistles.

Yesterday we went downtown [to protest,] and it was just incredibly positive. We kind of stayed on the outskirts a little bit when they were having the speakers and stuff, then marched and got on the train so our daughter wouldn’t get caught in all the craziness. I don’t know if “healing” is the right word, but you definitely feel like you’re not being swallowed up by everything as much. I feel much more emboldened and, like, “OK, we can we can do this. Everything feels good.”

I saw in New York they said there were a hundred thousand protesters and not one arrest. The only arrest in Chicago was [apparently] at the main detention center, which is about 20 minutes outside the city. Nothing associated with the main protest downtown. The main [Chicago Transit Authority] card system was on maintenance until I woke up yesterday morning, so it just so happened that it was free to ride all morning. Even the cops were smiling at the protesters and

I still can’t get over the fact that your 8-year-old daughter has to be signaling to her classmates that federal authorities might come to snatch them. What have we become?

I’m trying to find little threads of positivity in all this. She is pissed off about what’s happening to other people in her community. And not just things that are directly related to her. To me, it’s like, “OK, that’s good. I can appreciate that.” But we were talking to some people yesterday and were like, “Man, I don’t know what these kids are gonna do?”

I try to believe that things will improve that this is there there is some sort of resolve or something, but at the same time, my anxiety went through the roof when we found out we were pregnant in the October before Trump won first time. It took us years to get pregnant. Given that we’re bringing a kid into the world when all this was starting … and then the pandemic and all that stuff happened, and the craziness hasn’t stopped.

But I’m glad that I’m in Chicago, where people are vocally opposing things that are happening. Even the politicians that are here aren’t just [caving] by any means. The mayor [Brandon Johnson] called for a general strike yesterday at the protest. That makes you feel a little bit like you’re at least supported. And [Governor J.B.] Pritzker’s definitely showing some backbone.

I’m really concerned about the Supreme Court likely striking down Article 2 of the Civil Rights Act, which will apparently hand up to 19 seats to the GOP in Congress.

I’m trying not to think too far ahead and not [delve into] too much like doom and gloom. What reassures me is that, at the end of the day, my 8-year-old daughter even knows that nobody should be doing [the misbehavior that’s occurring]. She doesn’t know the nuances of the laws or anything, but in her mind, she is able to break it down to the simplest form of like, “No, that’s not right.” To me, these politicians should be learning from third graders. Like, “Forget about you lobbyists for a second. That’s just not right. You’ve prioritized [them] over common decency.” It’s ridiculous.

She’s helped us be able to look at it that way and just simplify things. Like, you try to justify why somebody might be a piece of shit, and at the end of the day, it’s like, “No, you shouldn’t try to justify that.” You need to call them out on it. 

When I launched this On Tyranny series, a lot of bands responded by saying, “Oh, we don’t do politics.” It’s like, “Well, politics has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives.” It’s not a left-right issue. This is about right and wrong. Isn’t it surreal for those of us who’ve been into underground music to be on the right side of the moral issue and the character argument? Those used to be the right-wing’s most effective weapons in the ‘90s.

I remember back when I was playing music as a teenager, I was very young, and I had one of the Asian Man Records anti-Nazi buttons. I still have it on my guitar strip, actually. But at that point, it was very distant in a way. Now, as this comes full-circle, you see Much more blatant direct action right in front of you, and then you see the the hesitance to come out and directly support it.

Everybody should be wearing those buttons right now. It’s like, “Wait, how much of a poser are you if you were only supporting those things when it was convenient and easy for you – but not now?” Like, this is what Joe Strummer prepared us for, you know? You can’t say you listen to the Clash or Fugazi or Propagandhi and then don’t fucking pay attention to what’s going on right now. That’s ridiculous. This wasn’t just a secondary element of their music. It was the focus, to a large extend, of what they were doing.

When I first built my little studio downstairs, my buddy made a big mural of Woody Guthrie on my studio wall. Those were the foundations I grew up with: the Woodies and the Billy Braggs and those guys. [What they stood for] is what folk music was trying to accomplish. It’s not just about convenience.

It’s disappointing to see how little some people are paying attention, but I’ll also say, under the first [Trump] term, we did this whole series called Undefeated where we put out a song a month for free and donated [what funds we received] to different organizations. It wasn’t an official release or anything, we just wanted to use our art to help, and that’s what we settled on. On my end, my anxiety went insane, and during Trump’s first term, I started taking Zoloft and stopped drinking. 

At this point, I’m trying to find ways of staying informed but at the same time conserve a little bit of my own sanity. I was obsessively refreshing news feeds and so overly engaged with it that I was hardly functional. They’re trying to suffocate people’s opportunities to flourish, to be able to keep things going. In the first term, I was very much, like, “Fight, fight, fight,” to publicly try to push back against everything that was happening. My biggest concern at this point is that mainstream media is playing the social media algorithm game, where it’s all about keeping you engaged. 

Even the New York Times has their daily political update, where every five minutes or so, something new comes up. That’s very dangerous in its own right, because so much of it  is speculative. And today we had the biggest protest political protest in American history, and it wasn’t the top news story on the Times website.

I get most of my news now from The Guardian, because it’s at least a little bit of a separate perspective and [doesn’t] just regurgitate things or put stories out there for the sake of being the first to post.  The fucking president is changing his mind every five minutes, so there’s not a lot of value in directly reporting and talking about how he’s saying one thing right away when, by the end of the day, it’s gonna be different.

I took all the apps off my phone. I check [the news] through the browser, usually in the morning, and then I try to just check it like once or twice a day, and then leave it at that. I feel like anything that I need to absorb is gonna be made pretty prominent on those sources and everything else I could just wait until the dust is settled and then take it in, and respond to and react to it as I need to.

That seems to be OK for the time being. The hardest part is, my partner works and gets home usually later in the day, at 7 or 8 sometimes, and when she gets in, we’re talking and she’s just getting a lot of that information. So she’s like, “Oh, did you hear about this?” And I’m like, “Yeah. I already got it. I’m good.” But it’s OK. I’m glad that she’s engaged and and paying attention.

Check out The Bad Penny‘s 45-part On Tyranny series, which The Bad Penny launched in the spring, here. Recent installments include interviews with Deaf Club, Cosmic Reaper, MyVeronica, Planet on a Chain, Necrofier, Cheap Perfume, Bobby Conn, Truculent and many more.

This entry was posted on 10/20/2025 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Features, Interviews, On Tyranny, On Tyranny with tags Asian Man Records, authoritarianism, Clash, fascism, Gunshy, Joe Strummer, Matt Arbogast, No Kings, No Kings 2, On Tyranny, tyranny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.