Axl Rose Blasts Vice President Mike Pence Over Colts PR Stunt

Mercurial Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose just sent out his first tweet in nearly six months, and it’s a whopper.

The 42-character message is a direct jab at Vice President Mike Pence, who attended Sunday’s football game between the San Francisco 49ers and his home-state Indianapolis Colts with the express purpose of making a statement by leaving early if any players took a knee during the national anthem. With the 49ers on the field — the team on which Colin Kaepernick played when he first started taking a knee — it was all but a sure thing that at least a few players would take a knee, and that’s exactly what ended up happening.

Thanks WH 4 the $200k Colts game PR stunt.

— Axl Rose (@axlrose) October 9, 2017

ABC News reports that the Air Force C-32 Pence took from Las Vegas, where he was visiting those affected by last week’s shooting, costs $30,290 per hour to operate. By those metrics, the three-and-a-half-hour trip to Indianapolis cost $106,015, while the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Los Angeles after the game cost $136,305, totaling $242,320 for both legs. Had Pence simply flown from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute-long flight, the cost would’ve been $37,862.50. That’s nearly $200,000 wasted. And all this amidst allegation that secretary of health and human services Tom Price used government funds to pay for private jets used for personal reasons.

It’s encouraging to see Rose getting political on his massive, massive platform. He did the same shortly after Trump was elected to office and has occasionally since, with some ire focused in particular on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and, of course, the Orange Cheeto. Definitely worth a follow, even if his tweets are quite sporadic.

Guns N’ Roses kicked off a North American arena tour this past Sunday in Philadelphia; dates here.