Phil Labonte Takes Trapt’s Chris Taylor Brown to School

What kind of bizarro, fucked up timeline do we inhabit in which not only are we constantly talking about Trapt in 2020 (what in the actual fuck!) but MetalSucks is going to bat for Phil Labonte, noted gun rights activist and liberal arch enemy?

But so it is, and compared to Brown, the All That Remains frontman — who has attracted more than his fair share of this site’s ire in the past — comes off like a MENSA scholar. Both Labonte and Brown joined a recent episode of the Breaking the Ice podcast, and whenever Brown tried to assert his completely misguided, anecdotal viewpoints Labonte acted as the voice of reason and smacked them right down to the ground.

At one point, Brown attempts to argue that those on the political left are more likely to take that side simply because they want to fit in and be accepted — identity politics, essentially — citing the “pussy hats” that women (and men) have worn at equality marches in recent years. Labonte shut that argument down immediately by pointing out that MAGA-hat wearing conservatives are doing the exact same thing, to which Brown, who looks like a deer in the headlights, has no retort.

I didn’t watch the whole episode, but my main takeaway from the parts I did see is that Brown is not very intelligent. We already knew this, duh, but seeing in real-time the way he approaches these arguments as opposed to formulated Twitter replies brings into the focus that the guy simply isn’t very bright. Elsewhere in the chat he suggests that venues should reopen immediately and that any deaths that result from such an endeavor are no big deal as long as venues are shut down again if that happens, hand-waving away the tens of thousands who have already died as if it’s an unavoidable fact of existence.

You can listen to the relevant portion at 59:40. If you have the energy to skip around, there are also sections in which Chris explains his white privilege comment, why he supports Pandora over Spotify and plenty of other goodies.