Woodstock ’99 Was a Prequel to the MAGA January 6 Capitol Insurrection – Business Insider

The testimony given by Capitol police officers at this week's House select committee hearings on the January 6 riot laid out in visceral detail how the chaos was instigated by a mob of mostly white men in a frenzy of rage.

Believing Trump's lies about election fraud, the rioters created a belief that they were victims of a politically correct elite that condescended to them and held them down. So they lashed out, broke stuff, and hurt people caught up in a mania that when all was said and done accomplished absolutely nothing.

The officers recounted some of the unspeakably vile things said right to their faces by members of the attempted MAGA insurrection, and body cam footage showed from a human perspective the level of sadistic violence perpetrated by the mob.

While Congress is trying to investigate the madness of that day, historians will be tracing the "roots" of the Trump-incited riot for years to come. There were many disparate factors that led to the violence, but undoubtedly, one of those factors was the widespread "own the libs" resentment against "politically correct" culture.

HBO's new documentary, "Woodstock '99: Peace, Love, and Rage," happened to be released this week as well.

After watching it, and then revisiting footage of the Capitol attack, I found it striking that the rioters seemed like grown up versions of the young men responsible for so much violence and destruction at the Woodstock '99 music festival 22 years ago.

I was in college when Woodstock '99 took place, right in the target audience. This was my generation. Culturally and politically if not necessarily literally the men in their 20s breaking stuff at Woodstock '99 grew into the men in their 40s that stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

Director Garret Price said his film "Woodstock '99" could have been framed as a comedy. And indeed, the festival's cluelessly tone-deaf Boomer organizers came off as unintentionally comical both during the festival and in interviews recounting the event two decades later.

The documentary he ended up making is actually more like a horror film, Price said.

Indeed, there are real-life horrors in the film that are difficult to watch.

The seemingly relentless shots of women being groped against their wills. People passed out from heat exhaustion because the event was held on an asphalt runway during 100-degree heat, with water bottles selling for $4 and few free hydration options available. And then there was the arson, looting, and mayhem that concluded the festival.

It's the voices of the young men in attendance, teeming with boiling fury despite being wealthy enough to buy a $180 ticket (about $294 in 2021 dollars), that proved this was a monster movie.

When the singer from punk rock group The Offspring came out on stage with a plastic baseball bat and knocked the heads off of four "Backstreet Boys" dummies, it seemed like he was just being goofy, having some fun. But it definitely captured the zeitgeist.

The angry young men in the Woodstock '99 crowd seethed at MTV (at the time a ubiquitous force in youth pop culture) for playing far fewer of the hard rock acts they identified with and much, much more teen pop directed at younger audiences. For much of the weekend, MTV personalities broadcasting live from the festival were relentlessly pelted with water bottles and garbage.

"They were mad at us for taking away their MTV and giving it to their little sister," former MTV VJ Dave Holmes said in the documentary. Holmes also recalled that at the end of the 90s, "there was this simmering anger and it manifested itself through sludge and angst."

This was an audience that embraced shock rap-metal acts and came of age bombarded by "Girls Gone Wild" ads on late night cable TV. They didn't care about peace, love, and social consciousness. They wanted someone to tell them it was their right to say "F*** you."

Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" with its troglodyte refrain "Give me something to break!" came to represent the Woodstock '99 generation. And break stuff, the audience did.

They flipped and mindlessly banged on metal garbage cans, they set fires, broke into ATM machines, and even burned food.

There were many reports of sexual assault and three people died.

In a lot of ways, for a lot of people, Woodstock '99 was the pit of hell.

But the rage exhibited that weekend in upstate New York never really went away. Instead, it evolved.

One of the most popular and culturally relevant performers of the time, Kid Rock, is shown in the documentary peacocking onto the Woodstock '99 stage with his typical faux-pimp affectations.

At one point he addressed the audience: "You want me to get political? Well this is about as deep as Kid Rock thinks. Monica Lewinsky is a f------ ho and Bill Clinton is a goddamn pimp!"

The crowd roared in delight. It was just your typical Woodstock '99 cultural temperature check stupid and disgusting, but seemingly apolitical.

Twenty-two years later, Kid Rock is now an outspoken Republican activist who golfs with Donald Trump and recently tweeted a defense of his prodigious use of a homophobic epithet.

Much like Trump, Kid Rock has no guiding political principles, but he is deeply in touch with the "own the libs" mindset. And much like Kid Rock, the Woodstock '99 audience demographic would later evolve from apolitical to obsessively political, though the proto-MAGA mindset never changed.

A study out of the University of Chicago analyzed the demographics of 377 people arrested for storming the Capitol, and found that 67% were over the age of 35.

But the largest subset was age 35-44 that's the Woodstock '99 generation.

During the two decades between Woodstock '99 and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the flame of "anti-PC" resentment manifested itself in the Men's Rights Activist (MRA) movement, the brazenly misogynistic attacks on female journalists in Gamergate, and the rise of the internet troll none bigger than Donald Trump.

These largely-online communities would also spawn the Birther movement that falsely claimed President Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya. And then came the openly racist Alt-Right, which later helped spawn the false Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories.

Trumpism, a politically incoherent philosophy guided by little more than resentment of the modern world, is the common thread among all these communities.

When Trump told the "Stop the Steal" crowd to march to the US Capitol on January 6, he could have easily been Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst singing "Break Stuff" at Woodstock '99. The fire was already burning, but it got a whole lot more fuel.

The hordes that tried to stop Congress from certifying Trump's electoral defeat dehumanized the Capitol Police, just as the bros at Woodstock '99 dehumanized countless women. The Capitol rioters claiming to be patriots also gratuitously broke stuff defacing statues, defecating, and stealing from congressional offices while falsely claiming to be the victims of a coup d'etat.

To be sure, the two events do not have a clean and simple cause and effect relationship to one another. But from Woodstock '99, through the rise of the many toxic internet cultures that converged into Trumpism, we can see the roots of the Capitol attack.

The seething misogynistic, anti-PC anger at Woodstock '99 evolved into an internet culture that undoubtedly helped Trump take the White House, and then facilitated the storming of the Capitol.

That's why the congressional hearings happening right now are crucial. We should more deeply probe where this political movement is today, and how much support it still has in the Republican Party.

Because I don't think it's done breaking stuff yet.

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Woodstock '99 Was a Prequel to the MAGA January 6 Capitol Insurrection - Business Insider