As reported by Rolling Stone, former Beach Boys member Brian Wilson has called out Mike Love and his current iteration of the Beach Boys for agreeing to play at an upcoming convention held by Safari Club International—basically an organization where rich people pay to pretend their hunting noble wild animals that have been bred to be slaughtered by assholes like Donald Trump’s horrible children. Wilson criticized the decision in a Facebook post, admitting that, while he and fellow Beach Boys co-founder Al Jardine are “emphatically opposed to” the performance, there’s nothing he can do to stop it. So, taking a page from everyone else on the internet who opposes something but can’t prevent it, he directed supporters to an online petition calling for Love’s Beach Boy to pull out of the SCI show.
The petition has over 100,000 signatures as of right now, with the signers pledging to “stop buying or downloading all Beach Boys music, going to Beach Boys concerts, and purchasing any Beach Boys merchandise” until the band members agree to back down from the show and “publicly state their opposition to this sick ‘sport’ of killing animals for ‘fun.’” The petition points out that groups like SCI are responsible for the death of “an estimated 20,000 animals from protected species” each year, and just in case the unnecessary killing of animals isn’t enough of a justification for criticizing SCI and this performance, Rolling Stone points out that one of those aforementioned horrible Trump children—Donald Trump Jr.—will even be speaking at this convention. What’s he going to say? I’m a bad person and it makes me feel like a big man to kill lions because they’re so much cooler and better than me? Because we would consider paying to see that.
Unfortunately, the convention is starting tomorrow, so it seems unlikely that the petition will have any impact, and Love has released a statement saying that the Beach Boys “support freedom of thought and expression.”