Stipe is insane and projecting his deepest perverted fantasies as historical fact.
Easy to figure out.
Stipe is ragingly gay. AIDS was not well understood and Reagan did not stop the world from rotating to ‘cure it’. Ergo he was evil. Well more evil than the would have been/was considered by the average straight leftist of the era.
It is once again, all about the ‘gay’.
Also the heavy metal/hippie thing. It is well documented that HM was all about the sex, the drugs and the Rock and Roll. Ergo it’s ‘sexist’ and thus anti liberal because of it. Now to be sure there were generally lib HM stars/bands. But their liberalism wasn’t the fanatical style. It was mostly the ‘get me laid with more lib chicks’ style, doing a benefit concert and leaving it at that.
Let us not forget it was Dee Snider that was one of the three who slapped down Tipper and the lib created PMRC.