Street artists who are said to be part of The Faction, a right-wing collective, have defaced a billboard above the Whisky a Go Go nightclub on Sunset Boulevard in an attack on presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The billboard was an advertisement for “Swamp Thing,” a DC Comics television show on the CW network. Working overnight on Wednesday, the vandals replaced the image of the Swamp Thing, a humanoid/plant elemental creature created by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson, with a freaky image of Biden. They also replaced the wording on the billboard, which read “Deep water, deep secrets,” with the slogans “Joe Biden is…Swamp Thing,” and “Hide your kids, hide your wife.”
Newsweek reports that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said: “Whoever made this billboard nailed it. Joe Biden spent 47 years in Washington, D.C., enriching his family, exporting the jobs of American workers and selling out our country to the Chinese Communists. There is no bigger ‘Swamp Thing’ in American history than Joe.”
The Biden image has been removed from the billboard. This isn’t the first time The Faction has defaced billboards and other property in and near West Hollywood. In January last year, artists said to be associated with The Faction defaced a billboard on the northeast corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Holloway Drive that was promoting Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time.” The artists replaced Maher’s image with a blank face and changed the slogan “The Whole Truth and Nothing But” to read “The Whole Narrative and Nothing But.” Narrative has become a term used to describe the practice of combining verifiable facts, half-truths and misinformation to promote political interests.
Sabo, another right-wing street artist said to be associated with The Faction, claimed responsibility in June 2017 for defacing signs for the City of West Hollywood’s WeHo Pedals bike share program with promotions of a new book by controversial right-wing propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay man.
Sabo on on his website describes his mission as “kicking liberals in the teeth.” He was the featured guest at an event last year at Fiesta Cantina, the Santa Monica Boulevard bar and restaurant, that was put on by the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican organization that has endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election and whose members include local residents such as Ben Coleman, a former Public Safety Commissioner, and Jim Arnone, a Los Angeles lawyer with the Latham & Watkins law firm who represents real estate development interests doing business in West Hollywood.
Best thing ever. Just where he belongs, the swamp thing. Laughing my 🍑off 🤣😆😂
Swamp creature tally:
Recent administrations with the MOST criminal indictments:
Trump (Republican) — 215
Nixon (Republican) — 76
Reagan (Republican) — 26
Recent administrations with the LEAST criminal indictments:
Obama (Democrat) — 0
Carter (Democrat) — 1
Clinton (Democrat) — 2
That doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. Pelosi, Harry Reid, Schumer, et al, will bring charges against any Republican for any ridiculous imagined offense they can come up with. Republicans don’t play those silly games in retribution. Useful idiots, then, count the total charges without even taking a glance at how insubstantial they are. Unfortunately, Joe Q. Citizen reads the kind of tripe like what you’ve posted here and he doesn’t have the resources or time to check it out and is influenced by it, which is exactly what the Dems had in mind in the first… Read more »
Your last sentence MUST be about the uninformed/poorly informed people who vote for Trump.
Way to let the facts speak for themselves, Movib! Touché!
Au contraire, Jay. You can indict a ham sandwich, and that’s what almost all of these indictments are. They are childish political ploys.
Politics aside, it amazes me that people can climb to this well-lit billboard on the roof of a Sunset Strip nightclub and spend all night defacing it without anyone seeing them, let alone the police.
Protestors are going to burn Weho down if Trump is re-elected.
We should keep our sense of humor. This probably only enhanced the publicity for the movie and provided free sympathetic press to the Biden campaign, which was probably not the vandals intention.
Interesting. I had not read about this group before. Nice to see budding artists create.
Bigger question, why are all you liberal dems still supporting a republican business like Fiesta Cantina which has regular events to support candidates who want to take away your rights.
My sentiments exactly.
We are the Creative City
Fake outrage. You wouldn’t have said a word if the billboard was criticizing Trump.
It’s a travesty to call these vandals “street artists”. They are militant criminal minded vandals who are no different than any other common street thugs who maliciously deface & destroy private & public property. Neither do they have respect for the law or of causing others hardship. Incidently, I wonder how they manage to accomplish their vandalism so easily without being spotted by a sheriff. It’s not easy to hide when you’re up in the air on a billboard ramp, or on top of a building on Sunset Strip.
And what is BLM graffiti considered?
pretty funny
It’s funny to break the law?
Depends on the law of course.
To square better with reality: It should be Rump’s name and visage featured. Suggestion- they can photoshop in Pence’s curiously red (pink?) eye from the debate (maybe the fly too?). If the number of convicted associates is any measure of swampiness I think we have a winner! Good news- they can keep the tag line with a slight edit! Just update it to: “Hide the kids…if they are brown and from out of town.” The “Hide the wife” line still seems apropros given his recorded and reported misogynistic comments and the multiple credible assault allegations against him. First time something… Read more »