John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan with a .22-caliber pistol in the first year of his presidency, claims that he has been victimized by cancel culture.
“I’m just caught up in the cancel culture, I guess,” he said about his continuously thwarted post-release musical career.
Hinckley, who now fancies himself a musician, was 25 when he shot Reagan outside of a Hilton hotel in Washington DC, in 1981, after being inspired by Martin Scorsese’s 1976 psychological thriller “Taxi Driver.”
He was reportedly fixated on a young Jodie Foster at the time, and imitated the story-line of Robert De Niro’s homicidally-inclined lead character, who attempted to assassinate a presidential candidate.
#vintage #Mugshot of John Hinckley Jr shortly after he attempted to assassinate President … https://t.co/EOUyz7QlaM pic.twitter.com/9FcId3kTyt
— Histolines Timelines (@Histolines_) October 13, 2016
His lawyers were successfully able to argue that Hinckley legitimately believed he would be able to impress Foster by shooting Reagan, and the court found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
He was confined to a mental ward in Washington DC’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for decades, until a federal judge ruled that he was no longer a threat to society in 2016, and would be allowed to live in society under the court’s supervision.
Since being released into the wild, Hinckley, now 68, has reinvented himself as a folk singer, who has been creating original music on a YouTube channel that has over 36,000 subscribers.
This Day In History
On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C. hotel by a deranged drifter named John Hinckley Jr.
The president had just finished addressing a labor meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel and was walking with his… pic.twitter.com/lVd11P4PWK— Matthew Lanoue (@matthew_lanoue) March 21, 2024
His court restrictions were fully removed in June 2022, which led Hinckley to book his first live performance the following month in New York City.
The concert sold out at $20 a ticket, but due to the intense backlash Bushwick’s Market Hotel received for hosting the event, they cancelled at the last minute.
“We don’t see the need to allow someone who did something awful to skip the line and play even our middle size independent community stage,” the hotel said in a statement, according to the New York Post.
The venue maintained that they hoped allowing Hinckley to perform would help showcase that people could recover from their mental issues and criminal past.
However, when push came to shove, the hotel determined that “some stunt booking” of a former assassin-turned-guitarist “who we don’t care about on an artist level, and who upsets people in a dangerously radicalized, reactionary climate” wasn’t worth the trouble.
After the Market Hotel bailed on Hinckley, other venues in New York, Chicago, Georgia, and Virginia, also refused to let him perform.
“My family, they loved President Reagan, I liked President Reagan, so it was never a sense of animosity,” John Hinckley Jr. said. “I’m just so glad that he survived my assassination attempt. But when he passed, I had a sense of sadness.”https://t.co/8GmYOSLtRL pic.twitter.com/lhXkXlmsLf
— WAVY TV 10 (@WAVY_News) March 21, 2024
His latest cancelled performance was supposed to take place at the Hotel Huxley in Naugatuck, Connecticut, on March 30.
“I think that’s fair to say: I’m a victim of cancel culture,” Hinckley complained to the New York Post. “It keeps happening over and over again.”
His concert on March 30 would have marked the 43rd anniversary of the day he shot Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, Secret Service member Tim McCarthy and officer Thomas Delahanty.
“They book me and then the show gets announced and then the venue starts getting backlash,” he told the outlet.
“The owners always cave, they cancel. It’s happened so many times, it’s kinda what I expect,” Hinckley explained about the cycle. “I don’t really get upset.”
Which is a good thing, because last time he got riled up, a sitting president took a bullet to the chest.
But Hinckley insists that he’s a changed man after spending over three decades in a psychiatric hospital.
“I’m just not the person I used to be. I have a different mindset than I did long, long ago,” he noted while reportedly refusing to discuss his past misdeeds. “I don’t want to dwell on the past. Let’s stay in the present.”
Though he’s unwilling to reflect on the past, his taste in music is firmly rooted there.
“I’m still stuck in the ’60s and ’70s with what I listen to. I just don’t like what’s going on in today’s music,” he told the outlet. I just don’t like it. I don’t like the rap. I don’t like the pop.”
To break the cycle of his gigs getting axed, he wants to open up his own event space for performers.
“It would be a venue for new artists, distinguished artists and they wouldn’t get canceled [at] the last minute like I’m getting canceled,” Reagan’s assassin remarked.