Ted Nugent claimed that Democratic politicians in Detroit “train[ed] and reward[ed] people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive” causing the majority of residents to become “pimps, whores and welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle” during an October 30 interview with The Washington Times. Nugent, a board member of the National Rifle Association and columnist for the Times, is also a high-profile endorser of Mitt Romney.

According to Nugent, President Obama is “doing everything he can to take the whole country down” the same path as Detroit:

It is so very true that my birth city of Detroit was the cleanest, most neighborly, positive-energy, work-ethic epicenter of planet earth when I was born there in 1948, right on through to the 1960s. Enter the liberal death wish of Mayor Coleman Young and a tsunami of negative, anti-productivity policies by liberal Democrats that put a voodoo curse on our beloved Motor City. When you train and reward people to scam, cheat and refuse to be productive, there is only one direction that society can go: straight down the toilet. It is truly a heartbreaker. Some wonderful people are still to be found back home, but they are outnumbered by the pimps, whores and welfare brats that have made bloodsucking a lifestyle. And now we have a president who is doing everything he can to take the whole country down that same path. Truly amazing. 

Nugent also claimed that The New Deal and Great Society economic programs “succeeded in brainwashing a segment of our country to believe Fedzilla would provide for anyone who decided, for whatever reason, to not be productive.”

The New Deal was responsible for creating the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs to combat poverty were responsible for the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and a variety of other anti-poverty programs. These initiatives dramatically reduced the rate of poverty, particularly among the elderly.

In recent weeks, Nugent has frequently made vitriolic media appearances to attack Obama. During an October 7 radio appearance, he claimed that an “anti-American” President Obama only feigned respect for veterans. On October 10, Nugent took to Twitter to claim that the Obama administration was guilty of treason and “criminal complicity to murder.”

Nugent, who claimed in April that he would be “dead or in jail” if Obama is reelected as president, also made waves in July when he published a Times column stating, “I'm beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.”