ruce Springsteen keeps lecturing working Americans about corruption while cashing in on the songs those same Americans made famous.
His most devoted fans tried hard to keep his politics parked outside the door.
And one Springsteen endorsement just pushed them somewhere they couldn’t come back from.
The Boss Backed a Socialist and His Own Fan Club Folded
For 11 years, a Facebook group called the Spring-Nuts gave Springsteen diehards a place to swap concert stories, trade photos, and raise money for charity.
The group grew past 18,000 members. Now it’s gone.
Founder Howie Chaz and his wife, Julie, pulled the plug after members kept tearing into each other over the political turn in Springsteen’s tours and public statements, according to the Asbury Park Press. Chaz told the paper that the singer’s endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race marked “the breaking point.”
The irony stings. The Spring-Nuts lived by a house rule that read like something off a church bulletin board: “Respect everyone’s choices and opinions. You don’t have to agree with them but you must respect them. NO DRAMA.”
That rule survived more than a decade of tours. It couldn’t survive the man on the stage.
“As Bruce became more outspoken about his politics, something we understood and respected as his absolute right, we found ourselves facing a difficult balancing act,” Chaz said. “How could we be a Bruce Springsteen fan community trying to protect that harmony and camaraderie and ignore messages and statements coming directly from the very artist who brought us all together?”
Read that one more time. The fans didn’t drag politics into the group. Springsteen did, and the folks running his fan club had no way to keep it out.
In their farewell statement, the couple said too many disagreements “deteriorated into personal attacks, bullying, insults, and some genuinely vile and hateful rhetoric.”
But the endorsement that lit the fuse was hardly a whisper. Springsteen hailed El-Sayed as “a fighter for our American Constitution” and “a fighter against the corrupt, lawless, and anti-American leadership currently in the White House,” and he told his followers he stood in the candidate’s “corner 100%.”
Corrupt. Lawless. Anti-American. Springsteen aimed all three at a President more than 77 million Americans voted for in 2024, and a good number of those voters, it turns out, own his records.
El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health official, ran on a platform built around universal healthcare after knocking off Haley Stevens in the Democrat primary, Fox News reported. He won the seat, and he heads to Washington, DC as one of the most committed champions of government-run medicine in the country.
Some longtime fans didn’t take it quietly. One critic called Springsteen “just another rich coastal has-been who needs a new reason to hate the country that made him.” Another, a self-described 59-year-old fan, opened with three words: “Shame on you.”
Other critics pointed to El-Sayed’s campaign appearances with streamer Hasan Piker, whom one commenter described as “the streamer who said America deserved 9/11.”
And one El-Sayed backer answered the critics in a way that should stop every Springsteen fan cold. “I suspect that some of your Jewish fans may have issues with this, but that’s their problem. That just shows their bigotry,” the supporter wrote.
That’s where the Left has landed. Raise a concern about antisemitism, and somebody on your own side calls you the bigot.
It’s worth remembering who built the Spring-Nuts. The Jewish News Syndicate once featured Chaz, whose full name is Howie Chazanoff, in a story about Jewish fans juggling the Sabbath and E Street tour dates. Springsteen’s endorsement didn’t just split a Facebook page. It landed on the very people who started it.
Springsteen Already Ran One Fan Institution Out of Business
This isn’t the first time The Boss’s choices shuttered a fan operation that took decades to build.
In February 2023, Backstreets, a magazine and website that had chronicled Springsteen since 1980, announced it was closing after 43 years.
The reason? Money. Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing sent some seats on Springsteen’s tour soaring to $5,000 or more, according to the Associated Press. Publisher Christopher Phillips wrote that the uproar left his team “dispirited, downhearted and yes, disillusioned,” and he said plenty of readers lost interest because they simply couldn’t afford to go.
For perspective, longtime fans remember paying $7.50 to catch him on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour in 1978.
And Springsteen didn’t budge. He told Rolling Stone that unhappy fans could have their money back after the show, and he admitted the obvious. “You certainly don’t like to be the poster boy for high ticket prices,” he said.
So the scorecard reads like this. In 2023, Springsteen priced out the fans who wrote about him. Now he has preached at the fans who gathered around him until they couldn’t stand each other anymore.
Two fan institutions gone. One over his wallet, one over his politics.
A Half-Billion-Dollar Rocker Keeps Picking Fights With His Own Crowd
Here’s the part the rock critics always skip when they gush about The Boss as the voice of the working man.
Forbes pegged Springsteen’s net worth at $1.1 billion in 2024, pointing largely to the estimated $500 million to $550 million he collected when he sold his catalog to Sony Music in 2021. Springsteen disputed the label. “I’m not a billionaire,” he told The Telegraph. “I wish I was, but they got that real wrong.”
Fine. Call him a half-billionaire. It doesn’t change the picture of a man who sold the songs about shuttered factories and laid-off steelworkers for more money than most of those steel towns will see in a generation.
And now he wants those same folks to cheer for a senator whose signature cause hands Washington the keys to their doctor’s office.
Government-run healthcare sounds lovely from a campaign stage. In practice, bureaucrats decide who waits and for how long. NHS England’s own figures have shown waiting lists stretching into the millions of treatments in recent years. Ask anybody stuck on one of those lists how “universal” it feels.
But Springsteen didn’t stop at the endorsement. On Election Day, he posted a video aimed at election officials, warning that they “must never consent to any directives that undermine our constitutional right to a free and fair election.”
What directives? He never named a single one. He simply took a Democrat scare story about Donald Trump and the midterms, tacked a Thomas Jefferson line onto it, and pointed his fans toward an online “Oath to the Constitution.”
He has also rolled out a new song bashing “King Trump” and ICE, the agency carrying out the deportations voters signed up for when they sent Trump back to the White House.
Metallica’s James Hetfield has a simple answer for all this. He has said for years that his band steers clear of politics because music brings people together and political talk mostly doesn’t. Plenty of rock legends who still pack arenas figured out long ago that a ticket buys a show, not a sermon.
Springsteen picked the sermon. That’s his right, and the First Amendment protects his opinions as surely as it protects anybody’s.
But freedom cuts both ways. Fans can walk too, and the folks who sang along to “Born in the USA” for four decades are discovering they barely recognize the guy holding the microphone.
Maybe Springsteen figures the old crowd will come crawling back the next time he cuts a record. Some probably will. But it’s hard to picture this ending with one Facebook group, not with El-Sayed taking his seat alongside a new Democrat majority hungry to push government medicine, and not with Springsteen sounding like a man warming up for 2028 rather than winding down.
Every endorsement from here on lands on another group of fans forced to choose between the music and the man.
Back in 2025, Chaz explained exactly what he and Julie wanted the Spring-Nuts to be. “We wanted people to smile,” he said.
Sources: Mediaite, “Bruce Springsteen Fan Club Shuts Down After ‘Breaking Point’ Over El-Sayed Endorsement”; Fox News, “Bruce Springsteen sparks fan fury after backing Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race”; Fox News, “Bruce Springsteen fan club founders say political fights, El-Sayed endorsement led to shutdown: report”; The Independent via AOL, “Bruce Springsteen’s fan club shuts down because it can’t stop arguing politics and his endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed”; Asbury Park Press (as cited by Mediaite and Fox News); Associated Press via Fortune, “Bruce Springsteen’s ticket prices are so high that his fan site ‘Backstreets’ is shutting down after 43 years”; Digital Music News, Forbes billionaire estimate and Springsteen’s Telegraph response; Jewish News Syndicate (via HowardBlas.com), Spring-Nuts profile