Exciting news: free speech is high-status again. The decision by the organisers of Ed Sheeran’s US tour to drop anti-Israel rapper Macklemore is being greeted by the left as an outrageous assault on freedom of speech and cancel culture in action. Wait a minute, I thought ‘freeze peach’ was the cry of racist gammons and cancel culture an invention of the far right? This is the problem with progressives: they’re so busy progressing they never stand in the same philosophical spot for longer than five minutes.
No one was asking Macklemore to be silent. Quite the opposite: they were asking, indeed paying, him to rap
Organisers ditched Macklemore, who has been opening for Sheeran during his Loop tour, after he used two gigs to promote his political views. In addition to telling attendees that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was a ‘terrorist organisation’, he revealed: ‘A big part of the reason why I wanted to do this tour in the first place is so I could stand up in stadiums like this and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: “Free Palestine”.’ The 43-year-old, whose real name is Benjamin Haggerty, explained to attendees that he could not be silent merely to preserve ‘my own comfort, and the audience’s comfort’.
Of course, no one was asking Mr Haggerty to be silent. Quite the opposite: they were asking, indeed paying, him to rap. If only there was a medium through which a rap artist could express his political views, some combination of spoken-word rhyme and musical beats that could be performed at a concert in lieu of holding up proceedings with a prepared statement. He could have drawn inspiration from his lyrical back catalogue: ‘Your politics are like a Starburst pack/Nobody fucks with the orange one/Bannin’ all Muslims?/Aight, bool/What if we ban all the white dudes?’ That comes from Macklemore and G-Eazy’s remix of YG’s ‘Fuck Donald Trump’. (Let’s just pretend we know who these people are and hope there isn’t a test.)
It’s not as if he hasn’t channeled his Palestinian sympathies into music. ‘Hind’s Hall’ is a 2024 track about Hind Rajab, a child killed in Gaza, and student protestors at Columbia University renaming a building after her. But Macklemore’s activism seems to tend towards the intemperate outburst rather than the cogent polemic. At a pro-Palestine concert in 2024, he led attendees in a chant of ‘fuck America’, though I doubt they needed much leading. He later explained:
‘I wish I had been in a better place with my grief and anger. But the truth is I’m not ok. I haven’t been. The last 11.5 months of watching a genocide unfold in front of us has been excruciating on a spiritual, emotional and human level.’
He sounds like an ideal warm-up for a middle-of-the-road peddler of romantic pop. No doubt the organisers booked him hoping to bring in an edgier audience, but Macklemore has all the edge of a blancmange. The accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is a statement so mainstream as to be banal. It’s not the cry of street revolutionaries amid clouds of tear gas; it’s the cry of school teachers and church ladies amid Facebook posts about their grandchildren and their dachshunds.
October 7, 2023 brought the Palestinians levels of attention and sympathy in the West that the architects of the shootings, burnings and rapings of defenceless kibbutzniks could never have imagined. But the TikTokification of the Palestine cause has turned it into what all progressive causes ultimately are: a fashion statement. Palestine isn’t trending anymore and Ed Sheeran’s target audience – thirtysomething wine girlies – have scrolled on to something else.
Robert Kraft, whose corporation owns Gillette Stadium, where Macklemore was next to open for Sheeran, says he blocked any performance by the rapper based on ‘material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery’. The latter seems to be a reference to a 2014 incident in which Macklemore played a gig dressed in a wig, long beard and oversized, hooked nose, which observers noted had a striking similarity to antisemitic caricatures of Orthodox Jewish men. Macklemore subsequently apologised and said he never meant to offend anyone. ‘A “Jewish stereotype” never crossed my mind,’ he wrote.
With Macklemore back in the headlines, the left is suddenly, and unusually, vocal about freedom of speech. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained that wealthy stadium owners are using their influence to ‘censor speech’.
As it happens, I don’t think Macklemore should be dropped from the line-up for his pro-Palestinian views. I would have more sympathy with Kraft if his argument was that the rapper disrupted the concert to hector paying customers with his political musings or had violated some ‘no politics’ clause in his contract. Venue owners should not be compelled to give a platform to speech they consider disagreeable or even hateful, and boy would it be fun to watch everyone switch sides if another warm-up artist interrupted his set to demand the deportation of illegal immigrants or document refugee crimes against Westerners.
There is a way forward, though, provided Robert Kraft is willing to get the old wallet out. Kraft is a billionaire and over the years he has spent untold millions on philanthropy in both the United States and Israel. If I were him, I would let Macklemore perform at Gillette Stadium but at the end of his performance I would display a message on the screens behind him: ‘Macklemore has expressed himself. Now I will do the same: For every full minute of this set I have donated $1 million to the Friends of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and charities supporting the survivors of October 7.’
Who could object to that? We’re all in favour of freedom of speech these days.
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