Marina Hyde says artists don’t change politics. A television drama that rewrote British law in five months, a former Beatle the Nixon administration tried to deport, and a vote in Congress that was unthinkable five years ago say otherwise.
Opinion. The views in this piece are the author’s own, not those of Arkava®.
On Saturday 19 September, Ed Sheeran walked on stage alone at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, with no opening act, and told a stadium crowd that what is happening in Gaza is “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate”.1
Credit: The Rest is Entertainment, Goalhanger Podcasts, Episode title “Ed Sheeran: The Fallout”
A few days later, on The Rest Is Entertainment, Marina Hyde apologised for what she was about to say. “I’m terribly sorry,” she told Richard Osman. “I’m afraid I don’t believe that artists are making a difference on this or indeed any issue in terms of changing the politics.” Later in the conversation she went further: “every single piece of evidence suggests they don’t.”2
It began at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on 4 and 5 September, where Sheeran’s support act, Macklemore, said “Free Palestine” from the stage — alongside “Free Lebanon”, “Free Cuba”, “Free Congo” and “Free Sudan”, and a line calling ICE, the US immigration agency, a terrorist organisation — and performed “Hind’s Hall” with images of Gaza on the screens.3
On 14 September Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of Gillette Stadium, said Macklemore’s appearance there “would cross that line”, citing “material shared from the stage” and what he called “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery”; the decision, he added, was “not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians”.4
The promoter, Messina Touring Group, said venues would not allow a concert with Macklemore on the line-up, and he was off the tour; Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga and Lukas Graham quit in solidarity.3 Osman placed Messina inside Live Nation on air. It is affiliated with AEG Presents.4
I agree with Hyde on two things. Macklemore saying “Free Palestine” in New Jersey will not stop Palestinian children being killed: the UN Secretary-General’s annual report records that the UN verified the killing of 2,668 of them in Gaza in 2025, and UNICEF said in August that at least 300 children had reportedly been killed in the 300 days since the October 2025 ceasefire.5
And tragedy tourism is real. Some celebrities arrive for the catastrophe of the week with thoughts and prayers, and leave before anything is asked of them.
Where I part company with her is the conclusion.
The argument I want to make here is that art changes culture, that culture changes politics, and that people who speak from a stage, with the weight of their work behind them, have always been part of how that happens.
A statement borrows its weight from the work
Hyde’s case rests on a line between the art and the artist’s statements about the world. That line does not hold. Nobody would care what Macklemore said between songs if he had not written the songs. A statement from the stage borrows its weight from the work, and from something that matters almost as much: how an artist shows up, and what they model as normal.
Macklemore has form. “Same Love”, released in July 2012, became the unofficial theme song of the campaign for Referendum 74 on same-sex marriage in his home state of Washington, which passed that November by 53.7 per cent to 46.3.6
Nobody can prove a song moved a 228,630-vote margin, and I will not pretend to. What the song did — and this is the mechanism Hyde’s evidence cannot see — was make one side of the argument sound like the obvious thing a decent person would say.
There is a name for that. The Overton window, in the words of the Mackinac Center, where the idea was developed, is “a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics”.7
Put plainly, it is the range of positions a politician can hold in public without being finished by them, and artists are among the people who move it.
Science fiction supplies the cleanest case I know. After the first season of Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols planned to return to musical theatre. Martin Luther King Jr, she later recalled, told her she could not, because the show presented a world in which,
“for the first time, we are being seen the world over ... as we should be seen”.8
The series existed partly because Lucille Ball — the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio, who had overcome CBS’s reluctance to cast her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz, more than a decade before — backed it through two pilots at Desilu.8
None of it was a protest, and it changed what America saw as normal anyway.
The window moves in both directions, and Hyde supplied the best example herself. In April 2026, after a backlash over his antisemitic comments, the Home Office barred Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — from entering Britain to headline a London festival, on the ground that his presence would not be conducive to the public good.9
Nobody in government thought his words were weightless. Art can make cruelty sound normal as easily as it makes decency sound obvious, and so can the proprietors and platforms that sell anger by the page view. That is a reason to take what artists say seriously, which is the opposite of Hyde’s conclusion.
Fourteen years of reporting, four nights of television
If you want to watch the window move in real time, look at Britain in January 2024.
Computer Weekly first reported the stories of sub-postmasters wrongly accused over the Post Office’s Horizon accounting system on 11 May 2009.10
The facts sat in the public record for more than fourteen and a half years — reported first, and for longest, by a trade magazine — and successive governments did not act on the scale they demanded. Then ITV broadcast Mr Bates vs The Post Office on four consecutive nights from 1 January 2024, to an average of 13.5 million viewers an episode across all devices within 28 days, by ITV’s count. On 10 January the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, told the House of Commons that the government would “introduce new primary legislation to make sure that those convicted as a result of the Horizon scandal are swiftly exonerated and compensated”. The Act received Royal Assent on 24 May 2024, and by 30 June 2026 it had quashed 2,249 convictions of 619 people in England and Wales.10
The drama did not uncover a single fact that Computer Weekly had not already printed. It changed the cost of looking away. For fourteen years, the claim that a computer system had been used to prosecute innocent people was something a minister could decline to engage with; after four nights of prime-time drama, it was something no minister could survive ignoring.
Evey, in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, remembers her father’s formula:
“artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.”
Mr Bates was the invention that told the truth.
Nobody tries to deport a singer they expect to be ignored
Even in a democracy, speaking can be made expensive. On 4 February 1972 Senator Strom Thurmond sent Attorney General John Mitchell a memo about John Lennon, written by the staff of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, with a covering letter saying the matter should be “considered at the highest level”. Lennon was planning — according to the historian Jon Wiener, whose Freedom of Information requests later brought the memos to light — to tour America with concerts that doubled as drives to register young voters, in the first presidential election in which 18-year-olds could vote nationwide. The memo described his circle as “strong advocates of the program to ‘dump Nixon’”, and said that “if Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategy counter-measure”.11
A month later the Immigration and Naturalization Service moved to deport him, on the strength of a 1968 guilty plea at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court for possessing cannabis resin, for which he had been fined £150. The same service had extended his visa only months earlier, conviction and all. Lennon dropped the tour on legal advice, Wiener says, and spent more than three years fighting to stay. On 7 October 1975 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the conviction did not make him excludable, and added a warning: “The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds.” By then Nixon had been out of office for fourteen months. Lennon received his green card the following year.11
That, I think, is the duty those with influence carry. There are moments when saying what is true is necessary, and the people with the largest platforms carry the largest share of that obligation. The price paid, is part of the proof that it matters.
Autocracies move faster. In late September 2022, less than a fortnight after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, the singer Shervin Hajipour posted “Baraye” on Instagram, a song built from the reasons Iranians had given online for protesting. It drew about 40 million views in roughly two days, and within days he had been arrested and the post deleted. In February 2023 it became the first song to win the Recording Academy’s award for Best Song for Social Change. In March 2024 Hajipour said he had been sentenced to three years and eight months for propaganda and inciting riot; that September he said an amnesty had dismissed the case. The post came down and the singer was convicted. The song went on playing from apartment blocks at night, the unofficial anthem of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.12
In the Soviet Union, when Western jazz and rock’n’roll were forbidden, bootleggers cut them onto used X-ray film and sold the “bone music” on the street, until reel-to-reel tape made the X-rays unnecessary in the 1960s.12
As Ian Malcolm said of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, life, uh... finds a way. So does a song.
The real selectivity is by cost
Hyde’s second charge is selectivity: artists loud about Gaza and quiet about Sudan and eastern Congo. It fails on its facts. Macklemore named Congo and Sudan in the very speech that cost him the tour, and Kraft’s statement mentioned neither; Ms Rachel’s May 2024 fundraiser for children in Gaza was also for children in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine.13
It fails on its logic, because declining to name every wrong in the world does not cancel the one you do name. If a warning about one fire only counted when it listed every fire on earth, nobody would ever be allowed to raise the alarm.
The selectivity worth worrying about runs the other way. In the spring of 2022 Sheeran said “I stand with Ukraine”, and that May he released a version of “2step” with the Ukrainian band Antytila, whose frontman had volunteered as an army paramedic.14
It was a decent thing to do, and in Britain in 2022 it cost him almost nothing. In Philadelphia last week he said he had tried throughout his career not to be “a political commentator of any kind”.1
But he has taken sides before. The difference with Gaza is what speaking up would cost him.
That is my measure of tragedy tourism. It asks whether you had spoken before, whether the words arrive next to something you are selling, and whether saying them costs you anything. By that measure Macklemore and Ms Rachel, who have spoken up for Gaza since 2024 and taken the backlash for it, are not tourists. Sheeran spoke when, in Macklemore’s words, his “typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before”.3
By my measure, silence had become the more expensive option. To his credit, when the bill arrived, he paid some of it.
Horizon ran for fourteen years because telling it was costly and ignoring it was cheap. The causes where speaking carries a personal, social or financial penalty are the ones people stay silent about, and silence is how they last. Advocacy on Palestine now carries penalties that most causes do not.
In Britain, police made 2,819 arrests in the nine months to March 2026 linked to support for Palestine Action, which the government proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, a ban the Court of Appeal upheld in June after the High Court had found it unlawful. In the United States, Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were detained for weeks and months in 2025 in immigration proceedings that charged neither with a crime. In Berlin, four protesters were ordered to leave Germany; a court annulled one of those orders in May.15
Whatever you think of any of them, that is what speaking now costs.
Silence at that scale is a position
Osman made the best case for Sheeran on air: that refusing to join in on any side is, in the culture we live in, “quite a radical act”.2
Everyone has a right to that silence — Osman is right about that — but rights and duties are two different things, and the duty grows with the reach. Uncle Ben put it more economically in the 2002 film Spider-Man:
“with great power comes great responsibility.“
Silence from someone who can fill a stadium is a position of its own.
Taking a stand does not require a megaphone. Dolly Parton, who died on 25 August at the age of 80, is the model. In 2018 she took “Dixie” out of the name of her dinner show because people found it offensive, and in 2020 she told Billboard that “of course Black lives matter”. The same year she gave $1 million for Covid-19 research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center that, its scientists said, helped them show the Moderna vaccine was producing a good immune response, and her Imagination Library has given away more than 300 million books.16
That is advocacy by consistency, and few people doubted where she stood.
Criticising a state is not hating a people
Kraft’s statement cited “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery”, and that charge deserves an answer.
Antisemitism is abhorrent, and it is running near record levels: CST, which monitors it across the UK, recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest total ever reported to it. Anti-Muslim hatred is rising too. Police-recorded religious hate crimes against Muslims in England and Wales rose by 19 per cent in the year to March 2025 (excluding the Metropolitan Police), and CAIR received a record 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States in 2025.17 Macklemore apologised in 2014 for a costume — widely criticised at the time as an antisemitic caricature — and that history is fair game.17
What is not fair is the conflation now doing so much work in our politics and media: the idea that criticising the state of Israel is hatred of Jews. No people is one uniform body with one set of views, and treating all Jews, or all Muslims, or all Christians, or all atheists, as interchangeable is ignorant and plainly wrong. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s own working definition of antisemitism says that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. In September 2025, after being read the UN’s definition of genocide, 39 per cent of American Jews told a Washington Post poll, conducted by SSRS, that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.18
Anyone who equates “Free Palestine” with hatred of Jews has to explain where those respondents fit.
Reading this far?
Subscribe to The Control Layer for one piece a week in this register — AI, cybersecurity, sovereignty, and the geopolitics of the technology stack. Free.
The few who own the stage do not own the song
Robert Kraft does not believe culture is powerless. By The Boston Globe’s count he has committed more than $100 million to fighting antisemitism since 2019, including Super Bowl campaigns reported at about $7 million in 2024 and $8 million in 2025, and a $15 million campaign this year.19
I have no quarrel with a penny of it. Kraft spends like a man who believes culture changes minds. So do I. We disagree about which minds need changing, but he is the one that owns the stadium.
That is the geopolitics of culture in 2026: a handful of owners with outsize control over the channels culture travels through, and very many people who depend on them. The venues on one stadium tour removed an artist by telling the promoter they would not host him. A radio chain did much the same in 2003, after Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks told a London audience, days before the invasion of Iraq, that the band was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas”. Cumulus Media, which its chief executive described to the Senate Commerce Committee that July as “a confederation of 270 individual stations in 55 cities”, temporarily pulled the band from its country stations. The band’s manager told the same hearing that what had happened to his clients was “perhaps the most compelling evidence that radio ownership consolidation has a direct negative impact on diversity of programming and political discourse over the public air waves”.20
A peer-reviewed study later traced the wider backlash to “grassroots conservative sentiment” among listeners, and Cumulus said it was answering exactly that.20
What consolidation added was reach: at Cumulus, one decision at head office took a band off dozens of stations at once. Four years later the Dixie Chicks won five Grammys, including Album of the Year.
Today the loudest channels are feeds, and they reward outrage, measurably: in one study of 2.7 million posts by news outlets and members of Congress, each word about the opposing political side raised the odds of a post being shared by 67 per cent.21 Hyde is right about that, and it is the strongest part of her argument.
But the same platforms carried something no owner chose. Motaz Azaiza, a photojournalist from Gaza, went from about 27,500 Instagram followers before October 2023 to 18.25 million a hundred-odd days later, according to Dawn, and TIME named him among the most influential people of 2024 as “the world’s eyes and ears in his native Gaza”. Bisan Owda’s It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive won a Peabody and a News Emmy. Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die”, first posted in 2011 and shared again in 2023 before he was killed that December, has been viewed tens of millions of times and, by ArabLit’s count, translated into more than 100 languages. Hind Rajab, a young girl killed in Gaza in January 2024, her name referenced in Macklemore’s “Hind’s Hall”, and the recordings of her calls for help became Kaouther Ben Hania’s film The Voice of Hind Rajab, which drew a standing ovation of more than 20 minutes at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for best international feature.22
Witness became art, and art became culture, without a single owner’s permission.
The window has already moved
In February 2018 Gallup found that 64 per cent of Americans sympathised more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians, and 19 per cent the other way. In February 2026 the figures were 36 and 41, the first time in Gallup’s annual series, which began in 2001, that the Israelis were not ahead. In July, 43 per cent of Americans told YouGov that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian civilians.
In September 2021, 210 House Democrats voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defences and eight voted against. On 15 July 2026, 103 House Democrats — including Nancy Pelosi and the party’s second-ranking leader in the House, Katherine Clark — voted for an amendment to cut $3.3 billion in security aid for Israel, and 98 voted against.23
The amendment failed, and I would be overclaiming if I said songs did that. The war itself did most of the work, and age and party did much of the rest. But in 2021 that vote was unthinkable. In 2026 it was merely unsuccessful.
The bottom line
Hyde is right that a stadium speech will not end a war, and right that the platforms reward the loudest version of every argument. She is wrong that artists change nothing. They rarely change a vote directly. What they change is the range of things a politician can say out loud and survive. That is why a British government legislated within five months of a television drama, why Senate staff called ending John Lennon’s visa “a strategy counter-measure”, and why Iran arrested Shervin Hajipour within days of his posting “Baraye”.
It is also why, this month, the venues on one American stadium tour decided that a song could go no further than New Jersey.
They could keep it out of their stadiums. They cannot keep it out of the culture.
Art rarely changes a vote. It changes what a politician can survive saying.
The Control Layer publishes weekly. Subscribe free.
Decision-grade analysis on AI, cybersecurity, technology sovereignty, and the geopolitics of the technology stack — written for the board paper, not the timeline. By Amer Altaf, Founder & CEO of Arkava and Managing Editor of The Control Layer.
One email a week. No paywalls on the analytical pieces. Unsubscribe in one click.
References
Amer Altaf is founder and chief executive of Arkava and managing editor of The Control Layer. This is an opinion piece; the views are his own.
Ed Sheeran, remarks before his concert at Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, 19 September 2026: The Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 September 2026, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/ed-sheeran-palestine-comments-macklemore-philadelphia-20260919.html; Fox News transcript, https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/read-it-ed-sheerans-pre-concert-speech-philly-crowd-about-gaza-controversy; and the Associated Press (via WSB-TV), https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/ed-sheeran-says-situation-gaza-is-catastrophic-unjustifiable-he-opens-solo-concert/CTPT5X4LFNGPLIH2ORFN5EUQC4/. The Inquirer and Fox carry all three words of the Gaza quotation; AP carries “catastrophic and unjustifiable”. The “political commentator” words are from Fox’s transcript; AP reports the same passage in paraphrase. ↩ ↩2
Marina Hyde and Richard Osman, “Ed Sheeran: The Fallout”, The Rest Is Entertainment, Goalhanger, released on 22 September 2026 (UK time), official feed https://feeds.megaphone.fm/GLT2052042801 — show page:
. Quotations at approximately 00:03:31 (Osman), 00:11:57 and 00:17:35 (Hyde). ↩ ↩2
Macklemore’s remarks at MetLife Stadium, 4–5 September 2026: The Boston Globe, 16 September 2026, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/16/metro/macklemore-comments-on-stage-at-metlife-stadium/; Newsweek, 7 September 2026, https://www.newsweek.com/macklemore-free-palestine-remarks-ed-sheeran-backlash-transcript-12413361; and CBS New York, 7 September 2026, on “Hind’s Hall” and the video imagery, https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/macklemore-pro-palestinian-comments-metlife-stadium-ed-sheeran/. The support acts’ withdrawal: The Irish Times, 15 September 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2026/09/15/irish-acts-aaron-rowe-and-beoga-quit-ed-sheerans-us-tour-in-protest-over-palestine/ and Newsweek (above). Macklemore’s statement that Sheeran’s “typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before”: ABC News (Australia), 16 September 2026, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-16/free-palestine-macklemore-and-ed-sheeran-tour-controversy/107157914 ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Robert Kraft, statement of 14 September 2026, in full in GBH News, https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2026-09-14/bob-kraft-explains-decision-to-urge-ouster-of-rapper-macklemore-from-ed-sheeran-tour. Messina Touring Group’s statement (“We have been notified by venues on the upcoming US tour dates that they will not allow a concert to take place with Macklemore on the lineup…”), given to Rolling Stone and reported by Al Jazeera, 14 September 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/14/macklemore-dropped-from-ed-sheeran-tour-following-palestine-advocacy. The promoter’s affiliation: AEG, https://aegworldwide.com/divisions/music; IQ, 3 February 2026, https://www.iqmagazine.com/2026/02/messina-touring-group-recounts-25-years-at-the-helm/; TicketNews, 19 September 2026, https://www.ticketnews.com/2026/09/ed-sheeran-messina-venue-power-live-nation/ (“Live Nation, however, was not Sheeran’s U.S. tour promoter”) ↩ ↩2
United Nations Secretary-General, Children and Armed Conflict, A/80/723–S/2026/357, 16 June 2026. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/children-and-armed-conflict-report-of-the-secretary-general-a-80-723-s-2026-357/ — UNICEF, “At least 300 children reportedly killed in Gaza in past 300 days”, 6 August 2026. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/least-300-children-reportedly-killed-gaza-past-300-days ↩
Washington Secretary of State, results for Referendum Measure 74, 6 November 2012. https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/20121106/Referendum-Measure-No-74-Concerns-marriage-for-same-sex-couples.html — HistoryLink on “Same Love” as the campaign’s unofficial theme song: https://www.historylink.org/file/11050 ↩
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, “The Overton Window”. https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow ↩
NPR, “For MLK Day: ‘Lt. Uhura’ on how Rev. King told her to stay on ‘Star Trek’”, 14 January 2011, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/01/14/132935327/for-mlk-day-lt-uhura-on-how-rev-king-told-her-to-stay-on-star-trek, and The Hollywood Reporter’s obituary of Nichelle Nichols, 2022, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/nichelle-nichols-dead-star-trek-lieutenant-uhura-1235189880/ (her recollection of King’s words varies slightly between tellings) — PBS American Masters on CBS’s hesitation to cast Arnaz, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/5-ways-i-love-lucy-transformed-television-history/19407/ — Ball as the first woman to run a studio: Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum, https://lucydesi.com/a-legacy-of-laughter/ and California Museum, https://californiamuseum.org/inductee/lucille-ball/ — StarTrek.com (the franchise’s own site) on Ball backing the show through two pilots, https://www.startrek.com/news/how-lucille-ball-helped-star-trek-become-a-cultural-icon ↩ ↩2
NPR, 7 April 2026, on the Home Office decision and the cancellation of Wireless Festival, https://www.npr.org/2026/04/07/nx-s1-5776646/ye-kanye-west-travel-ban-uk-wireless — NBC News, “Kanye West blocked from entering Britain to headline music festival after backlash over antisemitic comments”, https://www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/kanye-west-offers-meet-jewish-community-uk-ban-wireless-festival-rcna266842 — Time Out London, 7 April 2026, https://www.timeout.com/london/news/kanye-west-is-wireless-festival-2026-cancelled-040726 ↩
Computer Weekly, 11 May 2009, https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240089230/Bankruptcy-prosecution-and-disrupted-livelihoods-Postmasters-tell-their-story, described by Press Gazette as “the first investigation”, https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/post-office-horizon-it-scandal-journalists/ — ITV press centre, 9 January 2024, on four consecutive nights of broadcast, https://www.itv.com/presscentre/media-releases/mr-bates-vs-post-office-2024s-most-watched-programme, and the 28-day, all-device average reported from ITV data by The Knowledge, https://theknowledgeonline.com/news/mr-bates-vs-post-office-hits-whopping-13-5m — Hansard, House of Commons, 10 January 2024, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2024-01-10/debates/7CF4D161-1F0D-4005-AC2E-9FDFA07C0CA5/Engagements, and ITV News, 10 January 2024, https://www.itv.com/news/2024-01-10/horizon-scandal-pm-announces-mass-exonerations-for-sub-postmasters — Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Act 2024, Royal Assent 24 May 2024, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/14/enacted — Department for Business and Trade, quashed convictions management information, 2 July 2026 (figures to 30 June 2026), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/post-office-horizon-system-offences-act-2024-quashed-convictions-management-information/quashed-convictions-management-information-2-july-2026 ↩ ↩2
Senator Strom Thurmond’s letter of 4 February 1972 and the attached Senate Internal Security Subcommittee staff memo, as reported by UPI, 29 June 1984, from documents the historian Jon Wiener obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/06/29/Thurmond-led-move-to-deport-Lennon/8991457329600/ — Wiener has also quoted the phrase as “strategic counter-measure” (The Nation, 22 October 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/john-lennon-and-george-mcgovern-another-side-1972-campaign/). The tour, the first election with 18-year-old voters and the cancellation on legal advice: Jon Wiener on NPR’s Fresh Air, https://www.npr.org/2010/10/08/130401193/uncovering-the-truth-behind-lennons-fbi-files, and CBS News and The Nation, 15 September 2006, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-us-vs-john-lennon/ — the 26th Amendment and the 1972 election: US National Archives, Prologue, 13 November 2013, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2013/11/13/records-of-rights-vote-old-enough-to-fight-old-enough-to-vote/ — the 1968 plea, the visa extension, the INS notice of 1 March 1972 and the ruling: Lennon v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 527 F.2d 187 (2d Cir. 1975), decided 7 October 1975, https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/331607/john-winston-ono-lennon-v-immigration-and-naturalization-service/ — Nixon’s address of 8 August 1974 announcing his resignation “effective at noon tomorrow”, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-announcing-decision-resign-the-office-president-the-united-states ↩ ↩2
Mahsa Amini’s death in the custody of the morality police: Associated Press via NPR, 19 September 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123995106/iran-protest-mahsa-amini-death-morality-police — the song’s posting on 28 September 2022 and its 40 million views: CBC News, 6 October 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6608267 and the 1 March 2023, on the first award for Best Song for Social Change and the song’s 40 million views, https://www.grammy.com/news/best-song-social-change-shervin-hajipour-baraye-ruby-marchand-nick-difruscia-interview-2023-grammys/ — the arrest, the deletion and the song’s reach: The Times of Israel (wire report), 5 October 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/iranian-pop-singer-silenced-but-his-song-based-on-tweets-remains-a-protest-anthem/ — the sentence: IranWire, 1 March 2024, https://iranwire.com/en/news/125950-grammy-winning-iranian-protest-singer-sentenced-to-jail/ and Al Jazeera, 2 March 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/2/iranian-singer-sentenced-to-jail-over-mahsa-amini-protest-anthem — the amnesty: Associated Press, 23 September 2024, via KESQ, https://kesq.com/news/2024/09/23/iran-pardons-grammy-award-winner-whose-song-became-an-anthem-to-the-2022-protests/ — the “unofficial anthem”: RFE/RL, 3 December 2025, https://www.rferl.org/a/shervin-hajipour-iran-grammy-winner-album/33611837.html and Nafiseh Sharifi, “Soundtrack of Dissent”, Middle East Report 319, 20 August 2026, https://www.merip.org/2026/08/soundtrack-of-dissent-the-music-of-protest-in-iran/ — on bone music: Smithsonian, 10 December 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-hipsters-bootlegged-banned-music-bone-records-180957505/, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, https://garagemca.org/en/exhibition/bone-music and The World (PRX/GBH), 21 August 2025, https://theworld.org/stories/2025/08/21/bone-music-brought-western-tunes-to-soviet-fans-by-recording-songs-onto-x-rays ↩ ↩2
On Macklemore’s words and Kraft’s statement, see notes 3 and 4. Ms Rachel’s Save the Children fundraiser, launched in mid-May 2024: JTA, 23 May 2024, https://www.jta.org/2024/05/23/lifestyle/following-backlash-and-cyberbullying-ms-rachel-sings-a-prayer-for-all-the-children-including-hostages-and-israelis and NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ms-rachel-bullying-fundraising-children-gaza-rcna152701 ↩
Sheeran’s statement (“I stand with Ukraine…”), first made on the release of the original “2step” video, filmed in Kyiv, and quoted in NME, 2 May 2022, https://www.nme.com/news/music/ed-sheeran-teams-up-with-ukrainian-band-antytila-for-reworked-2step-3216770 — The Washington Post, 4 May 2022, on the Antytila version and Taras Topolia’s service as a paramedic, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/04/ed-sheeran-antytila-2step-ukraine/ — ITV News, 4 May 2022, https://www.itv.com/news/2022-05-04/ukrainian-band-antytilas-collaboration-with-ed-sheeran-filmed-on-the-frontline ↩
Home Office, Operation of police powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, quarterly update to March 2026, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/operation-of-police-powers-under-tact-2000-to-march-2026 — R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, High Court press summary, February 2026, https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Press-summary-Ammori-130226-002.pdf, and Court of Appeal judgment, 15 June 2026, https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Final-open-judgment-Ammori-v-SSHD.pdf — US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Khalil v. President of the United States, 15 January 2026, https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/252162p.pdf — Al Jazeera on the termination of Öztürk’s removal proceedings, 10 February 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/10/us-judge-blocks-trump-administrations-effort-to-deport-rumeysa-ozturk — NPR on the Berlin orders, 20 April 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/20/g-s1-60984/germany-deportation-protesters — Berlin Administrative Court, press release 24/2026, 6 May 2026, https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/verwaltungsgericht/presse/pressemitteilungen/2026/pressemitteilung.1668523.php ↩
Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 26 August 2026, https://news.vumc.org/2026/08/26/vanderbilt-health-mourns-passing-of-global-icon-dolly-parton/ — NPR on the Billboard interview and the renaming of her dinner show, 14 August 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902506007/of-course-black-lives-matter-dolly-parton-tells-billboard — Fortune, 18 November 2020, on the $1 million gift and the Moderna research, https://fortune.com/2020/11/18/dolly-parton-moderna-vaccine — NPR (via KUNR), 26 August 2026, on the Imagination Library passing 300 million books, https://www.kunr.org/2026-08-26/dolly-partons-imagination-library-gave-the-gift-of-books-to-millions-of-children ↩
CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, 11 February 2026, https://cst.org.uk/research/cst-publications/antisemitic-incidents-report-2025 and Jewish News, 11 February 2026, https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/2025-sees-second-highest-annual-figure-for-antisemitism-in-the-uk-says-cst/ — Home Office, Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025, 9 October 2025 (year-on-year comparisons exclude the Metropolitan Police Service), https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-year-ending-march-2025/hate-crime-england-and-wales-year-ending-march-2025 and ITV News, 9 October 2025, https://www.itv.com/news/2025-10-09/religious-hate-crimes-in-england-and-wales-hit-record-high — CAIR, 2026 civil rights report, 10 March 2026 (complaints received, not verified incidents), https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cairs-2026-civil-rights-report-shows-the-right-to-be-different-narrowed-in-the-past-year/ and Al Jazeera, 10 March 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/us-civil-rights-group-documents-broad-attack-on-muslim-life-in-2025 — CBS News on Macklemore’s 2014 apology, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/macklemore-apologizes-for-offensive-costume, CNN, 20 May 2014, https://www.cnn.com/2014/05/20/showbiz/macklemore-costume-apology and JTA, 18 September 2026, https://www.jta.org/2026/09/18/culture/macklemore-was-accused-of-antisemitism-in-2014-now-pro-israel-voices-say-his-pro-palestinian-activism-crosses-the-line ↩ ↩2
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Working definition of antisemitism, adopted 26 May 2016. https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism — SSRS for The Washington Post, fieldwork 2–9 September 2025, 815 Jewish Americans, published 6 October 2025. https://ssrs.com/news/many-american-jews-are-sharply-critical-of-israel-on-gaza-survey-finds/ — The Times of Israel, 5 October 2025, on the question (respondents were first read the UN definition of genocide), https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-nearly-four-in-10-us-jews-say-israel-has-committed-genocide-in-gaza/ ↩
The Boston Globe, 17 September 2026, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/17/arts/robert-krafts-influence-beyond-the-football-field/ — JTA, 11 February 2024, https://www.jta.org/2024/02/11/sports/robert-krafts-super-bowl-ad-about-antisemitism-to-feature-mlk-speechwriter-clarence-jones — Ynet, https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/bk7dewlfjg — Fox News, February 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/sports/patriots-owner-robert-kraft-continues-antisemitism-fight-new-15m-super-bowl-ad-campaign ↩
Natalie Maines’s remark: Associated Press via CBS News, March 2003, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dixie-chick-apologizes-for-bush-slam, first reported in Betty Clarke’s review in The Guardian, 12 March 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/mar/12/artsfeatures.popandrock — the temporary Cumulus ban, confined to its country stations: Associated Press, 21 September 2003, via Deseret News, https://www.deseret.com/2003/9/21/19785107/clear-channel-struggles-to-mend-image/ — US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Media Ownership (Radio Consolidation), S. Hrg. 108-979, 8 July 2003, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-108shrg88772/html/CHRG-108shrg88772.htm — Gabriel Rossman, “Elites, Masses, and Media Blacklists: The Dixie Chicks Controversy”, Social Forces 83(1), 2004, 61–78, https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/83/1/61/2234836 — the band’s five awards at the 49th Grammys: Recording Academy, https://www.grammy.com/artists/dixie-chicks/10581 ↩ ↩2
Steve Rathje, Jay J. Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden, “Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(26), 2021. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118 ↩
TIME100, 17 April 2024, https://time.com/collections/100-most-influential-people-2024/6964147/motaz-azaiza/ — Dawn, https://www.dawn.com/news/1828027/palestinian-journalist-motaz-azaiza-features-on-times-100-most-influential-people-of-2024 — The Peabody Awards, https://peabodyawards.com/award-profile/its-bisan-from-gaza/ — Variety, September 2024, https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/news-doc-emmy-winners-cnn-abc-nat-geo-its-bisan-from-gaza-1236156333/ — ArabLit, 21 June 2024, https://arablit.org/2024/06/21/the-story-of-a-poem-refaat-alareers-if-i-must-die/ — The National, 7 September 2025, https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/film-tv/2025/09/07/the-voice-of-hind-rajab-wins-silver-lion-at-venice-film-festival/ — Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 98th Academy Awards, https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2026 — Al Jazeera, 23 January 2026, on the Oscar nomination and the Venice ovation, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/23/gaza-war-docudrama-the-voice-of-hind-rajab-nominated-for-academy-award ↩
Gallup, 13 March 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/229199/americans-remain-staunchly-israel-corner.aspx and 27 February 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead-americans-middle-east-sympathies.aspx, reported by The Times of Israel, 27 February 2026, https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-1st-time-gallup-poll-shows-americans-more-sympathetic-to-palestinians-than-to-israel/ — Economist/YouGov, 25–27 July 2026, https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/55264-half-americans-think-us-should-arrest-netanyahu-if-he-comes-to-us-july-25-27-2026-economist-yougov-poll — Clerk of the US House of Representatives, roll call 275, 23 September 2021, https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2021275 and roll call 243, 15 July 2026, https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2026243 — Roll Call, 15 July 2026, on the amendment and the votes of Pelosi and Clark, https://rollcall.com/2026/07/15/dems-split-on-massie-effort-to-zero-out-israel-security-aid/ ↩