At Glastonbury, left-wing politics are shocking again

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

The notion that conservatism is 'the new punk rock' has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorised safety and sensitivity, members of the new right revelled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech.
This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don't like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth.
Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump's orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolised 'overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said'. This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled Heil Hitler.
Increasingly, however, it's the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in the Gaza Strip and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain's Glastonbury music festival this past weekend. The act's singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of 'Death, death to the IDF,' the Israel Defence Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticised Bob Vylan for 'appalling hate speech,' and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. (Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members' visas.)
The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticised it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of 'Free, free Palestine' and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their US visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He has said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn't know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap's appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offences.
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Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. 'What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,' Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. 'The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul-searching among British society,' wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It's hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage.
I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They've witnessed Jews being attacked, demonised and ostracised in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas.
But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it's not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverisation of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel's war in Gaza looks like to them.