Mediocre Artists Are Trying to Push Jews Out of Public Life

Sadly, it will never compensate for their lack of talent or personality

Image from Moreno Matković on Unsplash

I recently attended a concert for the first time since before the pandemic. Especially after October 7^th, filled with grief and wary of sharing intimate space with neo-Nazis, I have deliberately avoided large crowds.

But I found an outdoor show that not only sounded benign but harkened back to some sweet Jewish camp memories for me. Dispatch, the hippie white reggae band from the 90s and aughts was touring, with John Butler, G. Love & Special Sauce, and Donovan Frankenreiter.

Dispatch was on the same level as John Mayer and Jack Johnson for Reform Jewish camp girls in the early- to-mid-2000s; that is, almost religiously sacred. The whole camp would sing emotional Kidz Bop-esque renditions of “Out Loud” around a crackling campfire; the classic 1997 album was a frequent acoustic backdrop to hazy, cannabis smoke-infused nights off for staff.

It was, in many ways, a simpler time. Gone are the days.

My partner and I, each cherishing separate childhood Jewish camp memories of Dispatch from opposite sides of the country, decided that this would be the perfect show to slowly re-enter public life after a long period of general reclusion.

After all, we weren’t expecting anyone remotely “cool” (i.e. brainwashed by the latest TikTok social justice narrative) to attend a show that would skew so heavily towards both artists and audience members donning white dreadlocks. And we were partially correct, as the representation of hipsters was exceptionally low.

But we underestimated the guilt and hypocrisy of the basic and hippie white Liberal audience.

The evening started out fine – we enjoyed the music of Donavan Frankenreiter and G. Love & Special Sauce, two artists we know and enjoy from Jack Johnson’s record label (and Jack Johnson is notorious for being apolitical, so we thought we might be safe).

Things took a sharp turn when we saw the crew setting up for Australian-American artist, John Butler’s set. A massive keffiyeh was draped over his equipment, and I felt a pit in my stomach. Thinking quickly, I searched his name and “Palestine” and discovered that he had been reciting a propaganda routine at every stop on the tour.

We made a contingency plan to leave our picnic blanket and find an anonymous area at the back of the venue where we could either sit it out, or potentially boo him during his propaganda tirade, if need be, without having to be recognized or antagonized by the people seated near us (and then awkwardly sit through the Dispatch set).

Sure enough, moments into his set, just as we reached the back of the venue, Butler began a mendacious tirade about the fictitious “genocide” in Gaza. We booed, and he continued. During a brief silence, at the top of my lungs, I yelled “Fuck you, liar!” and he briefly stumbled as a momentary shockwave went through the venue, but he then proceeded to rant for a full 5 minutes about the “war crimes” and “genocide” that we’ve seen “livestreamed for over 600 days” in Gaza, hectoring the drunken crowd about complicity and the importance of activism.

People around us leered at us. Nauseous, I went to the bathroom as Butler continued his libelous screed. A frail, drunken young woman in line in front of me at the bathroom emotionally threw her whole head back and forth in ecstatic agreement with every sentence he uttered, clapping her skeletal hands to the lullaby of Goebbels lies. Thunderous applause rocked the amphitheater in response to his final exhortations for a “free Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Fearing for our safety, we stood vigilant at the back of the venue through the end of his set. We returned to our picnic blanket, and some of our neighbors looked at us suspiciously as we returned. We hoped for better with Dispatch, but we were already livid that we had spent so much money coming to an event just to be accosted like this.

As the Dispatch stage was set up, we saw a massive “No Kings” poster and a rainbow “All are welcome here” sign, but no sign of a keffiyeh. That is, until the second song into their set, in which they invited an Arab man to the stage to play trumpet. He was donning a large keffiyeh, which he draped over the microphone after he finished playing, and there it remained through the rest of their set.

It wasn’t surprising to me that the aging drug-addled hippies whose song “The General” is literally an anti-war anthem are rabid Liberals in 2025, replete with empty land acknowledgments, but I was infuriated not just at their ambivalence to the keffiyeh on the stage (and their tacit acceptance of the hateful, deceitful messages of the openers whom they invited to tour with them), but their sheer ignorance and hypocrisy.

At one point, they had the audacity to go off on a tangent about the importance of events like this, for people to come together and forget about all the hard things in the world for a while and just be together as a community and see each other as human beings.

That was followed up by them doing a “shout out to all the people who attended No Kings rallies” (massive applause, of course) to “protect our democracy” while “our black and brown siblings are being kidnapped in broad daylight” and that it’s critical to remember that “no human is illegal on stolen land.” That’s just about when we left. I was fuming.

In retrospect, none of this was unpredictable, and a few Google searches could’ve saved me some agony – hell hath no fury like washed up, mediocre, Liberal white artists who feel guilty for their culturally appropriative music and almost entirely white audiences.

Still, this ordeal, combined with a torrent of recent stories just like this across the arts, has left me feeling extremely bitter about the way Jews are being overtly tormented and marginalized from mainstream society.

We have seen terror-simping artists at music festivals chanting to kill the IDF, a Royal Opera singer unfurling a Palestine flag in the middle of a performance, Jewish musicians being heckled by throngs of pro-terror losers in the middle of their sets (with no prior reference to Israel whatsoever during their shows), the blacklisting of Jewish writers, the forceful injection of Hamas propaganda into things as mundane as beginner dance classes, museum employees refusing to work if antisemitism exhibits are shown, and so much more.

I shouldn’t need to do a background check in order to attend a concert. I’m sure lifelong Conservatives can relate to this in a significant way, since only after turning away from Progressivism in the last several years have I started becoming aware of just how overtly and constantly Liberal values are invoked across all arts, as though everyone shares the exact same ideology, and if they don’t they are simply unwelcome and terrible people.

But the anti-Israel blood libels hit on another level. As we know from every single day of swastikas drawn, the Holocaust being publicly and proudly inverted and justified, “accidental” conflations of “Jew” and “Zionist” when neo-Nazis are calling for violence and condemnation against us, and obvious common sense, when artists spew lies about Israel, they intend to blame and cause harm to Jews.

Sure, for now the pitiful minority of “good” ones who would eagerly slaughter half the world’s Jews are partially exempt, but the nefarious intention and dangerous consequence is palpable. Jews should not have to hide away from public life, nor should we have to be humiliated and excoriated should we choose to show up and participate.

Why do any of these pathetic “artists” even feel so entitled to disrupt a collective experience to impose their completely unrelated biases onto their fans?

Every time these miserable shills guilt their audiences into remembering [insert sad, possibly deliberately fallacious propaganda about cause du jour] during their otherwise expensive, neutral-positive events, it reminds me of Liberal parents who remind their children about starving African kids because their children will not finish the last chunks of boiled brussels sprouts on their plate.

Despite that ever so thoughtful performative gesture, it is a counterproductive non sequitur, which by design instills a false sense of righteousness in the person invoking it, but does nothing except simultaneously guilt and sadden the recipient while also desensitizing them to the actual contents of whatever was referenced.

Suddenly, instead of considering donating his allowance or volunteering for a mission to help starving children (perhaps even in America, but don’t expect sympathy there from racist Liberals), little Bobby is more likely to associate childhood starvation with his contempt for his mother’s shitty cooking than human empathy.

Similarly, in the vein of what Dispatch ironically mentioned, in a depressing time for the world, why are we not entitled to just be present with something joyful for a whopping 2 hours? Heaven forbid that anyone wield the unacceptable privilege of not thinking about Liberal banshee talking points for even a few minutes of their day!

This is a time of unprecedented mental health crises. The vast majority of people are seeing news, including propaganda about Gaza and beyond, on their phones and all around them throughout the day, every single day. You don’t need to force thousands of drunken, high people to be reminded about activism when they paid good money to escape for just one night. I promise, conflict, death and depression will still be there after your event.

But of course, where would we be if a middle-aged Australian douche bag didn’t atone for his cardinal sin of whiteness and white guy rapping and reggae by “doing his part” and spreading the gospel of Adolph Hitler to an inebriated “anti-war” audience?

Imagine if the tables were turned; consider why it’s so easy for “artists” to publicly vilify Jews.

What’s wild about this preponderance of antisemitic propaganda seeping into the arts, and public events in particular, is how transparent it is. I have seen a great many plays, concerts, operas, ballets, and public events of many other kinds in my life. Never have I seen anything like the Gaza War invoked to justify interrupting and poisoning the arts like this.

Not only have we never seen this happen on this scale for actual, well-documented genocides, but aside from an increasing ire for Conservatives among Liberal artists since 2016 (things like Dispatch’s paranoid rant, which have been going on intermittently for the last decade), you don’t see groups of people being singled out for their identities.

Imagine if artists were stopping shows to complain about how black Muslim Africans were genociding Christians, or bemoaning the high murder rates in America, which are documented to be disproportionately committed by black people? That would be both racist and obtuse, and it would also be an arbitrary bummer for a public arts event, because no one needs to hear about that shit unless they are seeking out a lecture on racism.

It's a good idea for all artists, and especially mediocre ones compensating for their lack of talent, to immediately cease and desist shoving their uninformed garbage beliefs down their audience’s throats and just stick to singing about magic or whatever other little gimmicks they employ.

Arts, culture, and public should be safe for all – not just social justice warriors.

While not everyone appreciates all forms of art, art is an essential part of culture and human society. When every area of the arts is being coopted by bad actors with exclusionary and even violent agendas, we have a major problem.

As

Julia W

brilliantly noted in a recent essay, mediocre and failed artists often espouse totalitarian, fascist and Nazi beliefs, erroneously believing themselves to be beacons of a profound, utopian Marxist ethic, despite frequently wielding disproportionate wealth, privilege and power (like terror-loving Mamdani – “socialism and defund the police for thee, but fabulously wealthy, surrounded by private security life for me”).

When entire groups of people are afraid to leave their homes or participate in public life because of their born identities, that should theoretically bother the “empathetic” virtue signalers on the Left. But it doesn’t, because just like their Nazi forebears, they do not see Jews as human, and therefore our concerns are dismissible as if we were fruit flies or rodents.

But be warned, all of this augurs a failed society. There is no legitimacy to a public life or arts that are so rigidly ideologically exclusionary, overtly homiletical, and violent as to taunt and sideline an entire group of people. This would not be tolerated for any other group, and it should not be tolerated for Jews.