Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) involved herself in the latest virtue signaling spat among music celebrities as the fallout from Britain’s Ed Sheeran not positively affirming the Palestinian people was met with woke outrage and tour dropouts. The New York Democrat suggested she would be boycotting the ‘Thinking Out Loud’ discography, joining the insufferable, former tourmate Macklemore and other cause du jour personalities.
For context, Ed Sheeran’s tour featured several prominent musicians playing as openers until the American rapper Macklemore decided to wear traditional Arabic garb during a concert and shout “free Palestine” amid a backdrop of footage from Gaza. Venue owners took issue with the overtly leftist protest and threatened to cancel future shows if he was not dropped from Sheeran’s lineup.
In response, after weighing whether to cancel tens of thousands of tickets and put perhaps thousands of people out of work who relied on the tour, Macklemore was dropped by Sheeran’s producers. The backlash was immediate. Despite Sheeran publicly acknowledging what happened but saying it was beyond his power, and taking the high road not to alienate a diverse range of fans, he personally did not weigh in on the controversy. However, not having the right opinion is enough for the woke mob to seek scalps, and the decidedly non-political Sheeran has found himself in the crosshairs of angry leftist hordes.
One of horde appears now to be the infamous AOC. When approached by a reporter on the streets of Washington, D.C., she was asked what she would do if Sheeran came on the radio while she was driving. AOC responded that she would be changing the channel. When asked to elaborate, she came back with a quintessentially leftist reply.
“I think that what we’ve seen, especially it’s not it’s not just what has happened with the act, and not just in removing Mclemore from the lineup, but when you see what Robert Kraft did to line up all of the stadiums to censor speech in that one specific way, it’s become clear that this is not just about one music artist or two music artists, but this is about how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue,” she began.
“In this case, the genocide in Gaza. But it doesn’t stop there. It could be speaking out about AI. It could be speaking out about any issue that you can now just get a handful of stadium owners to ensure that an entire person’s career can be jeopardized if they speak out about any issue,” she went on.
AOC was then asked about Sheeran continuing his tour absent many of the performers who dropped out in solidarity with Macklemore, and she weighed in on his supposed role in handling it. “I think that because you never see these contracts, and some I have no idea what the financial entanglements of that of all that is,” she continued.
“But I do think that you know, I think that the right thing to do is to speak out about it, and I think the right thing to do is, at the very least, to speak out about this abuse of power, because if they’re saying that to him, right, then they can say it to anybody. And at what point does it stop? I have a huge amount of empathy for the situation because it’s. I think people want the focus here to be about Ed Sheeran, and he of course plays a role, but they’re not putting the focus on Robert Kraft, and you know the actual people who are who are kind of twisting things here. So, and again, everyone has responsibility in the situation. Everyone plays a role, but we need to be very clear about how dangerous a precedent this is,” she finished.
Watch AOC absurdly call out a non-political musician below: