Billionaire Robert Kraft made eyebrow-raising donations before banning the pro-Palestine rapper.
Page D2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 16 September 2026
Kraft bans a pro-Palestine rapper from his stadium tour; every act on another tour walks off in solidarity.
As it ran on the front
Robert Kraft made donations before he banned Macklemore from his stadium tour. The Lever put those two facts next to each other in print, donations first, ban second, and let the order do the work. A billionaire who owns a stage decided who gets to stand on it, and a rapper who talks about Palestine got the door.
The ban was supposed to close the story. Instead it opened a different one. Within days, every supporting act on Ed Sheeran's tour pulled out. Novara Media counted the walkouts: every opener, gone, in solidarity with Macklemore's speech in support of Palestine. Sheeran did not lose one rapper. He lost his whole undercard.…
…(cont) The Washington Examiner headlined its response "Nobody owes Macklemore a stadium" and opened with a personal story: a decision about whether to take a daughter to a reggae concert, weighed against the anti-war protesters stationed outside it. The headline states the premise plainly — nobody owes him a stadium — which is the same premise Kraft acted on when he owned the stage and decided who stood on it.
The Intercept read the walkout differently: as proof of the logic of BDS, pressure applied at one point in an industry moving through the rest of it because the people in it are watching each other work. That is what the ban did not account for. Kraft controls his own stage completely. He does not control what the acts booked on somebody else's stage do once they've watched him use it.
Run the numbers as they sit in the receipts: one round of donations, one ban, one rapper taken off one stage. On the stage next door, an entire touring lineup took itself off in response. Kraft owns his own stage outright; the stage down the road was never his to buy, and the acts booked on it just proved it.
“A guy buys a stadium's worth of stage and thinks that buys him quiet. Robert Kraft banned one rapper and lost an entire opening lineup on a tour he didn't even own a piece of — that's what happens when the people getting paid start comparing notes instead of just cashing checks. The lesson for the next billionaire holding a microphone hostage: your money buys the mic, it doesn't buy the room.”
“It's his stadium, his money, his call — nobody's entitled to a platform they didn't buy. This isn't a boycott, it's just a bunch of artists making individual scheduling decisions that happen to line up with each other's, the same week, over the same rapper. Did I say that out loud? That's not really how I'd put it.”
The receipts
A year and a half ago, my husband and I talked about safety before he decided to take our oldest daughter to a reggae concert. Not because we were concerned about her getting a contact high from all the other concertgoers smoking cannabis, but because there were certain to be “anti-war” protesters stationed outside, trying their hardest…
Ed Sheeran’s entire tour quitting in solidarity with Palestine and Macklemore proves the logic of BDS. The post Ed Sheeran’s Craven “Neutrality” Is a Watershed Moment for Mainstreaming Palestine Solidarity appeared first on The Intercept .
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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.