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…
Page D2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 16 September 2026
Kraft's donations precede his ban of Macklemore, then Sheeran's own openers quit in solidarity
As it ran on the front
Robert Kraft owns the New England Patriots and a documented pattern of donations to pro-Israel causes, receipts The Lever pulled this week and called eyebrow-raising. He also has the kind of standing with NFL venue owners that decides who gets a stage and who does not. Macklemore performed "Free Palestine" and his song "Hind's Hall," dedicated to a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza, at a show earlier this month. Pro-Israel groups petitioned. Kraft rallied other NFL venue owners to bar Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour if Macklemore kept performing. Macklemore is off the tour.
Sheeran says he was helpless to stop it. That is the line he is giving reporters, and it is the line every man with a signature and no spine gives when someone else's leverage decides who gets to share his stage. He did not write the ban. He is, by his own account, just the name on the marquee while somebody with better donor relationships decided who else's name belonged there.…
…(cont) Then came the part nobody at Patriots headquarters priced in: Sheeran's own opening acts quit the tour, in solidarity with Macklemore, over what Common Dreams is already calling the silencing of his Palestine speech. The Daily Caller, no friend of any boycott, is reporting the tour itself is now on the verge of collapse. The Intercept is calling the walkout a watershed for how pop culture engages the issue. Three outlets that agree on almost nothing agree on one fact: this did not stay contained to the rapper it was aimed at.
Kraft's donations bought him the leverage to get one performer off one tour. They did not buy him a tour that survived the removal. The boycott did not begin with the openers. It began with a man who helped decide which stages carry which songs, deciding a five-year-old's name was not welcome on his, and it kept spreading after everyone left in the building told him, in effect, to sit back down.
Follow the check. It explains the ban — the donation on one line, the barred rapper on the next. It does not explain what happened after, because what happened after was never his to buy. A boycott, once it starts moving, does not check who signed the biggest check to stop it.
“Follow the money and watch it fail him. Kraft pays to keep one stage quiet, and the quiet turns into a tour that can't hold its own lineup. That's the whole racket — rich men keep buying control they can't actually keep.”
“Nobody owes Macklemore a stadium, that's just how venues operate, they make business calls every day. This was never about the war, it was about safety — my own family thought hard about protesters outside a reggae show once — wait, why am I bringing up my kid's concert, that's not even the point I'm supposed to be making here.”
The receipts
Billionaire Robert Kraft made eyebrow-raising donations before banning the pro-Palestine rapper.
Singer Ed Sheeran hoped to sidestep controversy by letting rapper Macklemore be removed from his tour over his pro-Palestine remarks. Instead, he's sparked what one writer said could be a "turning point" for how pop culture engages on the issue of Israel and Palestine. Sheeran responded to the backlash on Tuesday by claiming he was…
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 .
‘Money doesn’t give you the right to own the conversation’
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.