With apologies to Saint Sebastian.
Let’s do some basic math. Before Robert Kraft got involved, Macklemore was booked to open eight of the ten remaining shows on Ed Sheeran‘s Loop tour. Eight nights of stadium crowds standing in the beer line or scrolling their phones while the opener did his thing, because that’s what people do during opening acts. Nobody buys a Sheeran ticket to see Macklemore. Nobody was going to remember his setlist.
Then Kraft called Sheeran and told him Macklemore wouldn’t be allowed to perform at Gillette Stadium. According to Macklemore, Kraft also got a few other stadium owners to deliver the same ultimatum. The promoter dropped him from the rest of the tour.
So instead of eight opening sets nobody was listening to, we got a Macklemore statement that went everywhere, a Kraft statement answering it, and a week of stories about who called whom and which stadium owners got “rallied.” Then the other opening acts, including Finneas and Lukas Graham, quit in solidarity. Then Macklemore pledged a million dollars from his tour earnings to Palestinian aid groups and dared Kraft to match it, and Kraft answered that he’d already committed $2 million at Sheeran’s request. Every one of those was its own news cycle. And now Macklemore doesn’t have eight opening slots anymore. He has his own tour.
He’s calling it the Free Palestine Tour. Dublin on October 26, Paris on the 29th, London on the 30th, with American dates promised later. He announced it on Instagram this week, joking that his “schedule freed up a bit.” He isn’t warming up a crowd for anyone now. He’s the headliner, and every post he makes gets picked up by the international press. We already wrote about how a guy who sells golf pants got turned into a free speech martyr. This is the sequel, with a European tour.
Meanwhile his Red Rocks show in Colorado, announced back in March, still had unsold tickets as recently as mid-September. It’s now sold out of general admission, with only resale and pricier premium packages left. General admission at Red Rocks usually starts around $90, and Macklemore GA tickets are going for about $215 through Ticketmaster‘s resale program, a markup of almost 140%. The cheapest ticket jumped 45% in the three days after he got dropped, and the founder of the price tracker TicketData told CNBC that surge would not have happened without the Sheeran fallout. A rapper whose biggest hit was “Thrift Shop” doesn’t normally pull that kind of demand for a Thursday night in October. A guy who’s been the main character in the news for three weeks does.
I believe Kraft means what he says. He has put a lot of money and a lot of years into fighting Antisemitism, and Macklemore’s set, the “Free Palestine” speech, the Gaza imagery on the screens during “Hind’s Hall,” was ugly.
The problem with his message goes past ugly, though. Macklemore doesn’t say Israel’s conduct in Gaza is disproportionate, or unjustified, or that it needs an independent investigation. He says genocide. That’s a legal term with a legal definition, and the definition requires proving intent to destroy a people. South Africa has had that exact case in front of the International Court of Justice since December 2023. The court hasn’t ruled on it, and it won’t for years. Under the current schedule, South Africa’s next filing is due in November 2027 and Israel’s reply in May 2029, and only then come hearings. What the court did do, in early 2024, was order provisional measures, basically a set of instructions while the case plays out. A UN commission has used the word, but a commission isn’t a court, and no court has found Israel guilty of genocide. Macklemore skips all of that and announces the verdict from a stadium stage.
There’s nothing in the song or the speeches about the October 7 massacre that started this war. There’s no room for the fact that most Jews, in Israel and everywhere else, believe Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself. A survey released this year by the Jewish Federations of North America found close to nine in ten American Jews believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, including three quarters of those between 18 and 34. None of that fits on a poster, so he leaves it out, and what’s left is Israel bad, every show. Then he tells the Jews in the crowd that none of this is about them. It is. When you hand down the harshest possible verdict on the one Jewish state and strip out every bit of context, you’re handing ammo to actual Antisemites, whether you mean to or not.
None of that makes Kraft’s move a smart one. Kraft owns the New England Patriots. He has lawyers, PR people and crisis consultants on the payroll, and their whole job is to figure out what happens when the boss does something in public. Either nobody on that payroll had the balls to tell him this would blow up in his face, or somebody did and he didn’t listen. Neither is a great look. And this wasn’t hard to predict. Macklemore yelling “Free Palestine” to a half-empty stadium during the opening set was a one-day story. Kicking him off the tour made him a headliner with a cause.
So no, it didn’t work. Nothing got quieter. Macklemore is louder now, he has no co-headliner or stadium promoter around to rein him in, and people who couldn’t name a second Macklemore song are treating him as a free speech cause, with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling the whole thing censorship. Kraft wanted this gone. He made it bigger.
That’s what should bother us most. Kraft did this to stand up for Jews and against Antisemitism. What he actually got was more airtime for Macklemore’s message, on outlets that would never have covered an opening act on a pop tour. He got Macklemore sympathy, because now he’s the guy a billionaire tried to shut up. And he got a bigger international audience for the exact story about Israel he wanted to push back on. If the point was to protect Jews and Israelis, we’re worse off than we were a month ago, and we’ll be reading about it in the Dublin, Paris and London papers next month.
So Bob, if you’re reading this: next time you have a big idea, run it by us first. We’re a small Jewish blog with too many opinions, and we will tell you for free if your plan is going to backfire before it becomes a Rolling Stone headline. Throw a little sponsorship our way and we’ll even back it up with data, which is more than your comms team gave you. Oh, and the two Gillette shows at the center of all this? Cancelled because of a storm. You could have just waited for the rain.
― Tom Robbins
- Robert Kraft Turned Macklemore Into a Movement. Nice Work, Bob. - 9/26/2026
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