SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
music
'I Don't F*ck With Trump': Artists Listed for US 250th Anniversary Celebration Drop Out
"The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event," claimed rapper Young MC.
May 28, 2026
Artists slated to perform at the government-sponsored 250th-anniversary celebration of the nation next month are recoiling in horror and pulling out left and right upon learning of President Donald Trump's involvement.
The lineup scheduled to perform at the "Great American State Fair"—which included the likes of Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, and Poison vocalist Bret Michaels—was already getting dragged for what the Daily Beast described as a "lack of A-list musical talent" willing to perform for the president.
But some on the setlist apparently only agreed to participate because they were unaware of the president's heavy involvement in planning the festivities, which will include—among other things—a UFC fight on his birthday, a teenage athletic competition that many compare to the Hunger Games, and an American history exhibit created by PragerU hosted by an artificial intelligence-powered George Washington.
After just over a day, three acts—a full third of those announced—have already pulled out of the festival.
“I have informed my agents that I will not be performing at the Freedom 250 event,” said the hip-hop artist Young MC in a social media post on Wednesday, mere hours after the list of performers was published.
The rapper, who is most renowned for the 1989 classic "Bust a Move," said "the artists were never told about any political involvement with the event. And despite the claims by the organizers that the event is non-partisan, Spin magazine describes it as ‘Trump-backed.’ I hope to perform in DC in the near future at an event that is not so politically charged.”
Morris Day and the Time, most known for their work with Prince, denied ever having been part of the festivities.
“Contrary to rumor, Morris Day & the Time will not be performing at the ‘Great American State Fair,’" they said. "It's a no for me."
"Gonna Make You Sweat" singer Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory said he was surprised to start receiving phone calls asking why he was performing for Trump.
He said his agent "didn't say nothing about Trump" when he booked the performance months before. "So I told my agent, yeah, no, I ain’t good to do that… I don’t fuck with Trump. I don’t give a fuck about Trump. I know the type of fucking anarchy he creates."
As its music festival falls apart, Freedom 250 has emphasized that it is technically an independent 501(c)3 and that the White House itself is not directly putting on the celebration.
However, the festivities are being coordinated by a White House Task Force created by Trump, and it has been relentlessly promoted on official White House social media channels.
Much of Freedom 250's programming is also overtly MAGA-coded, from its wellness-focused "Make America Healthy Again Monday" to its numerous Christian prayer events.
Keep ReadingShow Less
As the Twin Cities Accept a Profile in Courage Award, Remember the Artists
Minnesota's artists aren't that different from artists anywhere, but there are some unique parts of Minnesota's ecosystem that explain the breadth and depth of the creative response to the federal immigration enforcement surge.
May 28, 2026
Two thousand of us were standing on a frozen lake in the dark.
My mittened hand was gripping the mittened hand of a stranger; tears were freezing on my cheeks. It was not a particularly Minnesotan thing to hold hands with a stranger, especially while expressing emotion so openly. But we were not in normal times.
We were there to light ice lanterns, to spell out "ICE OUT" on the lake in the hopes that the planes flying above would see our message. After long days of school patrols, protests, grocery deliveries, and trying to figure out how to raise more money to help neighbors pay rent, we needed to be together in person. We needed to sing, we needed to move, we needed to feel. And so we did, led in a call-and-response by Brass Solidarity, a community brass band: "Hold on, change is coming!" It was powerful and beautiful and deeply connected to our culture, holding this community together. This is what a creative response looks like when artists are already woven into the fabric of a community before the crisis arrives.
This Sunday, May 31, the people of the Twin Cities will accept the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in Boston, an honor previously awarded to former Vice President Mike Pence and the September 11 first responders. The Kennedy Foundation cited the neighbors who risked their safety to protect their community from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation: the 30,000 who trained as observers and rapid responders; the schools that organized patrols; the parent group chats, book clubs, and faith groups that became webs of mutual aid, delivering groceries, raising rent and legal funds for neighbors trapped in their homes.
It is not just what Minnesotans did in this crisis. It is what they had already built: a state that had spent decades recognizing artists not as a luxury or an afterthought, but as neighbors with something essential to contribute.
Journalists and historians have spent months trying to explain why Minnesota responded as it did. Was it the history of the cooperative movement that helped build a state where people looked out for one another? Or the recovery community and the Minnesota Model's belief that people heal together? Almost no one has asked why the artists were ready. That's what I want to share.
Minnesota's artists aren't that different from artists anywhere. But there are some unique parts of Minnesota's ecosystem that explain the breadth and depth of the creative response here.
Minnesota spends more on the arts per capita than any other state, $9.67 per person, backed by the Legacy Amendment, a 25-year constitutional commitment to the state's arts and cultural heritage, alongside other quality of life investments like clean water, parks, and trails. That's not a program. That's a value system encoded into law. A blend of public support and private philanthropy has built statewide artist fellowship programs, regional arts councils serving every county, and local governments that regularly hire artists to address community challenges. The nation's longest-running Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists, launched in Minnesota with private funds, gives artists a monthly stipend with no strings attached. Participants have reported volunteering more, deepening their roots in their communities, and taking on creative work they never could have afforded before.
But money alone doesn't explain what happened here. Minnesota’s arts support is rooted within an ecosystem of support for organizers, activists, and community leaders, creating an arts community with a deep understanding of the skills, values, and ethics of effective community work. Artists in Minnesota view their artistry as integral to, not separate from, their identity as a neighbor and community member.
In 2013, when St. Paul installed a new light rail line, hundreds of artists were engaged alongside businesses and community groups on the construction corridor, turning disruption into connection. Those artists didn't just make murals. They staged performances, built installations, and animated storefronts. They learned who worked at City Hall. They built relationships with power structures. Because artists in Minnesota have had numerous opportunities like this to bring their creativity to critical community issues, and had spent years doing that work, they weren't strangers to this movement. They were already inside it.
Drive down any street in the Twin Cities today, and you will see house after house with signs: "ICE Out." "We Keep Us Safe." "We Love Our Immigrant Neighbors." Nearly all are artist designed, many of them handmade prints. This doesn’t only represent the beauty and creativity that artists bring to a movement, but also symbolizes a movement that has turned away from mass production and corporate extraction, and toward the handmade and the local. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents photograph us and catalog our faces in AI databases built for harassment and intimidation, artists like Sean Lim, Marlena Myles, and D Guzman have worked through the night to generate human-made expressions of resistance.
This is what Minnesota's artists have been doing for months: showing up, leading, organizing, making the movement visible and felt. Thousands gathered in the cold with Singing Resistance to send a message to ICE agents that they could change their minds and join a loving community. Their tactics were rooted in Otpor, the student movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic's authoritarian regime in 1990s Serbia by spreading one simple message: "You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow." Singing Resistance is now sharing training tool kits with communities across the country.
Brass Solidarity, formed at George Floyd Square in 2020, has played at hundreds of gatherings, connecting this moment to the movement for Black lives and bringing joy and resolve to these spaces. Mixed Blood Theater has trained neighbors to speak clearly and confidently about their constitutional rights. Drummers have organized mass protests. Poets have told our story, including Renee Good, who was herself a poet. Art spaces and creative businesses have become food pantries, coat donation sites, and whistle distribution points. I've lost track of the sold-out cabarets, concerts, and pottery sales to benefit the immigrant legal aid and rental assistance, often appearing in hours, without marketing campaigns. Neighbors talk to neighbors.
The art being made for our community is happening outside the competition of grants, outside formal arts institutions, outside the commodification of collectors, outside the pressure for clicks. It is urgent and rooted in our community's needs. It feels sacred.
Many of Minnesota's artists put their lives on hold for months at great cost to their economic stability and at great risk to their safety. The thing I have said most when people outside Minnesota ask how I am: It is so much more terrifying than the media can show you. Every noise sounds like a whistle. Every unknown car could be bringing horror to our doorstep. The damage to our community's sense of safety will take years to repair.
But it is so much more beautiful than the media can show you, too.
There is a reason the Kennedy Foundation recognized the people of the Twin Cities with one of the most storied honors in American civic life. It is not just what Minnesotans did in this crisis. It is what they had already built: a state that had spent decades recognizing artists not as a luxury or an afterthought, but as neighbors with something essential to contribute, as vital to a community's health as any doctor, organizer, or teacher.
When the moment came, Minnesota's artists were ready, gathering us on frozen lakes, calling on us to hold hands with strangers, and spelling out in light for all the world to see what it means to take care of one another.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Time to Grow Out of 'Playing' War
By saying the quiet part out loud, Trump is revealing that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature.
Mar 14, 2026
Boys will be boys. Just ask the president.
At a gathering of Republicans a few days ago, Donald Trump talked nonchalantly about the recent sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian frigate by the US Navy—in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from the Persian Gulf. A total of 104 crew members were killed and 32 more were injured.
The president proceeded to make this more than merely another brutal, pointless act of war. He turned it into a glaring—shocking—revelation of truth... about the American-Israeli war on Iran and, quite possibly about all wars: about war itself. He was upset at first, he told the crowd, that the Navy sank the frigate rather than capturing it. But when he expressed this to the military officials, one of them responded, “It’s more fun to sink them.”
And the crowd laughed. Uh... are we “playing” war or waging it, with that trillion-dollar annual military budget America has? No doubt we’re doing both, but normally the “fun” part of war—the dehumanization of the enemy, the abstraction of people’s deaths (including those of children)—is airbrushed from public discussion by politically correct strategic and political blather. But this is Trump, spouting the quiet part out loud—in the process, causing the global infrastructure of nation-states, borders, and militarism to tremble. Could it be that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature?
A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness.
In contrast, I quote from a recent essay written by my friend Laura Hassler, founder and director of Musicians Without Borders:
Well, guess what. There are other forces alive in today’s world. Decades of resistance to domination and colonialism, the learnings of movements across the Global South, the freedom that Western hegemony for a few decades inadvertently released on its majority population, and access through social media to some of the reality of the actual horrors perpetrated in our names have together led to a worldwide awakening to fundamental injustices, and a worldwide longing for a livable, connected, survivable future.
She calls this worldwide awakening “Radical Empathy,” a term in widespread use, which means a deeply rooted sense of connection among people, well beyond merely sympathy and shared feelings. We are one planet, one people, and we will survive together or not at all.
“Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent,” she continues. “We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives. Stand in solidarity with all who resist oppression and the violence of power and greed...
“And we artists must nurture artistic bravery, using the power of the arts to tell truth, to build community, to turn our capacity for radical empathy into a force for good.”
In other words, Radical Empathy isn’t simply emotional. You can say it’s spiritual, but it’s also political. It’s a movement: ever changing, ever manifesting in the moment, ever addressing conflict by reaching for connection and understanding. Yes, global nationalism still maintains the power to wage war. And war is everywhere these days. As Jeffrey Sachs noted in a recent interview, “World War III is here...” from Ukraine and Gaza and Iran to Asia to the Western Hemisphere. And the fighting across the world is linked.
But at the same time the world is changing. A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness. Finding understanding with your enemy—connecting with “the other”—can be incredibly difficult, especially in the midst of conflict, but Radical Empathy is making it a reality across the planet.
Laura Hassler’s organization, Musicians Without Borders, exemplifies this movement. The organization was founded in 1999, in Alkamaar, a city in the Netherlands. Laura, who was a choir director and organized music events, had put together a concert for the town’s annual honoring of the dead of World War II.
But as I wrote in a column several years ago:
The bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news, and Laura couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war was alive in the present moment, pulling at her soul.
She decided, "We’ll perform music from the people suffering from war now—folk songs from Eastern Europe," she told me. Her impulse was to reach out, to connect, somehow, with those suffering right now, on the other side of Europe. And something happened the night of the concert. When it ended, there was a moment of profound silence... and then, as the audience stood, applause so thunderous that the rafters shook. It went on for 20 minutes.
One of the musicians, a political refugee from Turkey, said to her afterwards: "This concert was special. We should put it on a train, send it to Kosovo and stop the war!”
And they went to Kosovo. Gradually, Musicians Without Borders became global, working with local people in war-torn regions all over the world—people on both sides of the divide—to create music that transcends the war of the moment. The organization currently has long-term projects in the Balkans, West Asia, Eastern Africa, and Europe.
This is Radical Empathy, or at least one example of it—our complex force of hope even as the world’s leaders continue bleeding away the planet’s resources in order to play war. Radical Empathy transcends war. It’s who we are—when we find ourselves.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular