Europe 2026: Spring Tour Reflections

 Life is a blur these days, and so was this tour, but here are some blurry reflections.

There have been times when among various other forms of creative output, I might write a reflective sort of essay as often as every few days.  Lately, having much time for thinking that goes beyond attempting to digest the latest bout of propaganda and/or the latest volley of missiles seems like a distant luxury.

But there have been so many moments in the course of my travels where up-close, real-life, physical observations of reality in a particular place and time have seemed so valuable.  Like when I went to Texas, Georgia, and Arizona last winter without seeing any physical displays of Trump support anywhere I went.  From my social media feeds, I would not get the impression that this kind of thing would be possible in any of those states.

So, I'll endeavor to pause the clock for a moment and reflect a bit on this tour in Europe that I just returned home from, that took Kamala and I to various parts of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, and Scotland.  If the reflections seem blurry, it's because that's how they seem to me, too.

Before writing travelogues like this one, I often review various sources from the period of the travels, and just prior to them, to see what else was going on, put life into some context.  I note this morning that generally I've been writing a lot of songs, and very little else.

I guess I learned from my parents to prioritize in certain ways.  Both accomplished professional musicians, the priority at home growing up with them was always in favor of live music.  If any child or adult was endeavoring to play or practice or whatever, that was more important than whatever else anyone might have wanted to do at that time, in that room, or even in the backseat of that car.

I still seem to have these priorities, so in recent months if I wake up with a song idea, writing the song and bringing it to life always becomes the priority, at the expense of everything else that isn't related to parenting or other basic functions.  Tour-booking, essay-writing, reflecting on life in general, responding to emails, all goes more or less out the window.  Driven to do my best to musically document the reality unfolding so rapidly around us, I've written a lot of songs, and very little else -- and whatever I'm doing beyond this summer is a lot more up in the air than it normally would be at this stage of the game, as well, as a direct consequence.

As I start to actually think about it, the tour just over was wonderful, but not because I did a good job at all in the tour-booking department over the past few months -- I definitely did not.  Also, having my YouTube channel deleted and important functions on Facebook disabled throughout much of the tour-booking process did not help matters at all.

The reasons it was a great tour were largely down to several of the gigs being planned already over a year prior, and otherwise mostly to a certain cohort of folks in different countries who are the same ones who so reliably can be called on to host another event every year or so, such as in most of the cities we played in.

The tour began in Germany, a country I've spent quite a bit of time in in my life, especially around the turn of the century.  Kamala has spent very little time there, but both of us had heard and seen lots on social media and through other sources in recent years about the violent things that happen to so many people when they protest against arming Israel or in support of Palestinians, on the streets of German cities.  During our time in various parts of Germany, in any case, we encountered no open hostility to the kaffiyehs both of us were wearing most every day.  (A few dirty looks, though, quite possibly.)

Our first gig on the tour was one of the ones planned well in advance, which was an event on the occasion of the centenary of the existence of the Heideruh Center, outside Hamburg.

I wrote songs about two of the founders of the center -- Franz Jacob and Katharina Jacob -- which was why we were invited to sing at the commemorative event.  

Heideruh was originally a retreat center for communists and other antifascists, in the vein of retreat centers and summer camps in so many different countries that were probably at their most popular around that period of the twentieth century.  After being occupied by the Nazis during the twelve-year period of Hitler's rule, Heideruh became a retreat center for family members of those imprisoned or otherwise persecuted during the Third Reich.  The father of the current director of the center spent the entire twelve years of Hitler's reign in a windowless prison cell in Hamburg.

Until this tour with its three gigs in Germany, I had not been to Germany in many years.  Since Israel began its genocidal war upon the people of Gaza in 2023, I had heard nothing from any of the Germans.  I was writing lots of songs against Israel's war on Gaza that were certainly appreciated by the many Germans on my email list and those who are financial supporters as members of my CSA, but none of them were coming forward anymore to offer to organize a gig next time I'm in Europe.  It's always random whether anyone will make such an offer when I'm making announcements about planning another visit, but the consistency among the Germans in this instance seemed notable.

And also not at all surprising.  The question of Israel and support or criticism of it in Germany is pretty much the most sensitive political issue possible there.  I don't think most Germans have significantly different views on the subject relative to those of their European neighbors, but they are definitely much more reticent about expressing those views.

The two gigs we had in Germany after Heideruh were in Kassel and Berlin.  In Kassel it was organized by youthful members of the DKP, the German Communist Party.  In Berlin it was young anti-Zionist folk from Ireland living in Berlin, organizing as the Irish Block.

At least with two of the three gigs in Germany there were Germans involved with organizing them, but I was still reminded on various occasions while in Germany of the first pro-Palestinian protest I ever attended in that country, in Hamburg around 2000, when I was one of maybe three non-Arab people in attendance, among many hundreds of mostly Palestinians.

At least in Kassel, in any case, we met young German leftists who were as capable of being critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian struggle as their counterparts in other European countries.

While this was refreshing, it's also important to point out that this was not new.  It's only new in terms of the past 30 years or so.  Before that, the most dominant factions on the German left -- those that identified with the term "anti-imperialist" -- were fully capable of being supportive of the Palestinian cause and critical of Israel's policies, just as they were fully capable of being critical of the imperial policies of the USA, and of course most especially of the arms sales and other policies of their own government.

All of the three gigs in Germany were well-attended, though in Berlin we lost a bunch of the audience because Kamala and I didn't go on until several hours after many people thought things would be starting.  At the end of the evening, mostly after the folks running the venue had turned out the lights and left the premises, Phil Butland interviewed me at a picnic table in the dark for The Left Berlin.

It was a busy tour -- five weeks on the road altogether, including flying time, with 19 gigs, and often a lot of long drives in between them.  But on our free days we used our time together largely learning new songs and recording them with my fancy new Chinese camera, which is such a fine piece of tech that the US recently banned it, soon after I bought the last one available for purchase in any Best Buy in the state of California, when Kamala and I were last on tour.

To say we were learning new songs is a bit of an odd way to put it, since I wrote the songs we were learning.  To say I wrote the songs is also far from entirely accurate.  I wrote them with my musical collaborator, who I call my AI band, or I just anthropomorphize her entirely with a Japanese woman's name I chose for her, Ai Tsuno.

This was the first tour we've done where much or even most of the songs we did at most of the shows were songs I wrote with my AI collaborator over the past eight months.

I had been especially keen to do shows full of these recently-written songs.  While I wouldn't want to do a show with only recent material, out of respect for the folks who may have traveled for hours in the hope of hearing a particular song I wrote 25 or 12 years ago, what I was craving was real-world feedback from live audiences to these songs.

Here's where we begin a lengthy tangent reflecting on music, the music industry, and writing songs in collaboration with AI.

Most performers we've become familiar with in places like the US over the past century of the existence of the corporate music industry did not write any of the material they recorded.  The industry does its best to mystify the whole process, and imbue the artists they promote with supernatural abilities of all kinds, but in reality it's all very compartmentalized and systematic, the hit-making machinery.  There are songwriters, there are recording artists and studio musicians, and there are performers.  They're all different people.

The performers are generally required by the industry they work for to more or less pretend they wrote all the lyrics, all the music, and came up with all the dance moves.  They're geniuses, which of course is why they're able to pack a stadium.  A pop star would never mention to the crowd before singing a song who wrote the lyrics and who wrote the music, and which music promoter successfully convinced their manager that they should be the artist to make this gem a chart-topper.  That's not how the spell is cast.

We live in a society that is meant to be obsessed with originality, and often actually is, as well.  People naturally take the bait, which is largely of a corporate nature, as the corporations try to sell their artistic products with claims of uniqueness of every kind.

For every style of music that embraces glitz and glamor and the mystification of the arts, there are counter-trends.  In the folk music scene in places like Greenwich Village in the early 1960's, for example, the notion of originality was so thoroughly rejected that songwriters sought to present their recent compositions as songs written a century earlier.  If they succeeded in fooling their audience into thinking their own songs were actually traditional ones, then they had written the kind of song they were aiming to write.  For many people, the point was never to take credit for the song in the first place, the point was to show that you had fully grokked this musical tradition that you were part of, as demonstrated by your audience's inability to tell the difference between old and new.

For those of us who are part of this folk music tradition, we embrace what Pete Seeger called "the folk process," whereby songs and musical traditions evolve over time, as they are influenced by different societies, forms of art, particular performers or recording artists, etc.  The concept of the folk process, and music and art as a collective commons -- like languages or recipes or knowledge of the properties of medicinal plants -- rejects the very notion of originally, to a huge extent.

As an artist coming out of this kind of tradition -- a tradition fully revived in different forms, but just as dramatically, by the "three chords and the truth" punk ethos, as well as by the hip-hop ethos of sampling everything and anything an artist wants to make part of their work -- I embraced working with AI music-generation platforms, when I discovered how powerful they had become.  Sure, I found the power of the platforms to be both wildly impressive as well as terrifying.  Yes, I could see how disruptive the technology would be, along with all the other kinds of AI technology currently transforming life as we know it.  But the power was undeniable.

The people who used to code for a living and are now telling the AI coding platforms what to code for them say they are creating code that is just as good as it was before, but they are doing it five, ten, or twenty times faster.

Anyone who has ever worked for a for-profit corporation probably doesn't need me to tell them that when this kind of tech exists, it will become ubiquitous.  Obviously, if coders can work twenty times as fast and just as well, their bosses will tell them to use these platforms, whether they want to do it or not.

I have discovered that it is exactly the same with the music-generation platforms for writing songs, as it is with the coding platforms for writing code.  But for a musician like me, ostensibly at least free of the shackles of a corporate boss telling me what to do or how to do it, why do I need to vastly increase my creative output?  And in so doing, is the art suffering in any way?  Is the music I'm creating with my AI band as good as what I'd write without the aid of AI?  Is it better?  Worse?  Can this even be accurately measured or determined?

When people know a song they're listening to is being performed by an AI band, they tend to be immediately turned off to the music, with a feeling like they're being deceived.  So I was particularly interested to see how people would react to songs I wrote with my AI band that Kamala and I had "made our own" by figuring out good acoustic, two-voices-and-guitar renditions of them.  I wanted to do this not to deceive anyone -- but if I am deceiving anyone in this process, it is to deceive for the greater good, to make a broader point, which is that originality isn't important.  What's important is what a song does to you.

Whether it's a song written hundreds of years ago, or music written hundreds of years ago with updated lyrics, or allegedly "new" music and "new" words, what matters -- for those of us who embrace these concepts inherent to "the folk process" and the collective cultural commons -- is how well the song or the music works.

What performers seek to do is to cast a spell on their audiences.  Whoever wrote a song they're singing -- whether it was them, partially them, or someone else entirely -- if it's a sad song, they want to make their audience cry.  If it's a funny song, they want to make people laugh.  If it's a song about injustice, they want to make their audiences feel like marching through the streets.  Whoever wrote the song, this is what we want to do with our audiences, how we want them to feel.  We know a song is working when it has the desired result.  We measure the sad songs by the volume of tears shed -- not by anyone's ideas about how original or unoriginal, old or new, trad or punk the song may be.

Not at all surprisingly, the Ai Tsuno cover songs that made up so much of our sets on this tour went over as well as my other songs do.  The sad ones make people cry, and the funny ones make them laugh.  The fact that my lyrics were ably supported by the musical ideas of an AI band that I worked with to come up with the music is not something anyone would be likely to notice.  Not just because I don't tell the audiences which songs were written with AI assistance.  But because there is a consistency to all of the songs.  Due to my deep involvement with coming up with the music for each one of them.  But also due in no small part to the fact that there are only so many folk punk-friendly chord progressions out there, and both Ai Tsuno and I have already used them all many times.

The consistency -- the musicality of each song -- is born out of the fact that not only is the platform amazing tech, but as the producer and prompt engineer, I'm looking for certain sounds, and I'm rejecting the vast majority of what it comes up with before I eventually land on the right kind of music and phrasing, etc., for the spell I'm trying to cast.  But being the magician who already knows what kinds of spells work and what kinds don't, I know when a song is done, in a way that the uninitiated won't.  This is the nature of being a professional working with a platform intended for use by people with a certain skill set.  Same with the AI coding platforms.

The proof, however, is in the pudding, and was in evidence at every gig on this tour.  Do I need to be writing a new song with my AI band almost daily?  Is this level of output necessary?  No, certainly not.  It's more of a burden in many ways.  But given that the quality of each of these new songs is right up there with anything else I've written in the past 25 years, the temptation to exercise the capacity to musically comment on even more news stories and historical anecdotes is irresistible.  Or at least reasons to resist the temptation are over-ruled by the results of embracing it.

Lengthy tangent over.

One of the new songs we sang at almost every gig was "Last Morning," which I wrote after the US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran, which took the lives of hundreds of school girls, along with the highest religious figure in Shia Islam, and much of his extended family and the surrounding neighborhood.  Everywhere we went, this song in particular inspired reactions which I find to be a fascinating insight into the differing understandings of reality that can exist within a given society.

Almost every time we did a show and sang that song, afterwards I was approached by a member of the audience with some kind of Muslim, Arab, Iranian, or south/west Asian background.  Often with tears in their eyes, they told me how much they were moved by this song.

On multiple occasions after shows involving the singing of this song, I was also approached -- sometimes only afterwards in the form of a message online -- by white Europeans who were not of any kind of Muslim or Asian background, who had taken offense to the song, because they see it as somehow supportive of the Islamic Republic that the US is currently actively trying to wipe out.

When I eventually do a tour of parts of the US and sing this song at those gigs, I'll be interested to see what kinds of reactions I get from audience members.  Probably similar, in every way.

One of Glenn Diesen's recent guests was talking about how totalitarianism develops in what we call "the west."  The model of totalitarian development he described is first you have a corporate-controlled media ecosystem that creates a society's consensus, and a society's range of acceptable views, around a wide range of issues.  Then this overwhelmingly brainwashed population gets to vote between different corporate-sponsored candidates offering viewpoints that are within the acceptable range of debate.

Whether we're talking about the spiffy social democracies of northern Europe, or the run-down post-industrial corners of England, or the USA, very few people seem to have any significant knowledge about Iran, or the region surrounding it.  Any knowledge they do think they have has either been fed to them by the corporate media ecosystem and it just isn't accurate, or it's knowledge based on events that took place 47 years ago, after which point they lost interest in the subject.

I like to ask people the question, name a terrorist attack -- you know, the kind involving mass civilian casualties, not resistance attacks on occupying armies -- name one terrorist attack that Iran has supported over the past 47 years.  So far no one has been able to give me an answer.

One of the other things I was asking people, specifically in Denmark, was whether they had ever heard of a Danish woman named Elise Thomsen.  I asked people of various ages, provided context, and universally received the answer, "no."

Danish culture is one in which participants embrace humility, among many other wonderful values.  The effort of the group is emphasized far more readily than the efforts of any individual.  There's so much good to be said about this orientation.  But it still surprises me sometimes, how this can manifest in ways that mean a society might stand to basically forget the contributions of such standouts as Elise Thomsen.  We learned this song I wrote with Ai Tsuno about Elise, in time to sing it at our show in Aalborg on May 1st.

Touring around Scandinavia, it's always hard for me to believe it's possible to have any kind of gig where you might get paid to see such scenery.  Even with much of the country being under construction at the moment -- they're building a tunnel from the island of Fyn in Denmark to the European mainland in Germany -- driving across Denmark is so beautiful.  Even the multi-lane highway is calming.

Seeing Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Oslo again, along with old friends and comrades, is always such a profound pleasure.  The weather was mostly cool and breezy and beautiful, cloudy but generally not raining.  There were many walks around these lovely cities, and other smaller ones as well, though never enough of any of that.

Wherever we went in Scandinavia, we had the feeling of staying in paradise.  Our free time in the Copenhagen area was divided between staying with old friends at a cohousing community in Roskilde surrounded by forest, farmland, and walking paths, or with old friends in Ballerup, beside a huge public forest.  Our night in Gothenburg was spent in a hotel overlooking medieval boats docked in the harbor.  In Oslo we stayed in a beautiful, woodsy neighborhood that is apparently a no-go area for the Oslo middle class, as it contains a percentage of immigrants in the community that causes it to be characterized as a ghetto by white people driving through in their Teslas.

As we were driving through Norway, along with everywhere else in Europe, we were often listening to the latest interview our favorite podcaster has done with his latest source of what his critics call Russian propaganda.  Glenn Diesen is a Norwegian college professor.  He briefly explored the idea of running for office, because, as he often says, every current member of the Norwegian parliament supports sending more arms to Ukraine, without exception.

Exploring questions around the Russia-Ukraine war with a lot of people in Europe we met, my impression was very similar to the impression I got around how people understand the history of Iran and the war against Iran -- not very well.  I often wondered, once again, if these people with their many opinions about the Russian government and the Ukrainian right to self-determination had ever bothered to read a book about the history of Russia in this century, or the history of the efforts of NATO and the US to influence proceedings and create facts on the ground in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries?  And also, had they ever bothered to think hard about what final result they are hoping for, if their side wins this war?  What would that look like?  What would their home town look like?  The lack of knowledge and the lack of reflection around these questions that I encounter wherever I go is so alarming.

In between Oslo and Gävle we visited friends from Florida who have just bought a run-down house in rural Sweden for $14,000 -- less than what I pay for rent in a year.  Nice place, on nice land, with lots of potential.  Perhaps I'll follow them there soon.  Like most of the radicals I know from the US, the idea of needing to make a quick escape is always in the back of my mind.

One of the other gigs that was planned so far in advance that both of the main performers forgot all about it for probably several months was the event in Brighton, England, marking the anniversary of the 1926 general strike in Great Britain, and the Battle of Lewes Road in Brighton in particular.  I was already well into trying to organize this tour when someone mentioned the idea of organizing a gig in Brighton, and somehow or other it occurred to me to check my Google Calendar, where I realized then I already had a plan for Brighton.  I then reminded Robb Johnson about the gig we had both committed to and forgotten about.

It ended up being a great gig, in any case, for which Robb and I both wrote songs.

We were in between gigs in London when I got an email from someone calling my attention to the actions of the Pakistani government, in recently arresting the leadership of the Awami Action Committee in the region of Pakistani-administered Kashmir known as Gilgit-Baltistan.  Soon after getting that email I got another, and then over the course of the next 24 hours or so, three more.  Each different, each eloquently beseeching me, specifically, to support the imprisoned leadership of the committee.

Reading up on the great work of the leader of the group, Ehsan Ali, in uniting so many different sorts of people in the support of basic and broadly popular demands like controls on the price of wheat, it was obvious to me that I had to write a song about him, at least.  It was equally obvious that the fact that the committee needed to make these demands again was because the government was trying to go back on their prior agreement to subsidize wheat prices.  And the fact that this was happening when it was happening was absolutely a consequence of the US war on Iran, and the resulting impact on global shipping, and the skyrocketing prices of commodities of all sorts, such as food, fuel, and fertilizer.

It was just after I wrote the song about Ehsan Ali that I got a message from Reuben, who had been one of the organizers of another wonderful show at the London Action Resource Center.  He was writing to make sure I was aware that the Duke of Devonshire owned an antiquarian book shop in London at which he was involved with some protest organizing, due mainly to the fact that said duke also owns a mountain in the Republic of Ireland, where he intends to raise the fees charged to tenant farmers seeking to graze their sheep.  Now, in the allegedly independent part of that island, in 2026.  Next song.

We got to have a brief visit and sing with our longtime friend, comrade, and musical collaborator, Lorna McKinnon in Glasgow.  One of the projects I've been engaged with in recent months especially has been trying to take boring slogans and make them more interesting, in the form of songs, and singable refrains.  We demonstrated at many of the gigs how well they can work.

Kamala and I had already played around southern England, about to head north to play in Middlesbrough and Glasgow (having no gigs in between London and Middlesbrough due to aforementioned distracted tour-planning efforts), when I got a message from someone in Denmark, asking if we had May 20th free.  Soon we had plane tickets from London to back to Copenhagen, which we had just left ten days earlier.

The unexpected return trip to Denmark was certainly the most moving evening of the tour, surrounded as we were by grieving friends, relatives, and comrades of Mads Gram, a longtime socialist organizer in Denmark, and participant in International Solidarity Movement activities in and around occupied Palestine, who had just died suddenly earlier in the month, at the age of 40.

What was also so moving about the evening for me, in addition to seeing how everyone was dealing with the sudden death of their loved one, was having this unusual opportunity to reunite briefly with so many people I used to see around often, but who I hadn't seen in many years, or often decades.

People who spend their teenage years or their early twenties hanging around SUF (socialist youth front) comrades or going to shows at Ungdomshuset (the House of Youth) generally grow up to be leftwing adults, but you don't see them at the shows anymore.  They grow up and maybe get a cool job working for a union or an NGO, but from the vantage point of the leftwing musician like me, they're gone, or much less visible, than when I'd see them in the audience and talk with them over a cigarette outside after the show.  In many cases by now they've even quit smoking, and they're drinking less, too.

In my experience as a touring artist, I often play for young people, and I often play for older folks, who are retired.  The common thread in both cases is they have more free time than people who are raising small children while working 30 or 40 or 50 hours a week.  I often meet teenagers who tell me they grew up listening to my music, and they tell me about their parents, who are fans, but they don't bring their parents with them most of the time.  For their parents, those days ended when they had kids, due to time constraints and maybe other factors.

So, there was something really special about hanging out with all these people now in their forties, who were in their teens or early twenties when we last spent much time together.  In some cases, as grown up as they now appear, I can still see the scrawny punk kid they used to be, and they still see in me the much older adult leftwinger who came to sing for the kids, though now they're in their forties and raising small children, and I'm in my fifties, doing the same thing, and the age difference seems much less pronounced.

The last gig on the tour was at the Islington Folk Club, which was also the last of the gigs which had been planned a year or more in advance.  The folk club has existed in a few different venues over the decades, but as a folk club, it's the place I've played in most consistently, since I first started touring in England over a quarter of a century ago.  This evening we played there, the house band and the other acts were especially in good form.  One of them did a brilliant rendition of a Robb Johnson song, which was not the first Robb Johnson cover I heard on this tour, either.  Having heard Kamala and I do "Song for Tomorrow" at the folk club, the man said he was going to learn it next.

At all of our shows in England and Scotland, I think without exception, there was at least one member of the audience who had recently been arrested for the crime of holding a sign saying something along the lines of "I support Palestine Action, I oppose genocide."  If memory serves, it was at our last gig, in Islington, that the audience included the first of the octogenarians to be arrested for this particular terrorism-related offense.

Now what?

Where is the antiwar movement we need?

As the US and Israel jointly pursue Armageddon, I wait for the calls from protest organizers looking for live performers to make their protests engaging, for the movement they're desperately hoping to build.  But these calls never come.  Not just since the end of February, but for many years now. 

The occasional protests that do happen are carefully-managed, with no room for live music, which can be unpredictable at times.  The bigger protests that happen in recent years are almost always the ones being promoted heavily on NPR and by social media algorithms.  The bigger protests in recent years are never about US foreign policy.

It's always easy to know what needs to be done.  The hard part is in the implementation.  We need a big, radically inclusive social movement with a vision for the kind of internationalist, egalitarian society we want to build, and the movement needs to be rooted in a shared love of human culture -- music, poetry, puppetry, food -- so it's attractive and might stand a chance of growing even bigger.

This movement, naturally, needs to be opposed not only to terrible domestic policies like violently rounding up and deporting our neighbors and trying to form a dictatorship, but also opposed to a foreign policy based on threatening, sanctioning, and bombing other countries around the world -- particularly Iran, and by virtue of the client state relationship, any other country Israel occupies or attacks.

I know I'm not the only one noticing that while the ongoing ICE raids have inspired a lot of resistance, not only grassroots but also among all sorts of celebrities and politicians, this has hardly been the case with opposition to Israel's wars on its neighbors, or the current war on Iran.

This reality dramatically highlights the conundrum anyone is in who might hope the way out of this madness could come from the leadership of the Democratic Party.  Listen to the Democratic Party politicians and DNC-affiliated press outlets talking about military tactics with war hawks, rather than asking what the hell the US is doing bombing schools, hospitals, water desalination plants, and oil refineries.

Our leaders for the movement we want won't come from that crowd.

But what of the other potential elements of society?  People often wonder aloud in my presence about things like when the labor movement might step up to the plate, or the students, or Muslims, or "the left," or some other group like that.  I often wonder about that, too, even to the point where I start to come up with answers to my own questions -- some of them gathered from decades of observation and participation.

In the hope that it's true that in order to try to answer the "now what?" question we must first understand the "what happened?" question, here are my broad generalizations that attempt to explain how we got here.  That is, to explain a little about why antiwar sentiment does not seem currently to be represented by an antiwar movement, and to help answer the question of what happened to effective grassroots movement-building tactics.

There are various reasons why different groups or segments of society become sort of institutionally incapable of effective organizing.  No small part of this process is related to constant, ongoing efforts on the part of various actors to misdirect and otherwise divide and conquer any real or potential threats to the status quo.  (Look up "Cointelpro" for more information on that.)

I don't know where the leadership we need in terms of a big, well-organized, radically inclusive, visionary, culturally-rooted social movement is going to rise out of.  Sometimes, as has often and accurately been said, the darkest hour is just before the dawn.  But here are my thoughts on some of the places some people often seem to be looking towards for this kind of leadership, and why we're unlikely to find what we're looking for in those places.

The labor movement

In the 1930's in the US, the labor movement was where it was at.  The movement was pervasive throughout society, influential in every possible way, and greatly dependent on art and music to communicate its message.  Led by former members of the old Industrial Workers of the World who had joined the Communist Party, formally-organized unions and informally-organized movements connected to them were the order of the day, and led directly to the New Deal reforms of the era.

But the circumstances that arose around World War 2 and its aftermath proved to be too much even for this powerful, internationalist, often revolutionary movement.  With the anti-communist, post-World War 2 backlash represented by McCarthyism and McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee, the communists were purged from the leadership of the labor movement.  With the rise of the US as the world's manufacturing base for much of the next generation, the labor movement's leadership was overwhelmingly won over by the many good union jobs provided by the military-industrial complex.  With the passage of the Taft-Hartley law banning solidarity strikes, the labor movement was also extremely hampered.

It has never really recovered from the post-World War 2 purges.  The US labor movement has never, since the 1930's, been at the forefront of any social movement.  At worst, labor leadership has often been on the wrong side of many issues.  In the 1960's, the antiwar protesters who got beaten up were often being beaten by members of especially patriotic labor unions, in fact.

In the late 1990's there was a resurgence in the labor movement connected to the global justice movement that was active in so many different countries then.  9/11 took the wind out of the sails of that movement, particularly in the US.

The boomers

People often look at things from a generational perspective.  I'd say this orientation exists partially because it's real -- people are shaped by the times they grew up in and the events that took place during those times.  Partially it's also wrapped up in the manufactured, corporate cult of youth that has existed for a very long time.  It's a cult that is both very profitable in terms of marketing products and services, and also very useful in terms of keeping the population divided from each other by age and other categories.

Certainly one of the very most useful and impressive social movements that happened in the twentieth century was the antiwar movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's.  This extremely culturally-rooted movement used music and other forms of art as a means of demilitarizing the hearts and minds of so much of their generation, and so much of society in general.

Everything the boomer generation was thought to stand for in the context of the antiwar movement has been ridiculed and vilified ever since that time, so threatened were the powers-that-be by this movement and how it operated so effectively.  Efforts were made ever since to make sure we have negative associations with this movement, and all of its methods, all of which have been portrayed as unrealistic, utopian, and ineffective, despite all of the abundant evidence to the contrary.

Despite all of these efforts, it was this generation -- or significant elements from it -- which took the helm of the antiwar movement when the US invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq after 9/11.

Since the movement against those wars and its boomer leadership, efforts to vilify and ridicule the 1960's movement the boomers are still associated with increased exponentially with the rise of social media, and the algorithms the social media corporations use to effectively brainwash, divide, and conquer our society and so many others.  The boomers are now too old to be leading anything, but the anti-boomer propaganda continues full tilt, lest anyone else be fool enough to try to engage in the kinds of organizing many boomers did so well -- helping to generate a tremendous antiwar movement using art, music, free festivals, free love, antiwar coffeehouses next to every military base with live music and free literature, among other tactics.

Generation X

Nobody actually talks about Generation X as a potential savior, but given that I'm a member of this generation...  As with any other generation, it's inaccurate to characterize it politically in one way or the other, it's much too big and diverse for that, as they all are.  But there are common lived experiences that can shape people and entire generations profoundly.

We are the first generation alive today to experience a nation in continual decline in terms of standard of living and hopes and expectations for the future.  We are the last generation alive that didn't grow up on social media.  Both of these could be hopeful things.  We're also currently middle-aged, and largely very preoccupied with trying to pay the rent and raise children.

The youth

People younger than Generation X have grown up not only in a nation in decline, but in a country where our communications have been hegemonically hijacked by Big Tech and the ruling class interests it serves.

There has long been a cultural idea that "the youth" are the future, they're the generation to look to for leadership in any potential social movement that might develop, and they're also the generation that, as a result of growing up with all this technology, are the most astute about the whole tech-dominated situation we find ourselves in.

These assumptions have often proven false.  For example, it wasn't the youth that led the antiwar movement circa 2003, it was the boomers.

As a result of growing up within the confines of the social media reality that has been shoved down all of our throats, I'm not sure why anyone imagines that the generation most directly devastated by this onslaught would be in a good position to lead the resistance against it.  Rather, this generation has been probably more dramatically impacted by the worldview presented by a very divisive interpretation of identity politics than any other, because of the nature of the online reality established by Big Tech by the late 2000's.

The Left

To be clear about terms, when I say "the left" I'm talking about organized elements of society who are politically too radical to be part of the fold of the Democratic Party establishment.  If you want to de-fund the police, close the US military bases around the world, welcome refugees, have reparations for slavery, seriously regulate the housing market and make housing a human right, if you are in a party or other organization that includes words like "socialist," "communist," or "anarchist" in the name.

In other countries these sorts of politics are sometimes actually represented by parties that have legislators in parliaments.  In the US these sorts of values exist almost exclusively outside of electoral politics.

Being outside of electoral politics would not itself be a big limitation, in terms of forming a social movement focused on these values.  But overwhelmingly, the organized left in the US, as well as the left represented by popular sentiments expressed on social media platforms, has long been hobbled by endless internal debates around issues of identity.

The pattern that has become well established in the social media age in particular is whenever a person or group rises to the fore in some way, they are cut down by the all-pervasive social media rumor mill for having the wrong identity, or the wrong orientation towards another identity.  This way ties of common goals are broken, and the arguments never stop.

Whether we're talking about groups that may fall under the rubric of identity politics or groups that orient more towards socialism, the environment, opposition to militarism, etc., the left in the US today has also become institutionally incapable of organizing an event that isn't depressing (with the very occasional exception, of course).

Every protest now, small or large, for years, with rare exceptions, is bereft of live music, in a scene bereft of artistic representations of the people's will.  On the stage is one speaker after another, overwhelmingly people who are going to lecture the assembled crowd about how things are, tell us things we already know, criticize us for not being active enough or numerous enough, and then we all go home.

Probably more than any other part of society, the US left has convinced itself that the intense dependence on art and music as tools for organizing and communicating that every previous significant social movement have embraced is not relevant for us today, somehow.  The boomers, though largely now dead, are still vilified and ridiculed, as is anyone with an acoustic guitar, despite the acoustic guitar still being one of the most popular instruments for people in the US to play, of any generation.

Every element of organizing effective events that foster a sense of community, inspire people to action, and leave people feeling optimistic about this movement is missing, as if systematically.

The methodically horrific way these demonstrations almost always go is evidence of a left that has been captured and rendered flaccid.

Muslims

Here we are in a situation where, once again, the US is at war with a number of predominantly Muslim nations.  To say that the US is at war with a Muslim nation is akin to saying the sun rose in the east this morning.  In many countries in what we call the western world, such as in the UK or Australia, the resistance to US and Israeli policies is led by Muslims.

Those of us who were politically active prior to 9/11 will remember that in the year following the beginning of the Second Intifada -- between September, 2000, and September, 2001 -- Muslims and Arabs across the US were very politically engaged in supporting the Palestinian uprising and opposing Israel's expansionist, ethnonationalist, and racist policies.  Events organized by Muslims during this period, from my direct recollection, almost always involved music and dance.  I sang at innumerable events at this time, to take one of many such examples.

After 9/11 this all changed dramatically, as the security state went into high gear vilifying Muslims, putting them on no-fly lists, infiltrating mosques and other organizations, imprisoning solidarity activists on scurrilous charges, etc.  

With Israel's more recent policy of genocide in Gaza and daily pogroms across the West Bank, many Muslims and Arabs in the US got politically engaged again, along with other people, and the policies of both Biden and Trump has been to criminalize their speech and, if they're not US citizens, to deport them.

With this kind of targeted repression, counting on a movement in the US to be led by elements of this country's relatively tiny Muslim minority seems unlikely.

Students

In very recent years, students have been at the forefront of resistance to Israeli and US policies.  Student leaders have been deported when they have not been citizens, with these policies impacting huge numbers of people in very dramatic ways.  But US citizens have also faced expulsion and other very dramatic consequences.

It is not at all surprising that the student movement in 2024, even at its height, was mainly to be found in the bigger universities with either a significant Muslim or Jewish student population.  The movement was largely led by students so directly affected that they couldn't bear to look the other way.

That this was the case -- that this movement was not led by students who were just concerned about a war their country was very much involved in, but by Muslim and Jewish students -- was not at all surprising to me, given the stifling atmosphere that has now been present for many years on college campuses when it comes to anyone expressing an opinion on something that doesn't somehow align with their perceived identity.

By my observation college campuses were central to resistance movements up until the funding on campuses across the country became less and less accessible to student groups, which thus had a harder and harder time organizing events, and this all happened to coincide directly with the rise of social media, circa 2006.  Up until 2006, this particular artist was playing shows on college campuses across the US constantly, often over a hundred of them in a given year.

Immigrants

Immigrants generally have faced the same kind of blanket repression in the US that Muslims and Arabs have faced, particularly since 9/11.

At other times in history, massive social movements in the US have been led by immigrants, or have had a disproportionately large immigrant element, such as the Industrial Workers of the World over a century ago.  All of the immigrant-led movements, such as the IWW and later movements such as those in the 1960's -- La Raza Unida, the farmworkers union, the 2006 uprising that nobody remembers -- were all intensely musical, and effective.

Immigration was long favored by the leaders of industry, because it meant a ready source of cheap labor that they could use to prevent workers from organizing and demanding better pay and conditions.  When this strategy failed badly with the rise of the IWW, lots of laws were passed that made immigration much harder, especially from the parts of Europe where the biggest trouble-makers were thought to be from.

While the campus protests in recent years may not rise to the level of participation we saw in the labor movement a century ago that inspired the anti-immigration legislation of the period, the response to the campus protests in terms of harshly punishing participants and passing laws to harshly restrict immigration from certain countries has been identical, and has effectively silenced a whole lot of people.

In conclusion

Who will take the lead in delivering the kind of movement so many of us are hoping for?  You tell me.  I have no idea.  What I do know is most massive social movements that rise up and change everything were not predicted by the intelligentsias of their times.

Partial Victory in Campaign to Restore YouTube Channel

To briefly review:

Due to my alleged support for "violent criminal organizations," which seems to be defined as any group that opposes genocide and supports the rights of Palestinians, my YouTube account was demonetized in January, 2025.  In November, 2025, all of my 50 albums were removed from YouTube Music, with no notification or explanation.

On January 9th, 2026, my channel received its first Strike.  On prior occasions when songs that violated their policy on support for violent criminal organizations were taken down, I received Warnings.  A Strike is worse -- 3 Strikes and your channel gets deleted.

At that point I deleted all versions of the 3 songs that had previously been flagged and removed, because only some of them had at that point been taken down.  But a few days after my one-week suspension from being able to post or upload on YouTube ended, on January 19th, I received an email from YouTube that my entire channel violated  their terms, and would now be permanently deleted.  My appeal was then immediately rejected.  There had never been a second Strike, they just went straight from the first Strike to channel deletion. 

Review over.  Here's what happened next.

Pro-Palestine activist/pundit Guy Christenson's channel was also deleted, along with his existence on TikTok and Instagram.  Guy then posted a video on X about what had happened, which went viral, and resulted in YouTube restoring his account.  Fellow pro-Palestine activist Sarah Wilkinson recommended to me that I make a video like he did, and try to emulate his success.

I put up my own short, captioned video last night, on February 19th, doing my best to copy how Guy does his videos.  Lo and behold, it also went viral.  Overnight it was reposted on X close to 3,000 times.

This morning I got two emails from YouTube, in quick succession.  The first one, somewhat bizarrely, informed me that a song which was not one of the ones they had previously deleted was in violation of their violent criminal organization support policy, and would now be deleted.  It also informed me that as a result of this song being up ("When Luigi Goes On Trial," by Ai Tsuno), my channel would now receive its second Strike, and would be inaccessible to me to post or upload to for 2 weeks. 

At first it seemed strange to have a song deleted from a channel which had already been deleted, including that song and many hundreds of others.  And a second Strike on a channel that had already been deleted.

Then came the next email, a few minutes later, informing me that YouTube had decided that my channel did not violate their policies, and would now be restored. 

And sure enough, it is back.  My children can once again watch my animated children's videos.  History buffs can once again hear the hundreds of songs I've written about labor history and the history of social movements from around the world.  And supporters of the Palestinian cause can once again hear my hundreds of songs that could easily be construed to violate the same policies the random songs they've targeted so far have violated.

Or can they?  No, actually, they can't.  Why is that?  Because this victory is a very partial one.  Those 50 albums that used to be up on the world's second-biggest music streaming platform, YouTube Music, are still not there.  My existence as an artist on YouTube Music, and the thousands of followers I had as an artist there (what they call being a "Topic" in YouTube parlance) are still gone.

In short, I'm still being very much suppressed on YouTube.  Without my albums being restored, this will mean thousands of people every month who used to get my songs recommended to them via YouTube's all-important song recommendation algorithms will no longer discover my music for the first time.  It will mean I have an estimated 30% fewer listeners on YouTube overall, according to music industry people who try to estimate these things.

So, the battle is definitely not won, and much more pressure on YouTube is needed, for them to put my albums back up on YouTube Music, now that they have restored my channel, albeit with a second Strike that may soon lead once again to channel deletion.

Nevertheless, I think it would be very appropriate to take a wee bit of cheer from the fact that my channel was even temporarily restored, because when you look at the sequence and timing of events, this quite obviously happened due to popular pressure, not for any other reason.  Thanks to all of you who canceled your YouTube Premium account, wrote YouTube a message, or reposted my video.  Solidarity is the way to go.

The Benefit of the Doubt

The way so many of my fellow leftist intellectuals are rushing to throw Noam Chomsky under the bus lately makes me question my sanity.  It also makes me wonder how many of them were subjected to harassment campaigns online until they wrote a statement critical of Chomsky.  This can be a daunting experience, which some of us are immune to, having already been canceled.

Over the past month I've been really busy with a concert tour, and also dealing with having my YouTube channel being deleted for my alleged support for criminal organizations.

Unlike me, Chomsky isn't accused of supporting any criminal organizations, however.  He's accused of maintaining cordial relations by email and now and then in person with Jeffrey Epstein.  That is, he's accused of having associations with a criminal.  Not just any criminal, but a very rich and powerful one who systematically and sexually exploited children -- so, among the most distasteful sorts of criminals available.

Various of Chomsky's former associates -- though certainly not all of them -- have been writing things along the lines of how much they love and admire Chomsky, his work, his brain, his writings, etc., but that now that they've learned just how much time he spent with Epstein and how many nice things he said to him (mainly in private emails between the two of them that were recently made public), they can be found on social media saying very professorial things like "fuck Chomsky."

I'm struck by what feels like some kind of innocence on the part of these professors.  Are all of their associations made or broken based on moral considerations?  Are there no other reasons they can imagine wanting to have cordial relations with someone, aside from moral ones?  And then if their morality meter says they need to break their associations with someone, they react accordingly and break off relations with the immoral people?

I don't pretend to know what Chomsky's interest in maintaining cordial relations with Jeffrey Epstein was.  Unlike many people, apparently, I also don't feel the need to jump to conclusions about this question.

These people seem to assume that the only possible reason why someone would want to be on good terms with a guy like Epstein is because they are attracted to the life this guy led, with all his wealth, power, women, and girls.  Attracted in the sense that they want to live like him, and partake in his repulsive ways.

This assumption seems so incredibly unimaginative for people with such great minds, that it boggles mine profoundly.  And apparently it's not just because I'm a dude, judging from the opinions of a sampling of my friends and comrades on this subject.

There are innumerable examples, including some I'm familiar with personally, when really awful people with a lot of money and/or in positions of power were persuaded to do something good with their money or with their influence once, or even more often than that.

In some of these instances, when a good thing happens involving a rich or powerful person, it's because someone had their ear.

Does this make it worthwhile to risk compromising one's own moral standing by associating with rich and powerful people who do things like run intelligence agencies, oil companies, family dictatorships, or who are involved with other activities that most thoughtful people would be profoundly uncomfortable with?

And even aside from any possible good that could come out of such an association by having the ear of someone like Epstein, are such associations of value for other reasons, like for anyone seeking to have a deeper understanding of how power in this sick world is actually exercised?

To me, the answer to either of these questions is an unequivocal "yes."  I don't even really understand why this needs to be said, or to be explained.  Nor do I understand why anyone would assume Chomsky's association with Epstein has to do with anything other than exactly these sorts of considerations.

I'm not sure of this, but I feel like there was a time when, at least in the absence of hard evidence, most people at all familiar with Chomsky and his life work would tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming negative intentions.  If those days ever existed, they're clearly over now.

On Being Targeted

I've been a target for surveillance and suppression for at least 24 years.  The question is, a target of whom?

I first learned I was on some kind of international watch list in 2002, thanks to a uniformed officer for Canadian immigration at the Montana-Alberta border who showed me what it said on his computer screen about me, before he told me I wouldn't be allowed into the country, and if I tried again at another border crossing, I'd be held there until the G8 meetings were over.

Contrary to some people's opinions, I'm actually not inclined towards assuming there's a conspiracy going on, generally.  Until I was shown the "all points warning" about me on the officer's screen, I had figured that my many problems with trying to cross the Canadian border were related to generally increased levels of security on the border since the rise of the global justice movement in the late 1990's.

I knew that the increased security, and my problems with the border, were not just attributable to the increased security post-9/11, because it all started before then.

Around the turn of the 21st century there were so many overlapping events all happening at more or less the same time.  The rise of the global justice movement, which seemed to be very threatening to the neoliberal capitalist status quo then, was happening in North America and around the world at basically the same time as other events that were also very threatening to various elements of the ruling elites, such as the election of Hugo Chavez to power in Venezuela, the beginning of the Second Intifada in the occupied Palestinian lands, and then the 9/11 attacks, all in fairly rapid succession.

Since that time it's been a quarter century.  I've been touring, performing, and recording all that time, trying to maintain and maybe even build a career, while facing many obstacles along the way.  Some of those obstacles have been related to the rise of Big Tech, and the enshittification of the platforms which have effectively taken over the internet.  For example, when legal, free streaming became the dominant way most people got their music, untold numbers of musicians lost half their income, which for so many meant they effectively had to find another line of work.  This happened to musicians regardless of their politics or lack thereof.

What's happened to me, however, can't just be attributed to those kinds of developments.  On the other hand, almost everything that's happened to me -- aside from at that border crossing in 2002 -- could be attributed to a variety of possible factors.

There are all sorts of reasons why I might have trouble crossing a border, for example.  I fit a certain kind of suspicious profile, whether I'm on a list or not.  There are all kinds of reasons someone expressing opinions like mine about sensitive issues like whether Israel has a right to exist as an ethnonationalist state or not would have problems with things like censorship.  Such opinions often violate the laws of many different countries these days, after all.

One of the things about being targeted for surveillance and suppression by evil forces is no one wants to inflate one's sense of self-importance, or most of us don't.  If we can attribute our experiences to a less conspiratorial, more common sort of explanation, that often seems preferable.

For someone like me, a US citizen with some kind of involvement with the left dating back to my early childhood, I naturally have been inclined to think about things like Cointelpro, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program.  Partly because I knew about it, and partly because I'm a US citizen with a history of being involved with various social movements that have all been heavily targeted for suppression by US authorities here -- such as the global justice movement, the antiwar movement, the environmental movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement that was very prominent around the world during the slightly less than twelve months between Ariel Sharon's invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28th, 2000, and the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

But my ruminations in more recent times -- and also after reading a big chunk of Ilan Pappe's recent history of the Zionist lobby and its massive and longstanding program to dominate the global narrative around Israel, and looking at what we're learning about the vast network of surveillance and influence that Mossad seems to have established with the Jeffrey Epstein project -- leads me to wonder, what if there is one particular agency targeting me all this time, and what if it's not a US-based one, like I had always assumed?  Whether or not this knowledge would make any difference is another matter.  But what if it's Mossad that is targeting me?

As I process this question myself, I find it makes the most sense.  Given my relatively low profile as an artist in the first place, with never more than 2 million songs streamed in a given year in my entire career, I have often wondered how much sense it could possibly make for me to have had so many problems in so many different countries.  Are they all run by people who are really that concerned about me and my music?  It feels unlikely.  But if there's someone in Israel, or working for Israel, who decided a long time ago that I was deserving of being a target for surveillance and suppression, then it all seems at least slightly more logical.

The folks who run Israel have a long history of understanding the vital importance of artists in the resistance, which is why Israel has a long history of assassinating, imprisoning, and otherwise in less violent ways suppressing the careers of artists who speak out against the crimes of the Zionist state.

Assassinating your critics can draw a lot of attention, so most artists targeted for suppression don't get to meet the fates of people like Ghassan Kanafani, Wael Zuaiter, Kamal Nasser, Naji al-Ali, Refaat Alareer or Saleem Al-Naffar.  There are many other ways to suppress an artist's career that don't turn them into martyrs.

My guess at the moment is I got on the radar of the Israelis when what was to be my second tour of Israel was canceled in the fall of 2000, just after the beginning of the Second Intifada, which had coincided with me writing a song called "Children of Jerusalem."

The song resulted in me having most of my gigs canceled in Israel, and being labeled a fascist and/or an antisemite by most of my would-be Jewish gig organizers there (despite my Jewish lineage).  It then resulted in a flood of attention and praise from the Palestinian diaspora around the world, and many years afterwards of being featured as a performer at pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the world and being interviewed occasionally on platforms like Al-Jazeera.

I'll just go through notable things that happened in the years and decades since that time.

The first major thing that I remember was being turned away at the Canadian border in 2002.  The border official had been instructed to turn me away without telling me why he was doing so.  He was so uncomfortable with this order that he showed it to me.  Then he turned me away, because he didn't want to lose his job, and he told me that that was the real reason he was turning me away.

In 2002, after the Israeli military's invasion and destruction of the Jenin refugee camp and resulting deaths of scores of Palestinians, I wrote the song, "Jenin."  In the UK, Andy Kershaw began playing that song about once a month on his weekly, nation-wide world music program.

As a result of playing this song, Andy was called to an interview with the BBC Board of Governors, for the first time in his three decades at BBC.  They questioned his journalistic neutrality and criticized his choices of guests.  He lost his job at BBC not long after that, supposedly for unrelated reasons.  I have met some of his former producers since then, who have all apologized for never playing me since he was fired, saying that they don't want to lose their jobs, too.

In 2002 I was gaining a much bigger audience in Germany as well, performing at an antiwar demonstration for a hundred thousand people in Berlin that spring.  Soon after that, I began to be targeted by a group called the Antideutsch, the Anti-Germans, a bizarre but influential political tendency coming out of some of the more academic and convoluted corners of the German left that aligns themselves strictly with anything the self-proclaimed Jewish State of Israel does, up to and including crimes against humanity -- and that aligns themselves rigidly against anyone who is opposed to Israel's crimes.

The Antideutsch began leafleting at some of my gigs, and threatening with other ones to do physical violence at venues if gigs went ahead.  This kind of thing has kept up in Germany ever since then.  It hasn't stopped me from playing in Germany fairly regularly, but it has had a tremendous impact in terms of the functioning of the rumor mill, and how I have to swim through a morass of false allegations and misunderstandings in Germany everywhere I go since then, especially if anyone is online at all.

When I was barred from entering Canada for a full year, in 2006 or so, what I was mainly going to Canada to do was to receive an award from a Palestinian community center in Vancouver.  There was also a work visa question around another gig, which I figured at the time was the real problem.  The Palestinians at the community center thought otherwise.  A year ban seems excessive either way.

When I received a phone call in Tokyo before boarding my flight to New Zealand in 2013 and I was told by New Zealand Immigration that I could not board the flight and was not welcome in New Zealand, I thought this time as well that maybe it was related to not having a work visa organized yet.  But it turned out that there was no mention of that, only of things Immigration had been reading on my blog, that made me an undesirable element as far as visiting New Zealand went.

I was hooked up then by a criminal lawyer I knew with an immigration lawyer, who took my cause to the appropriate government ministers, and was told that my case would not be reconsidered, I was not welcome in New Zealand.  The lawyer had never seen anything like this in all his decades of experience.

I have never made it back to New Zealand since then, but my strong suspicion about what got me on the radar there as far as being an unwanted character was that the year before, in 2012, I played at a benefit concert folks in New Zealand organized for the purposes of buying a printing press for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, to use.  The PFLP is not a proscribed organization under New Zealand law, but it sure is as far as Israel is concerned.

Soon after I was turned away from New Zealand, in the capital of Australia, Canberra, a worker in one department happened to be walking past the open door of a couple of people talking in the department that addresses things like war crimes.  According to this man's story to me, in that room there were two people discussing me.  He didn't stick around to hear more than that.

At the beginning of 2021, allegedly because I interviewed a controversial guest on my YouTube channel, a campaign began, that has never stopped since that time, to spread false rumors about me being antisemitic, pro-Nazi, transphobic, and other things.  Systematic efforts have been made to get my gigs canceled.  While these efforts are often unsuccessful, they always succeed in creating or maintaining the toxic atmosphere that follows me wherever I go, and wherever anyone says anything nice about me online.

For years I assumed that the people behind this incessant trolling and cancellation campaigning were adherents to the intolerant philosophy represented by groups like Rose City Antifa here in Portland, that believe in physically shutting down book talks they find offensive, and who believe that cancellation campaigning is a great way to "demand accountability" from those who have allegedly lost their antifascist way.

Being targeted from the left and the right seemed ridiculous, but also like par for the course.  Cointelpro is a great, lengthy illustration of the kinds of divide-and-conquer techniques that have successfully been employed in the past, that have seen groups form on the left that are doing the work of the right, whether with witting agents or unwitting activists who have been successfully misdirected by the efforts of the agents.  What was and is especially maddening about this particular kind of campaign is how well it fools so many people who are too innocent to understand what is going on here, who are ready to believe any nonsense they hear from someone who claims to be a victim of my bigotry.

But then came the fall of 2023, and the winter and spring following, when the cancellation campaigning and trolling was very explicitly coming from supporters of Israel.  The volume was astronomically greater than any of the trolling that was supposedly coming from the Antifa end of the political spectrum.  But what was shockingly identical was everything else -- the techniques of attacking anyone who speaks up in my defense; the quick resort to attacking me and others in ways that were sexist, homophobic, or racist, all the while supposedly being offended by my antisemitism; the use of macho language and certain kinds of macho vocabulary.  It was all the same -- identical.  Almost as if it were all or mostly, all along, the same people.

Things moved from trolling and algorithmic suppression online to vast troll farms unleashed on my Facebook page in early 2024, with 27,000 comments per month for a while, all hateful ones.  My first album about the Gaza genocide, Notes from a Holocaust, mysteriously disappeared from the world's biggest music streaming platform, Spotify.  On YouTube, various songs the censors disliked were being removed, and I was receiving warnings that I faced worse fates if I didn't shape up and stop supporting unnamed criminal organizations.

In early 2024 a group called UK Lawyers for Israel began writing venues in England and warning them that they were hosting an antisemite and could face a lawsuit if they didn't cancel the gig.  Other anonymous people also wrote venues to tell them they should cancel gigs, on the same basis, but they presented themselves as people of the left.  Same stuff as in the US, but happening in the UK.  The same efforts were then made to get gigs canceled all over Scandinavia, where allegations around me became a subject for discussion at various venues and within various groups.

As if they were coordinating with these various efforts to get gigs canceled and suppress turnout to them, Facebook started disabling the use of the "Invite" feature on Events for me about 95% of the time I tried to use it.  This almost-total disabling of the most useful feature on Facebook continues.  Unlike with other times they do this to people, with me there has never been a notification that this is happening, or for how long it is to happen.  It just happens, and never stops happening.

In January, 2025, my YouTube channel was demonetized.  In November, 2025, the world's second-biggest music streaming platform outside of China, YouTube Music, removed me as an artist, and all of my albums, from their platform.  In January, 2026, YouTube deleted my channel.

For an artist today, YouTube deleting your channel and YouTube Music deleting all your albums is akin to cutting your potential global audience in half, along with your streaming revenues, which in my case started declining well before the channel removal, because of YouTube's actions prior to that.  The only thing that could be as bad as this is having my music deleted from Spotify, at which point my effective disappearance from most people's online reality will be pretty well complete.

Needless to say, the vast majority of the offenses I committed on YouTube that led to songs being removed prior to my channel being deleted revolved around Israel and Palestine, and my musical support for various forms of resistance to Israel's aggressions, with songs like "I Support Palestine Action" and "Song for the Houthi Army" being singled out by the censors.

Stay tuned, dear reader, for the next chapter in my disappearance.

Meanwhile on YouTube: Discographies Wiped and Channels Deleted

If there's anyone out there interested in civil liberties, now might be a good time to help me sue YouTube, for the sake of society at large.

The title uses the plural because I assume I'm not the only artist this is happening to, but I have yet to hear of others, aside from R. Kelly, who was actually convicted of running a criminal organization with lots of actual victims who testified in court.  I know channel deletions have happened to a number of journalists, among many other people, who, like me, were not running or otherwise engaged with any criminal organizations.  These removals are as outrageous as mine, but not quite the same thing.

What happens when an artist becomes possibly the first artist to have all of their albums wiped from YouTube Music and then the YouTube Channel they've had for twenty years deleted, all because their music allegedly was supportive of unnamed criminal organizations?  As far as I can tell, basically nothing.

Lots of expressions of sympathy, lots of completely bizarre advice, lots of comments from people who clearly have no understanding of the nature of the digital world we all live in these days, and no interest whatsoever from the mainstream media from anywhere in the world.

There are, of course, many other very pressing things to cover, what with masked thugs killing people on the streets of US cities every day, Trump invading or threatening to invade everywhere, and so much more.  But I'll just say here for whoever might be listening, the canary in this coal mine of artistic free expression just died, and I believe any people or organizations concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in the world should be very interested in what YouTube just did.

One of the more maddening aspects of the experience has been the realization that a tremendous number of people, especially people over the age of 40 or so, don't really seem to understand why having one's music wiped from YouTube Music or their YouTube Channel deleted is a big deal.

The suggestions people helpfully offer tend to confirm this.  The most common one involves recommendations of other platforms that host videos.

The concerns people express also reflect this.  The most common one is around the assumption that I must have lost a lot of content that I had stored there and nowhere else.

I wonder if when Orson Welles was blacklisted from working in Hollywood, people offered him the use of their sheds to store his film reels, as if being blacklisted were somehow a storage issue?

It's good to be positive and look for alternatives, but this stuff can get pretty weird.

I get the impression that most people over 40 aren't really aware that so much of what they see, read, watch, etc., is controlled by corporate algorithms.

What people once thought they understood about the various platforms has long ago stopped being true.

When you're scrolling on any of the major platforms, very much including YouTube, you're seeing what the corporate algorithms want you to see, that they think will keep your eyes glued to the screen.  You are not seeing whatever your friends posted most recently.  That stopped being the case over a decade ago on the platforms most of these folks are using, like Facebook.

These algorithms are such a curse to all of us in so many ways.  They distort how we perceive reality and seem to be turning us all into assholes.  They're also crucial to the lives and livelihoods of musicians and other content creators, whether we like it or hate it.

I'm not famous like Kneecap or Bob Vylan or Roger Waters, and my disappearance from the internet will not apparently garner the kind of media attention that attacks on them have generated.  But after twenty years on YouTube, a certain handful of videos of me singing a certain handful of songs have managed to get hundreds of thousands of views.

Once a video gets views in that sort of number, it tends to get into the recommendation algorithms.  This means when someone is into Irish rebel music and they're listening to the Clancy Brothers or the Irish Brigade, there's a good chance my song, "the St. Patrick Battalion," will eventually come up in YouTube's recommendation algorithm.

These algorithms are how so many people today discover new music, new videos, the next thing to watch or read or listen to on whatever platform or device.

And if you're looking for a video, not only are these algorithms going to determine most of what you're probably going to end up watching, but the place you're going to do that is likely going to be either YouTube or Tiktok.  If you're looking for music, the platform you're most likely going to be doing that on is Spotify, or secondarily YouTube Music.  If you're looking for an event of some kind, the first place many people are likely to search is on the Events tab on Facebook.  If you need a ride and you're not sure where to find one, the first place you're likely to look is on the Uber app on your phone.

These corporations have all succeeded in becoming, functionally, monopolies.  The music is on Spotify, the videos are on YouTube.  These platforms are places where millions of people basically live.  If music or videos listeners or viewers might like are not coming up, they don't exist.

So many people don't go to websites and intentionally do things like look for an artist that has never come up for them on the platforms they use, just like so many people don't bother looking beyond Amazon for a product they might be looking to buy.

Alternatives exist, but most people are watching videos on YouTube and listening to music on Spotify.  Those are the platforms on which they are creating and sharing playlists.  The platforms serve the online function of being like the collective living room, the place where people gather, just as Facebook and Instagram are so often the places people feel very dependent on for keeping up on what's happening with their friends, family, and even local, physical communities.

So, in case it's not abundantly obvious where this is all leading up to, having your YouTube Channel deleted is a form of disappearance, it is akin to blacklisting.  What is all the more outrageous is the blanket nature of the action.  It is not a complaint about a specific piece of art, but about the existence of the artist online.

Some of the impact is easily measured numerically.  Many thousands of songs that would otherwise have come up as the next track for people exploring YouTube or YouTube Music each month will no longer come up.  Many thousands of people each month who would have discovered my music for the first time will no longer do so.  Not on YouTube, or YouTube Music (YouTube's music streaming platform).

I'm not allowed to start a new channel without thoroughly disguising my identity, but even if I could do that, it would not get my music back into the recommendation algorithms anytime soon.

Other people are still able to put up videos of me, but other people putting up videos of me doesn't help people see where my next show is.

One or the main ways many people find out if an artist they like is coming to their area is through a tab on YouTube that viewers can see, if the artist they're listening to has that going on, which the vast majority of serious working artists alive today.  The existence of this tab, however, requires that the artist first has a channel.

Being that Facebook is also a monopoly in the same way YouTube is, it is notable that I am prevented from using the "invite" feature on Events.  Being able to invite people to Events is the most useful thing anyone can do on Facebook, and this feature is permanently disabled for me, as far as I can tell.  This is also a very real and very damaging form of blacklisting.

If an artist is blacklisted, but the media never paid attention to them in the first place, were they really blacklisted?

The thing that has been different about the internet, and even "walled garden" corporate platforms like YouTube or Spotify, is artists who had had no success with corporate radio airplay or appearing on TV shows or in movies could now put their stuff out there on platforms where the existence of their audience engaging with their content on these platforms could propel their art or music further, so more people could hear it, because of the dominance of recommendation algorithms.

Despite never getting corporate airplay or promotion or putting out fancy corporate-sponsored music videos, doing music that would just never be touched with a long pole by corporate labels in the first place, I had gotten to the point on YouTube, just as with Spotify, where my songs were altogether being streamed a million times in a given year.

While really famous artists are getting a million streams a day, no doubt, the disappearance of an artist like me, and the loss of those million streams to the public consciousness, should be very worrying to people other than me.

I don't want anyone to ask me what I'm going to do next.  This is akin to asking the canary what should be done about the coal mine.  I want to hear about what other people -- and organizations like the ACLU, the EFF, and others -- are going to do next.

Of Babies, Bathwater, and AI

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about AI to me, and in general.  Here I make a bit of effort to distinguish the baby from the bathwater.

There's a lot going on in the world, some of which I write about quite a bit, including in the form of lots of songs.  One of the things going on in the world that occupies my attention regularly aside from the actual events happening that I'm writing about is the method of communication I'm using much of the time in recent months to write about those events -- AI-driven music-generation platforms. 

This is not the best time in history to engage in nuanced discussion of pretty much anything.  It's an age where people with strong opinions put them out there in order to make money on creating viral ragebait.  An age where it's easier than ever to leave a snarky comment most anywhere you want to, without having to bother with herculean and arcane maneuvers like stuffing an envelope and putting a stamp on it.

But it is clear that there are a lot of people thinking about what to think and how to feel about AI.  I'm much more distracted with the possibility of World War 3 starting any minute now, but according to a lot of comments I get on the various platforms, while lots of people are enjoying my recent Ai Tsuno albums, people also express various concerns about AI in general, and using it to make music.

In support of the idea of nuanced thought, I thought I'd try to contribute to this discussion by looking at the various critiques of the technology that people often talk about, with some examination of each one.  I'll explore the following common themes, which we could divide up between:  AI slop, energy/water use, jobs, the Wall-E effect, theft, Big Tech is bad, the future of humanity.

You're making AI slop.  Why are you doing this?

I've noticed that the people telling me I'm making AI slop are not actually the ones listening to the songs.  They're referring to it as AI slop in principle, because AI is involved with the creation process.

The reason pretty much no one calls it slop who actually listens to it -- not to AI-assisted music in general, but specifically to the music I have made with Ai Tsuno -- is because it's clearly not slop, it's great music, with catchy hooks and melodies, inventive use of different sorts of styles, instruments, and cross-pollinations between various styles and instruments, and the production values are amazing.  That is, the clarity of the sound, how good it all sounds through big speakers or small ones, and things like that.

In short, I'm doing it because it's not slop, it's real music, and really good music.  The reason it's really good has a whole lot to do with my input -- it's a very collaborative process.  There's lots of stuff we can certainly call AI slop out there, being produced by all kinds of people who aren't yet very good at what they're trying to do.  You'll find exactly the same phenomenon among the realm of human musicians -- a lot of them are not very good.

AI requires all these data centers and they use a lot of energy and water.

This is true.  Also, if you drive a car you burn gas.  I have rarely if ever had someone tell me I should stop doing concert tours because of that.

When we're talking about energy use, this only makes sense if we're comparing it to something.  The amount of savings in unnecessary use of energy and creation of pollution represented by the transition to digital streaming would probably be hard to overstate.  The amount of plastic involved with the production of all those vinyl records and CDs, and plastic packaging they usually came with, along with shrink wrap, is staggering.  The amount of energy involved with doing a run of 1,000 CDs is thousands of times greater than the amount of energy involved with creating an album's worth of songs on Suno and distributing the album on music streaming platforms.

If you're recording an album in a music studio with a bunch of musicians, and you factor in the carbon footprint involved with them getting from their homes to the studio and back every day for a couple of weeks, once again, the energy and water use involved makes using AI music-generation platforms look very ecological.  The argument is probably one of the more bizarre ones I regularly encounter, because of the lack of the "compared to what" element in it.

Working with my AI band, putting in hours on a typical day for the past six months or so, I have produced more songs in top-quality recorded form than would otherwise be possible by any other means that I know of.  I'm not creating mindless content here, but real art.  If I burned a few gallons of gas in order to do that, I'm sorry they don't run their data centers on solar and wind like they all should and could, but I don't control that, unfortunately.

AI is going to take away everyone's jobs.

I think this is very true, and very disastrous, in so many different ways.  It's also very true in the realm of music.  Who is going to hire a chorus to record harmonies in a studio anymore?  Or anything else like that.  It's all going to become less and less common, and this is a very sad thing.

It's also going to happen regardless of whether some of us boycott new technologies that are not going anywhere.  We can dream about the days before automation of all kinds, but it's overwhelmingly obvious to a lot of people that this genie is not going back into the bottle, any more than technologies like the internet, TV, radio, or the printing press is going to go away.

People using AI to do various things are not the ones deciding that this is now how the world is operating.  Because we use this technology, we are not therefore then equally responsible for the job losses that will result.  To think this way is to have no understanding of how society under the rule of the billionaires, society under capitalism, actually works.  Capitalism needs to change, but it won't change depending on our lifestyle choices, like whether we use AI platforms, drive cars, or eat meat.  The changes required are structural in nature.

If we use AI like this we'll all forget how to play instruments and become like the people in Wall-E.

I think this is exactly what is going to happen to a lot of people.  Learning to play an instrument in the age of AI music generation will probably become more and more of an unusual thing to do.  I hope to avoid that happening to me.  I'm sad that it will probably happen to a lot of people, though, and sad that there will probably be fewer and fewer people making music with each other, just as there are already fewer and fewer people talking with each other, who aren't otherwise occupied with online activities, or getting therapy from their AI companions.  There are so many down sides to this and other technologies, but some of us not using them won't make them go away.

All of these AI platforms were trained on pirated material, for which the authors or composers or performers have not been consulted or compensated.

This is very true.  All of us content creators from throughout history have been robbed by Big Tech, and now we have these amazing tools to use, for which no one receives credit but the thieving corporations that trawled the internet for everything in it.

Like many other people, I hope humanity persists long enough for us to arrive at some way for everyone to at least be able to live comfortable lives, even though most of our jobs will have been replaced by AI that was created based on what they call piracy of intellectual property.

But until then, and after then, this technology now exists.  The platforms that are "ethically trained" are amazing, too.  The genie is out of the bottle.  No matter how these platforms are going to be run, there's no way they are going to compensate for the loss of the music industry jobs involved with Suno being able to do the things it can do.

Society has to find solutions to these very deep, society-wide problems, in terms of how to adapt to the new world of AI.  Those of us trying to avoid AI technology will in a few years be as anachronistic as the folks who didn't own a television by 1970 or so.  They were happier, overall, I'm sure.  More productive than many of their TV-owning neighbors, and probably less brainwashed.  But their choice not to own a TV didn't change society any more than those of us avoiding AI today are changing society.

These Big Tech corporations are so unbelievably rich, and out to rule the world.

It's so true, and so alarming.  But it is already and will become increasingly the case that avoiding AI technology is akin to trying to be a bicycle enthusiast in a country with no bike lanes and lots of highways, sports utility vehicles, and sprawling suburbs.  Some people will manage to do everything on a bicycle under such circumstances, but very, very few.

This is, again, a systemic problem.  Like other massively impactful technologies, AI is a double-edged sword.  It can do many amazing things, including making music, but also lots of other, destructive things which we've all heard lots of news stories about.  Other technologies that transformed society and were largely very destructive to it, also had uses that were impossible to avoid trying to engage with.

For example, if everyone is going to have a TV anyway, then those of us trying to communicate about important issues want to use that medium to reach people.  Same with radio, the internet, the printing press, etc.

When Artificial General Intelligence arrives, maybe AI will destroy humanity.

A lot of very smart people think this is the case, or they give it a 10% chance of happening.  That's very alarming to me, as it is for many others.  I wish I could make it all go away, and make all the corporations pouring trillions into developing the technology disappear.  But what I do as an individual with the technology will do very little to influence its development either way.  We can use it or not use it, but AGI is either coming or its not, and it'll destroy humanity or it won't.

I hope people who care can find a way to have agency in this whole question, but we won't do that by making individual lifestyle choices about trying to avoid the use of chatbots, any more than we will prevent the clearcutting of the Amazon by becoming vegans.  This kind of thinking was delivered to us by the capitalists themselves, because they know very well that that's not actually how the world works, under capitalism.

For the podcast version of this essay, I'll close with some songs I wrote with Ai Tsuno on the very subject this essay is about -- AI.  I hope you enjoy them.