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30 June 2025 (New York, NY) - - My, my, my. Glastonbury ended up being surprisingly relevant this year thanks to the folks over at the BBC not understanding how the Streisand effect works.
During the livestream for the Belfast-based rap group Kneecap, the broadcaster cut away right as the group was leading the crowd through chants of “Free Palestine” and “fuck Keir Starmer,” the latter a reference to the UK’s prime minister telling British media earlier this month that the group wasn’t “appropriate” for the festival.
Except the BBC editors were less quick on the trigger for other acts, however, and accidentally aired rap group Bob Vylan leading a crowd chant of, “Death, death to the IDF.” Very typical BBC self-own. In a press release the BBC said:
“We have edited it to ensure the content falls within the limits of artistic expression in line with our editorial guidelines. As we have said before, acts are booked by the festival, and the BBC doesn’t ban artists. We didn't stream Kneecap live".
And an edited version of Kneecap’s set is currently up on the BBC’s iPlayer.
Bob Vylan’s set, however, is not on iPlayer. The group has been dropped by United Talent Agency and had their U.S. visas pulled (they had a string of U.S. concerts starting next month).
And, according to the ... uh ... BBC, the Glastonbury’s organizers were “appalled” by the crowd chants during Bob Vylan’s performance. Starmer and a whole bunch of UK politicians have called both Kneecap’s and Bob Vylan’s sets “hate speech.” Chris Philp, the UK’s shadow home secretary, posted on X that Bob Vylan was inciting violence and that the BBC broke the law by airing it.
Tough talk from a guy who has the word “shadow” in his title.
Anyway, the true hero of Glastonbury turns out to be “Helen from Wales,” a woman named Helen Wilson from Swansea, who held her phone up in the crowd for over an hour to livestream Kneecap after the BBC cut the feed. She told The Irish News that she kept streaming even as her phone started overheating and literally burning her fingers, to fight against the BBC’s “deliberate act of silence".
Her stream got over a million likes and Kneecap have offered her free tickets to their shows. There’s also fan art (see the graphic above opening this post).
MAGA-Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who is very *smart* and *self-aware*, and never misses a political opportunity, shared a video of Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury set and posted it across social media with this sentence:
“This is the base of the Democrat Party”.
After being made aware that the music festival was not in the U.S. and that Glastonbury is actually in the UK and, thus, most likely did not have a lot of registered Democrats in the audience, he amended his posts to say:
“Getting lots of comments saying this is actually happening in England. True".
Great stuff as always, Ted. Thank you.
If you’re looking for context for the BBC’s stance on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, it’s pretty similar to how The New York Times here in the U.S. is criticized for being pro-Israel, with the added dimension that the BBC is tax-payer funded and the UK doesn’t have the first amendment.
Kneecap member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was charged with promoting terrorism, after UK Met Police investigated videos of Kneecap chanting "up Hamas, up Hezbollah" on stage in 2024. So it’s not exactly far-fetched to say that there’s a legally-enforced government line on the conflict being parroted back by the media. And the UK press has gone full attack mode on Kneecap, Bob Vylan ... and even poor Helen.
Outlets like The Daily Mail and The Sun are flooding the web with outraged articles about Glastonbury, demanding Kneecap and Bob Vylan be arrested, and a bunch of right-wing influencers associated with outlets like GB News are calling Helen a race traitor.
What is not being reflected in a lot of the media reports from this weekend, however, is how these incidents were not just rappers criticizing Israel on stage, but huge crowds, at what is easily the most mainstream music festival in the UK, possibly even the world, chanting along with them. Said two people on Twitter:
“Hey! Whatever you make of this and wherever it may be going, I think we have to agree on one simple fact: the toothpaste is fully out of the tube here”.
“There is no partisan or cultural counterweight for hundreds of millions of people seeing thousands of the worst images they’ve ever seen, and then hearing almost every prominent figure in Western politics say "this is fake, and I love it".
In other words, sentiment has shifted. And, in this case, the mainstream media is literally refusing to document the absolute horror happening in Gaza and Palestine: torched bodies, headless children, destroyed hospitals, and things like today's attack that once again killed scores of journalists.
And of course that’s not working because we all have phones now. Phones through which to view the conflict in Palestine and phones through which to view the protests against it that are very clearly gaining steam around the world, and the unmitigated horror and genocide. Here at Luminative Media, we can access 75+ verified streams to see the real world going on in Gaza, Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen ... etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
Yes, let's get more outraged by a bloke saying stupid things at Glastonbury than by the carnage in Gaza itself.
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