The notion that conservatism is “the new punk rock” has been a common trope of the President Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorized safety and sensitivity, members of the new right reveled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech.
This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don’t like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth.
Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump’s orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolized “overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said.” This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled “Heil Hitler.”
Increasingly, however, it’s the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in the Gaza Strip and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain’s Glastonbury music festival this past weekend. The act’s singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of “Death, death to the IDF,” the Israel Defense Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticized Bob Vylan for “appalling hate speech,” and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members’ visas.
The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticized it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of “Free, free Palestine” and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their U.S. visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He has said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn’t know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap’s appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offenses.
Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. “What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. “The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul searching among British society,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It’s hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage.
I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They’ve witnessed Jews being attacked, demonized and ostracized in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas.
But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it’s not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverization of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel’s war in Gaza looks like to them.
Many of these people feel helpless watching a war that has created, as of January, the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world. On social media, they’re seeing desperate Palestinians address them directly from the rubble. Some followed the teenage TikTok star Medo Halimy, who once went to high school in Texas and who made viral videos about his “tent life” before being killed in an Israeli airstrike. Maybe they’ve seen video of a sobbing, starving child eating sand. Hirsi Ali blames social media for creating a cultural movement against Israel: “The algorithm is the accelerant,” she wrote. She’s not entirely wrong, but she fails to consider Israel’s role in creating the content feeding that algorithm.
I’ve heard Israelis and their partisans mock pro-Palestinian activists as ignorant of the region’s history and geography. But many of these activists have developed an intimate familiarity with the intolerable misery of life in Gaza right now, a level of human suffering that Israel’s defenders too often wave away. And they know how regularly attempts to protest this suffering, or even merely describe it, are dismissed as antisemitic incitement.
In a deeply disturbing article recently, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that IDF soldiers have shot hungry Gaza residents as they rush toward aid distribution sites. Some soldiers apparently call these shootings “Operation Salted Fish,” after the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in his limitless cynicism, accused Haaretz of propagating an antisemitic “blood libel.”
An Israeli state that behaves this way is going to be reviled for reasons that have nothing to do with antisemitism. Clumsy attempts by Israel and its allies to stamp out this revulsion by throwing around accusations of bigotry only lend it the frisson of forbidden truth. That doesn’t justify the provocations of Bob Vylan or Kneecap; they meant to offend, and they did. Sometimes, however, radicalization is born in the gap between what people feel and what they feel they can say.
