Unhealthy Bunny is the newest entertainer to endure a conservative backlash in the USA. This previous weekend the 2026 Superbowl headliner mocked MAGA critics whereas internet hosting “Saturday Evening Reside.”
In the meantime, final month, ABC briefly suspended late-night speak present host Jimmy Kimmel after political strain. Federal Communications Fee Chairman Brendan Carr had despatched a threatening message in response to a comment that Kimmel had made about U.S. President Donald Trump’s response to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Supporters criticized the community, and a few participated in a boycott of Disney, ABC’s guardian firm. Excessive-powered colleagues on different exhibits, together with Stephen Colbert, whose personal present was canceled by CBS this 12 months in related circumstances, stood earlier than the cameras to defend Kimmel. When Kimmel returned to the airwaves the next week, he didn’t again down. After first apologizing for any phrases which may have offended, he stood agency on the significance of defending well-liked tradition from authorities intimidation. “This present shouldn’t be necessary,” Kimmel informed his viewers on Sept. 23. “What’s necessary is that we get to reside in a rustic that permits us to have a present like this.”
Sadly, well-liked entertainers have been prime targets for U.S. authorities officers who didn’t like their views earlier than. Throughout the second Pink Scare within the Fifties, actors, producers, writers, and singers had been singled out by conservative anti-Communist politicians wanting to make an instance of them by high-profile investigations. By attacking folks with massive audiences, the precise might ship a chilling message: Anybody on the left, no matter fame or fortune, risked having their lives destroyed by mere accusations of Communist ties. As Clay Risen argues in his guide Pink Scare, the battle was as a lot a tradition warfare because it was about politics—a knock-down, drag-out battle over the character of the USA.
Pete Seeger was among the many entertainers who refused to buckle to political strain. Although their industrial careers typically suffered, he and his allies grew to become heroes of the Nineteen Sixties counterculture and enduring symbols of free speech. Their battle nonetheless resonates immediately, as many in 2025 are taking vital dangers to problem a U.S. administration intent on eroding the nation’s most cherished rights. Seeger and his story stay an inspiring chapter within the ongoing wrestle to defend the First Modification.
By the point he was known as earlier than the Home Un-American Actions Committee (HUAC) in August 1955, Seeger had achieved appreciable fame each within the musical world and on the left. Born in New York Metropolis in 1919, the banjo-playing Seeger had devoted himself to the rising folks music scene within the Thirties and ’40s. Launched to the music of Woody Guthrie and Huddie “Lead Stomach” Ledbetter by his father, Charles Seeger Jr., an ethnomusicologist, he grew to become one in every of folks’s most revered figures because the style gained a maintain in coffeehouses and small live performance venues. Within the late Forties, Seeger discovered industrial success together with his band the Weavers, scoring a No. 1 Billboard hit in 1950 with their rendition of the Lead Stomach folks ballad “Goodnight, Irene.” Their model of Guthrie’s “So Lengthy, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” hit No. 4 in 1951, and the band offered some 4 million data throughout this time. “If I Had a Hammer” was a labor anthem: “It’s the hammer of justice. It’s the bell of freedom.” The followers cherished seeing Seeger carry out reside. “He was a passionate particular person,” Weavers bandmate Ronnie Gilbert recalled after his loss of life in 2014, “and that was what folks noticed. Folks absorbed his ardour and his beliefs.”
Like many entertainers of the period, Seeger was extraordinarily lively in left-wing causes. He joined the Communist Social gathering USA in 1942, in the course of the years of the Common Entrance, when a wide-ranging community of progressive teams championed labor, civil rights, small farmers, and different marginalized teams. Later within the decade, Seeger left when he realized of the horrendous nature of Joseph Stalin. As a part of the Almanac Singers’ repertory, he introduced anti-fascist and pro-union songs to sizable nationwide radio audiences throughout World Conflict II. He additionally campaigned for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Social gathering candidacy in 1948. Seeger made no secret of his political affiliations. Certainly, he was proud by music to face by the hard-working, frequent American. Seeger, who served throughout World Conflict II in a U.S. Military unit of performing artists, fashioned Folks’s Songs after the warfare, a corporation that collected and distributed political songs.
By the early Fifties, Seeger had develop into a goal of the right-wing forces sweeping the nation. In June 1950, the conservative broadside “Pink Channels” accused Seeger of being a Communist, although he had left the celebration by then. The FBI leaked information to reporters about his activism. The Weavers had been blacklisted from radio stations and live performance venues as house owners concluded that their reputation was much less priceless than the potential value of internet hosting them. Unable to earn an honest residing and underneath relentless political strain, the band broke aside.
On Aug. 18, 1955, the HUAC subpoenaed Seeger to testify. By then, the committee was notorious for its anti-Communist investigations. In 1947, the Hollywood Ten, a bunch of writers and administrators accused of Communist ties, had been jailed and blacklisted. Touring the county to generate headlines, HUAC held the listening to that included Seeger within the U.S. federal courthouse in New York’s Foley Sq.. The committee went proper to work, probing his well-known left-wing actions and the lyrics of his music.
Seeger, who was carrying a tweed jacket and yellow tie, refused to bend the knee. Not like the Hollywood Ten, he didn’t invoke any modification. As a substitute, he argued that the committee had no proper to even ask the questions it did. “I really feel these questions are improper, sir, and I really feel they’re immoral to ask any American this type of query,” Seeger informed HUAC Chair Francis Walter, evaluating the scenario to Jesus Christ being questioned by Pontius Pilate. Seeger defended his personal proper, and that of each American, to help any worldview he discovered compelling.
Nor would he title names. When the committee pressed him about whether or not he had performed the track “Wasn’t {That a} Time?” to a politically controversial group in New York, Seeger wouldn’t entertain the query however did supply to play it within the listening to room. In his feedback, Seeger refused to cede patriotism to his interrogators. “I really feel that in my entire life I’ve by no means performed something of any conspiratorial nature, and I resent very a lot and really deeply the implication of being known as earlier than this committee,” he informed Walter, “that in a roundabout way as a result of my opinions could also be totally different from yours … that I’m any much less of an American than anyone else. I really like my nation very deeply, sir.”
In 1956, the Home of Representatives voted to carry Seeger in contempt of Congress. In March 1957, a federal grand jury indicted him on 10 counts, one for every query he didn’t reply. It took 4 years for the case to come back to trial. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, based in 1920 to guard free speech after the primary Pink Scare, Seeger confronted conviction. In March 1961, at age 42, he was discovered responsible and sentenced to 10 sequential one-year jail phrases. Shortly earlier than the sentencing, he had performed music for reporters at a press convention, after which he defined: “I’ve sung for Individuals of all political persuasions, for hobo jungles and the Rockefellers. … I’m proud I can carry good songs to the folks. I’m a catalyst chopping throughout strains.” A 12 months later, the U.S. Court docket of Appeals overturned the conviction on a technicality. His sentence was vacated.
Although Seeger’s industrial profession by no means absolutely recovered, his principled stand earned deep admiration all through the music group. His journal Sing Out! was a go-to publication for the folks motion. Bands resembling Peter, Paul and Mary coated his songs, and he was a co-founder of the Newport People Competition. When ABC barred him from showing on the folks music present Hootenanny as a result of he refused to signal a loyalty oath, quite a few performers, together with Bob Dylan, boycotted this system in solidarity. In 1965, Seeger was requested about having been blacklisted after the HUAC listening to, saying of the committee: “This group of individuals are really … in my view, a bunch of American fascists. Their thought of America is an America the place all people agrees with them.”
Recording for the smaller Folkways Data label whereas instructing in colleges in addition to performing in union halls, excessive colleges, and on faculty campuses, Seeger emerged as a extremely revered determine within the civil rights motion. In September 1957, he performed “We Shall Overcome” at a folks faculty in Tennessee with Martin Luther King Jr. in attendance. Throughout Freedom Summer time in 1964, he carried out for Black audiences and white scholar activists in Mississippi.
Solely within the late Nineteen Sixties, because the nation grew extra disillusioned with the established order, did the mainstream media start to welcome Seeger again. Whereas they’d modified, he had not. In September 1967, CBS executives eliminated his efficiency from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour after he sang “Waist Deep within the Massive Muddy,” with its line “And the large idiot stated to push on,” which was vital of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and the warfare in Vietnam. Seeger had written the track after seeing an image of U.S. troopers trudging by a river within the Mekong Delta. The showrunners had assured govt William Paley, who had acquired direct complaints from Johnson about earlier skits that had mocked him, that there can be no political content material within the music. Tom and Dick Smothers had been livid concerning the censorship and complained about what occurred. When the Smothers Brothers welcomed him again on Feb. 25, 1968, the community fits allowed them to air Seeger singing “Waist Deep.” Some 13.5 million households watched. By then, Seeger had develop into an important musical voice within the burgeoning anti-war motion.
Over time, his braveness grew to become the stuff of legend. In 1994, Seeger acquired a Nationwide Medal of Arts from U.S. President Invoice Clinton and a Kennedy Middle Honor. When Barack Obama was inaugurated as U.S. president in 2009, Seeger carried out Guthrie’s basic “This Land Is Your Land” alongside Bruce Springsteen. Seeger died on Jan. 27, 2014, at 94. In a tribute, Obama stated: “Over time, Pete used his voice—and his hammer—to strike blows for employee’s rights and civil rights, world peace, and environmental conservation. And he at all times invited us to sing alongside. For reminding us the place we come from and displaying us the place we have to go, we are going to at all times be grateful to Pete Seeger.” In 2024, Edward Norton portrayed him within the Dylan biopic A Full Unknown.
Seeger stays a testomony to what well-liked entertainers can obtain in harmful instances. With their huge platforms, every act of defiance in opposition to overreach, abuse, or oppressive authorities motion delivers a strong symbolic blow for civil liberties. Musicians and different performers who stand their floor and defend their rules, even at the price of their careers, give numerous Individuals the braveness to do the identical. The inspiring collective energy of claiming no lies on the coronary heart of each profitable countermobilization in opposition to strong-armed governments.
Seeger’s legacy nonetheless looms massive. Within the months forward, political threats is not going to disappear. Trump is barely ramping up his marketing campaign in opposition to all political opponents. Nor will the facility of each entertainer who attracts a line within the sand, whatever the private value.
