Ed Sheeran broke down on stage in Philadelphia this weekend, days after firing opening act Macklemore from his tour. The move followed a threat from New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who told Sheeran the rapper would not be welcome at Gillette Stadium if he stayed on the bill—and that other venue owners stood with him. That’s the sequence of events as laid out by American Thinker columnist J.R. Dunn, who uses the episode to argue something larger about the wave of anti-Zionism washing through music and entertainment.
According to Dunn, Macklemore had delivered an anti-Semitic rant at an earlier show. Sheeran initially kept him on the tour anyway. Then Kraft—who is Jewish and runs both the Patriots and Gillette Stadium—made the call: either Macklemore goes or Sheeran does not play. Kraft reportedly added that he was in touch with a number of other venue owners, all of whom agreed. With no real choice left, Sheeran folded and fired Macklemore—something Dunn says he should have done in the first place.
Dunn is an opinion writer, and he does not pretend otherwise. His column is less a report on the music business than an argument about what anti-Israel politics actually amounts to—and who is really behind it.
His first claim is about target selection. Israel, he writes, is the world’s only Jewish state, revived after nearly two thousand years as an explicit response to the Holocaust—a guarantee that Jews would never again be defenseless. Any attack on that state, by extension, is an attack on the Jewish people as a whole. Macklemore, Dunn concedes, may not have called for the annihilation of Jews, repeated the blood libel, or invoked death camps. But all of that, Dunn argues, is implicit in whatever he did say.
The second claim is stranger, and is the engine of the whole piece. It brings in Hermann Göring.
Dunn describes the Luftwaffe commander as Hitler’s right-hand man and a convinced Nazi—but not, in his telling, an anti-Semite. Göring employed a number of Jews in his organizations, most notably Erhard Milch, chief of research for the Luftwaffe. When Heinrich Himmler informed Göring that he was sending Milch to the camps, Göring defied him: “I decide who is a Jew here.”
Does that make Göring a good man? Dunn’s answer is an immediate no. He argues Göring was something worse than an anti-Semite: someone who used anti-Semitism as a career instrument. Göring went along to get along, posing as a Jew-hater to impress Hitler and fit in with the other Nazis, all while ignoring the deportations, the camps, the torture, the murder, the genocide. Dunn notes exceptions like Albert Speer, but characterizes the rest of the Nazi leadership as “mental defectives to one degree or another, psychotics, psychopaths, and obsessives.” Göring, in his account, was not one of them. He had a choice, and he made it.
From Göring to the green room
That is the parallel Dunn wants readers to sit with. He contends that most of the “anti-Zionists” currently making the rounds in music and entertainment are likewise making a choice, not expressing a conviction. They know nothing, in his blunt phrasing, about Gaza, Palestine, or the Middle East as a whole. They do not know and they do not care. What they do care about, he writes, is their careers, fitting in, not being left behind, staying on top of the wave. If Jew-hatred is part of what makes you “the epitome of cool,” then—in Dunn’s words—they are fine with it.
They too have made their choice, he concludes. They will have to live with it.
Whether readers accept the Göring comparison or find it overheated, the practical question underneath it is a real one: when does deniability stop holding? Macklemore, on Dunn’s account, said whatever he said. Sheeran says he fired him. Kraft says he would have barred the doors. The venues say they agree. Each actor can claim the next one forced their hand.
Dunn closes on a different note entirely. He calls it a great thing that Kraft acted as he did, and that so many others offered to join him. One of the clearest signs of a truly revived America, he writes, will be when Jewish Americans can sit beside their vine and fig tree and be not afraid. Let it be so, he writes.
The column is signed with American Thinker’s standard appeal for reader support, framing the outlet’s work around free expression. But the substance stays where it started: on a stage in Philadelphia, and on the question of who was willing to say no.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/red-s-bad-week/