The Dropkick Murphys spent St. Patrick’s Day hosting three back-to-back shows at MGM Music Hall at Fenway Park in Boston. And in true Irish fashion, the weekend concluded with frontman Ken Casey slamming an attendee who spent the duration of Sunday’s concert holding up the all-black MAGA hat popularized by Elon Musk, which Casey called the “true Nazi edition.”
“If you’re in a room full of people and you want to know who’s in a cult, how do you know who’s in a cult?” Casey asked. “They’ve been holding up a fucking hat the whole night to represent a president.” His Celtic smack cam was only just getting started. “This is America, there’s no kings here,” he told the man. “Anyway, if you mind, sir, we’re gonna play a song about our grandparents and people who fought Nazis in the war and shit. So if you could just shut the fuck up for five minutes.”
When Dropkick Murphys performed in Clearwater, Florida earlier this month, a similarly charged exchange occurred between Casey and an attendee sporting Donald Trump merch. The frontman challenged someone wearing a MAGA hat and shirt combo to a bet about whether the items were made in the United States. “If you lose the bet, we switch shirts, OK? If you win the bet, I give you $100 and the shirt,” he said. Moments later, he declared: “It’s made in Nicaragua! He’s taking the shirt off. We’re taking crime off the streets.”
The band isn’t going out of its way to pick fights with people in their audience, but they also don’t want there to ever be a question about where they stand. “The reason we speak out, we don’t care if we lose fans, because when history is said and done, we want it known that the Dropkick Murphys stood with the people, we stood with the workers,” Casey said in Florida.
But their MAGA spars aren’t anything new. In 2022, Dropkick Murphys went viral after their appearance at the Great Allentown Fair in eastern Pennsylvania. “I felt like we were playing a MAGA flea market,” Casey told Rolling Stone at the time. “Every other table was selling the MAGA gear and the ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ gear and all this stuff. I was a little overwhelmed and befuddled. It was like I was dropped into another planet.”
Some people, who claimed to be fans of the Boston band known for their Irish-influenced punk rock and vocal support of workers’ rights, asked for pictures while wearing the same type of shirts. Casey promptly refused. “If you’re out there buying these fucking hats that these swindlers are selling… then you’re part of the problem!” he yelled on stage later that night. “Because you’re being duped by the greatest swindler in the history of the world… and a bunch of grifters and billionaires who don’t give a shit about you or your family!”
The band received death threats in response. Still, Casey wasn’t backing down. “Those people in power, the elite and the wealthy, are really just laughing at us. And no one in my opinion sums that up more than Donald Trump,” he told Rolling Stone. “Pretending that he would actually spend a second of his life with the average Make America Great Again supporter that comes to his rally? Not a chance. If he didn’t look at that person as someone he could scam five dollars out of, or a vote, he would literally taser that guy.”
