The Rise of the Anti-ICE Protest Song
He is also sitting in front of a screen. “Am I the only one willin’ to bleed / Or take a bullet for bein’ free / Screamin’ ‘What the fuck?’ at my TV?” Lewis bellows. This oscillation between rage at one’s own powerlessness and fantasies of violence is the song’s motive force. It could be said that conservative protest music is more likely than its progressive counterpart to call for something like armed revolt—perhaps most overtly in Forgiato Blow and JJ Lawhorn’s minorly viral 2025 song “Good vs Evil,” which takes “Try That in a Small Town” to its logical end point. “We need a big tall tree and a short piece of rope / Hang ’em up high at sundown,” Lawhorn sings over a beat suspiciously reminiscent of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” But these songs are also honest, sometimes despite themselves, about the feelings of impotence associated with watching history play out on a screen.
Then again, the protest song is right there in the fray with history, flashing across our screens, vying for our attention. Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” from 2023, a song about “livin’ in the new world / with an old soul” that gets sidetracked on a rant about welfare and snack cakes, became a surprise viral hit partially on the strength of its video, which finds Anthony playing the song live in the woods. It also owed some of its popularity to the efforts of right-wing commentators, including Matt Walsh and the former F.B.I. deputy director Dan Bongino, to brand the song as a MAGA anthem. It hardly mattered that Anthony described his own politics as “dead center,” or that the song’s inventory of complaints—the cost of living, human trafficking—could align with any number of political programs. The song was subsumed into online discourse, and it became something at once more banal and more pervasive than spectacle: it became content, another piece of digital flotsam eddying across the feed.
For progressives, the undisputed master of the viral protest song is the thirty-three-year-old folksinger Jesse Welles, who makes videos of himself standing in a field, singing clever miniature tunes about the hypocrisies of the health-care industry, tech billionaires, ICE. Welles, who was nominated for four Grammys in 2025, is a gifted lyricist, and his finest verses use cascades of slant rhymes to move subtly from specific finger-pointing to broader implication. One recent song takes aim at “outright white supremacists, or America First / I think they both sell merch / The whole place seems a little bit cursed / It’s like somebody might have been living here first.”
If Welles’s hyper-specific lyrics are his gift, they can also make his songs feel ephemeral. In “The Ballad of Big Balls,” from August, 2025, he sings, “Some days I forget that Cracker Barrels exist / But there ain’t no one forgetting about that list.” The assault of a former DOGE staffer, the fracas over the Cracker Barrel logo, the demands to release Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list”—this is hardly the stuff of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” let alone “Rich Men North of Richmond.” It is more like the “Today’s News” sidebar on X set to music, re-creating the vertiginous churn of posts—and then neutralizing the feeling in a mist of icy smugness. In this sense, Welles’s songs are far better suited to social media than to the stage, to say nothing of the ramparts. At one of his concerts last year, a member of the audience yelled during a song, “Why didn’t you film this one in the woods?”
Caught between nostalgia and numbing immersion in the feed, the protest song today seems to have lost some of its power to confront and mobilize. Even when it takes a bold stand—see “Hind’s Hall,” Macklemore’s admirably adversarial song in support of the Palestinian-solidarity movement on college campuses—it has a tendency to feel simply like more news, more commentary, more posts. “We see the lies in them / Claiming it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist,” Macklemore raps, the lyrics less an incitement than a summary.
