I was watching some footage from a rally in London last week, and it is wild how much the atmosphere has shifted in just the last few months. You have these performers who spent years building a brand on being untouchable provocateurs, and suddenly, the legal guardrails are actually starting to hold. Today's prompt from Daniel is about that exact friction point, specifically looking at the boundaries of free speech versus incitement to violence through the lens of figures like the band Kneecap, the musician Bob Vylan, and the comedian Tadhg Hickey.
It is the perfect moment to dig into this, Corn, because we are seeing a massive divergence in how different jurisdictions are handling this. We have the Metropolitan Police opening a new probe into Bob Vylan just a few days ago, on March sixteenth, while over in Ireland, the legislative landscape is essentially in a state of retreat after the two thousand twenty-four Hate Offences Act was gutted of its speech clauses. Herman Poppleberry here, by the way, and I have been deep in the legal weeds on this one.
You have been refreshing the Met Police press feed for three days, haven't you? I can see the tabs open from here. But it is interesting because for a long time, the defense for guys like Bob Vylan or the Kneecap trio was always, look, this is just art, it is performance, it is subversion. But when you move from a festival stage at Glastonbury to an Al Quds Day rally and you start leading chants for the death of a specific national military, the art defense starts to look a lot thinner.
The legal distinction hinges on the shift from offensive speech to incitement to violence. In the United Kingdom, they are looking closely at Section eighteen of the Public Order Act of nineteen eighty-six. That section covers words or behavior that are threatening, abusive, or insulting and intended to stir up racial hatred. The key change we are seeing in two thousand twenty-six is how the authorities are interpreting "intent" versus "likelihood." With Bob Vylan, the two thousand twenty-five investigation into his Glastonbury set was dropped because the Crown Prosecution Service felt it did not meet the criminal threshold for a public performance. But doing the same chant at a politically charged rally changes the context entirely.
Context is everything, but it feels like there is this "Zionist" proxy at play here that people use as a get out of jail free card. If you say "Death to Jews," you are in handcuffs in ten minutes. If you say "Death to the I D F" or "Death to Zionists," suddenly everyone starts debating the nuances of geopolitical critique. Daniel’s prompt really gets at this, how that proxy is used to mask what is, for all intents and purposes, a call for the destruction of a people.
That is where the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism becomes so important in these legal discussions. It explicitly points out that while criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, using symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism to characterize Israel or Israelis is. When Tadhg Hickey reacts to missile attacks on Tel Aviv with "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv," he is not critiquing a policy. He is celebrating the attempted mass murder of civilians. From a legal standpoint, the question is whether that celebration crosses into incitement.
Hickey is a fascinating case because he has essentially built an entire second career out of this. He was a comedian, but now he is more of a professional agitator. His Instagram ban in May of two thousand twenty-five was a huge moment because it showed that the platforms, at least, were starting to see through the "it is just a bit" defense. He had three hundred thousand followers, and he was using that reach to amplify rhetoric that the Times of Israel and others correctly identified as a dog whistle for incitement.
The "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv" post was a turning point. In the past, he might have argued it was satire or a comment on the cycle of violence, but when you are cheering for rockets hitting a major metropolitan center, the "satire" label loses its protection. What is striking is the contrast between his online persona and the reality of his detention during the Global Sumud Flotilla mission in October of two thousand twenty-five. He complained about being denied legal counsel and drinking toilet water, trying to frame himself as a human rights martyr, but the underlying reason for his detention was the direct connection between his rhetoric and the groups firing those rockets.
It is the "Righteousness Shield" we talked about back in episode one thousand twenty. There is this sense, especially in Ireland, that if you are on the "right side" of the post-colonial narrative, you can say almost anything. You can call for the destruction of a state, you can celebrate violence, and you are shielded by this perceived moral high ground. But the law is starting to catch up to the idea that the "Zionist" proxy does not actually grant you immunity from incitement laws.
Ireland is in a very strange place legally right now. The Criminal Justice Hate Offences Act of two thousand twenty-four was supposed to be this landmark piece of legislation. It was enacted on December thirty-first of two thousand twenty-four, but at the eleventh hour, Minister Helen McEntee dropped the "incitement to hatred" sections. There was a massive public backlash, mostly from people worried about free speech and the "right to offend." So now, Ireland has a law for hate crimes, like aggravated assault, but for speech, they are still relying on the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act of nineteen eighty-nine.
Which is a pretty weak tool, isn't it? I mean, nineteen eighty-nine was a different world. We did not have social media algorithms amplifying this stuff to millions of people in seconds. Does the nineteen eighty-nine Act even have the teeth to handle someone like Hickey or the guys from Kneecap?
It requires proving that the speech was intended to, or likely to, "stir up" hatred. The threshold for "likely to" is notoriously difficult to meet in Irish courts. This is why the Council of Europe has been putting so much pressure on Ireland lately to reintroduce those speech restrictions. They see Ireland as a bit of a legal vacuum where this kind of rhetoric can flourish without much consequence.
Let's talk about Kneecap for a second, because their trajectory is wild. They win this High Court case in November of two thousand twenty-four against Kemi Badenoch. She had blocked a fourteen thousand two hundred fifty pound grant for them because of their political views, and the court says, no, you cannot do that, that is an unlawful block. They look like the ultimate free speech heroes. But then, six months later, in May of two thousand twenty-five, one of their members, Liam Og O Hannaidh, gets hit with a UK terrorism charge for displaying a Hezbollah flag. That is a massive jump from "edgy rap lyrics" to "displaying the symbols of a proscribed terrorist organization."
That is the crucial distinction. The UK Terrorism Act of two thousand-year has these "glorification" clauses. It is not just about direct incitement to a specific act of violence; it is about the support and promotion of groups that the state has deemed terrorist organizations. When you wave a Hezbollah flag, you are not engaging in a debate about Middle Eastern policy. You are signaling support for an entity whose charter is built on the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. The UK threshold for prosecution there is much lower than the "clear and present danger" test you see in the United States.
It feels like the Kneecap guys thought they could play the same game in London that they play in Belfast. In Belfast, the republican imagery is part of the local furniture, for better or worse. But when you take that act to a global stage and start incorporating flags from groups that are actively involved in regional conflicts, you are stepping out of the "artistic expression" zone and into the "national security" zone.
And the UK authorities are clearly losing patience. The fact that the Met Police reopened the Bob Vylan probe is a signal. They are looking at the Public Order Act and saying, look, if you are on a stage and you lead a crowd of thousands in a chant for the death of a national military, you are creating a situation where violence is a foreseeable outcome. It is about the public order, the potential for immediate unrest.
But how do they prove intent there? Bob Vylan could just say, "I am a punk singer, I am being hyperbolic, I am expressing my anger at a military operation." Is that enough to beat a Section eighteen charge?
It is harder than it used to be. The courts are increasingly looking at the effect on the audience and the broader climate. If you are doing that chant in the middle of a period of high tension, with rising antisemitic incidents in London, the "it is just a punk show" defense starts to fall apart. The prosecution would argue that the intent was to stir up hatred against a protected group, in this case, Israelis or Jews by proxy.
This is what I find so interesting about the Tadhg Hickey situation too. He is very careful to always say "Zionist." He has this whole routine about it. But then he goes on social media and cheers when missiles are flying toward Tel Aviv. At that point, the "Zionist" label is just a thin layer of paint over a very old, very ugly sentiment. When you are celebrating the potential death of civilians in their homes, the political nuance is gone. You are just incited.
The platform bans are actually a more immediate check on this than the legal system. When Instagram permanently banned Hickey in May of two thousand twenty-five, it was because their internal moderation teams—which, to be fair, have their own issues—decided that his content violated their hate speech policies. They do not have to prove things "beyond a reasonable doubt" like a court does. They just have to see that he is repeatedly using his platform to dehumanize a group and celebrate violence against them.
It is funny how these guys always react to those bans, though. They immediately pivot to being "censored by the machine" or "silenced by the lobby." It becomes part of the act. Hickey’s detention in the flotilla was the ultimate version of that. He gets to go home and tell stories about "toilet water" and being a political prisoner, which just fuels more of the same rhetoric.
The "toilet water" claim is such a classic agitprop move. It is designed to be visceral and unprovable, to create a narrative of victimhood that justifies his previous vitriol. But if you look at the legal reality of that detention, he was part of a mission that was intentionally attempting to breach a legal naval blockade. Any country would detain individuals in that situation.
Let's go back to the legislative side for a minute. You mentioned that Ireland is being pressured to bring back the speech clauses. What would that actually look like? Are we talking about making it a crime to be "offensive," or is there a way to target this kind of "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv" rhetoric without catching everyone else in the net?
That is the million-dollar question. The original draft of the two thousand twenty-four Act had very broad language about "possessing material" that could incite hatred. That is what scared the free speech advocates. They were worried that having a controversial book or a meme on your phone could get you in trouble. If they reintroduce it, they will have to be much more specific about "public communication" and "clear intent to incite violence." The problem is that the more specific you make the law, the easier it is for people like Hickey or Bob Vylan to find the loopholes.
Right, they just get more creative with the dog whistles. Instead of saying "Death to X," they say "From the river to the sea" or they use the "Zionist" proxy. It becomes a game of linguistic whack-a-mole.
And that is why the UK is leaning more on the Terrorism Act for cases like Kneecap. You do not have to prove a complex linguistic intent if someone is literally holding the flag of a proscribed group. It is a binary. Is that the flag? Yes. Is that group proscribed? Yes. That is a crime. It is much cleaner than trying to parse the subtext of a rap lyric.
But even that has its limits. If Liam Og O Hannaidh says, "I was using the flag as a prop to critique the colonial history of the region," does a UK jury buy that? Or do they just see a guy supporting a group that kills civilians?
In the current climate, with the memory of the two thousand twenty-three and twenty-four attacks still very fresh, juries are much less likely to be sympathetic to the "it is just a prop" defense. There is a sense that the grace period for this kind of "edgy" support for extremist groups is over. People are tired of the double standards where some forms of incitement are treated as "art" while others are treated as crimes.
It feels like we are seeing the end of the "ironic" radical. For a long time, you could be a performer and play with this stuff—wear the gear, use the slogans—and everyone just rolled their eyes and called it a persona. But when the rhetoric starts translating into real-world harassment and a climate of fear for Jewish students in London or families in Dublin, the irony stops being funny.
The data on this is pretty stark. We have seen a sixty percent increase in antisemitic incidents in Ireland in the last year alone. When you have a public square filled with people like Tadhg Hickey telling three hundred thousand followers that missile attacks on Tel Aviv are a cause for celebration, you cannot be surprised when that translates into people being targeted on the street. The law is finally starting to recognize that speech does not exist in a vacuum.
So, if you are a listener trying to make sense of this, how do you draw the line? Where is the boundary between "I hate this government’s policy" and "I am inciting violence"?
The most useful framework is looking at the target and the call to action. If the target is a protected group—an ethnicity, a religion, a nationality—and the call to action is their destruction, their death, or the celebration of violence against them, you have moved past political critique. Political critique focuses on policy, on specific leaders, on legal frameworks. It does not call for "Death to the I D F" or cheer for "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv."
It seems simple when you put it that way, but the "Zionist" proxy is the smoke screen that makes it look complicated. If you can convince people that "Zionist" just means "someone I disagree with politically," then you can say anything you want about them. But the reality is that for the vast majority of the world's Jews, Zionism is a core part of their identity and their safety. When you target "Zionists" with calls for death, you are targeting Jews. The courts in the UK are starting to accept that reality. Ireland is still catching up.
Ireland’s hesitation comes from its own history. There is a deep-seated sympathy for any group that frames itself as an anti-colonial movement. This is why Kneecap gets so much traction there. They wrap their rhetoric in the Irish language and republican history, which makes it very hard for Irish politicians to criticize them without looking like they are "siding with the colonizer." It is a very effective rhetorical trap.
It is the "Righteousness Shield" again. If you can link your cause to the Great Hunger or the Easter Rising, you get a free pass on almost any level of vitriol. But it is a false equivalence. Supporting the destruction of a modern democratic state is not the same thing as wanting independence for Ireland.
And that false equivalence is what the two thousand twenty-four Hate Offences Act was originally trying to address before it was watered down. It was trying to say that your historical grievances do not give you a license to incite hatred against others in the present. The fact that those clauses were removed shows just how powerful that "Righteousness Shield" still is in Irish public life.
It is also a failure of the intellectual class in Ireland, frankly. You have academics and journalists who should know better, but they are so afraid of being called "Zionist shills" that they stay silent while someone like Hickey goes on these rants. They have ceded the ground to the loudest, most extreme voices.
This is where the Bob Vylan case in the UK is so important as a counterpoint. The Met Police are essentially saying, we do not care about your punk rock credentials or your anti-establishment brand. If you are breaking the Public Order Act, we are going to investigate you. It is a return to a more neutral application of the law, where your political identity doesn't grant you special privileges to incite violence.
Do you think the Bob Vylan probe actually leads to a conviction? Or is it just a shot across the bow?
It is hard to say. A Section eighteen conviction is a high bar. But even the investigation itself has consequences. It has already cost them festival slots and their US visas. It sends a message to other performers that there are real, tangible costs to this kind of rhetoric. The era of "anything goes as long as it is on a stage" is ending.
What about the Kneecap terrorism charge? That feels much more serious than a Public Order Act probe.
It is much more serious. A terrorism charge under the two thousand-year Act carries significant jail time. If they can prove that the Hezbollah flag was displayed as a sign of support for the organization, that is a felony-level offense. It would be a massive blow to the band’s career, but more importantly, it would set a clear legal precedent that "artistic expression" is not a defense for supporting proscribed terrorist groups.
It is a wild time to be watching this. We are seeing the limits of the twenty-first-century "provocateur" being tested in real-time. You can be edgy, you can be offensive, you can even be a bit of a jerk, but once you start playing with the imagery and rhetoric of mass violence, the state is going to step in.
And they should. The purpose of these laws is not to protect people's feelings; it is to prevent the breakdown of public order and the eruption of actual violence. When you see the direct correlation between this kind of rhetoric and the rise in hate crimes, it becomes clear that "just words" are never just words.
Especially when those words are being amplified by platforms that are designed to reward outrage. The "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv" post probably got more engagement for Hickey than any of his actual comedy routines ever did. The system is set up to incentivize the very thing that the law is trying to prevent.
That is the core of the problem. The digital economy rewards incitement. If you are a niche comedian like Hickey, the fastest way to grow your brand is to lean into the most extreme version of the "Righteousness Shield." You become the hero of a very specific, very angry tribe. The fact that it might incite someone to attack a Jewish community center in Dublin is just collateral damage to the brand.
It is a dark way of looking at it, but it is accurate. These guys are essentially arbitrageurs of hate. They find the gap between what is socially acceptable and what is legally punishable, and they live in that gap until the law moves the line.
And the line is moving. In the UK, it is moving through active prosecution and police probes. In Ireland, it is moving through a messy, public debate about what kind of country they want to be. Do they want to be a modern European state with standard protections against incitement, or do they want to remain a legal outlier where the "Righteousness Shield" allows for open calls for violence?
I think the pressure from the Council of Europe and the reality of the rising incident numbers will eventually force Ireland’s hand. They cannot pretend this isn't happening forever. You cannot have a disappearing Jewish community—like we discussed in episode nine hundred seventy-two—and then claim your laws are working fine.
The "Last Minyan" episode was a real eye-opener for a lot of people. When you realize that people are literally leaving the country because they no longer feel safe in the public square, the debate about "free speech" takes on a much more urgent tone. It is not an abstract philosophical question anymore. It is a question of whether a specific minority group is allowed to exist in peace.
This brings us to the practical takeaways. If you are listening to this and you see this kind of rhetoric online or at a show, what is the framework for evaluating it?
First, look for the dehumanization. Does the speaker treat the target as a human being with rights, or as a "Zionist" proxy that deserves to be destroyed? Second, look for the call to action. Is it a call for a change in policy, or a call for "death" and "destruction"? And third, look at the context. Is this a nuanced discussion, or is it a celebration of violence like the "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv" post? If it hits those three marks, you are looking at incitement, not critique.
And don't be fooled by the "it is just art" or "it is just a joke" defense. Art and humor have a long history of being used as a delivery system for some of the worst ideas in human history. The fact that it is set to a beat or delivered with a punchline doesn't change the underlying intent.
We also need to be much more critical of the "Righteousness Shield." Just because someone uses the language of social justice or anti-colonialism doesn't mean their goals are just. You have to look at what they are actually advocating for. If the "justice" they want involves the destruction of another people, it isn't justice. It is just another form of hate.
It is about intellectual honesty. You can be a critic of the Israeli government and still condemn someone for waving a Hezbollah flag or cheering for missile attacks on civilians. In fact, if you are a serious critic, you should be the first one condemning that stuff, because it completely undermines your position.
But that requires a level of moral courage that seems to be in short supply in certain circles right now. It is much easier to just go along with the "Boom Boom, Tel Aviv" crowd and feel like you are part of the "resistance."
It is the easy path, for sure. But as we are seeing with Bob Vylan and Kneecap, the easy path can lead straight to a police station or a terrorism charge. The legal landscape is changing, and the people who built their brands on being "untouchable" are finding out that the law has a very long memory.
I think we are going to see a lot more of these cases in the next year. The Met Police probe is just the beginning. As more data comes in on the link between this rhetoric and real-world violence, the pressure on prosecutors to act is going to become overwhelming.
And hopefully, that pressure will eventually reach Dublin too. The removal of those speech clauses was a victory for a very specific type of "free speech" advocate, but it was a loss for the people who have to live with the consequences of that speech every day.
It is a balancing act, and every society has to find its own point of equilibrium. But right now, it feels like the scales are tipped way too far in favor of the inciters. The "Righteousness Shield" has become a license for vitriol, and it is time for that license to be revoked.
Well said. I think that covers the legal and ethical ground Daniel was asking about. It is a heavy topic, but one that is absolutely essential for understanding the current climate in the UK and Ireland.
It really is. And it is a reminder that the words we use and the ideas we amplify have real-world consequences. We cannot just treat the public square as a playground for provocateurs.
Before we wrap up, I want to thank our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping us on track and digging up those specific legal dates. We would be lost in the weeds without him.
And a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power the generation pipeline for this show. They make the technical side of "My Weird Prompts" possible.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you are enjoying the deep dives, search for My Weird Prompts on Telegram to get notified whenever a new episode drops. We are also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, so make sure to follow us there.
We will be back next time with another prompt from Daniel. Until then, keep an eye on the rhetoric and remember that the "Zionist" proxy isn't the legal shield some people think it is.
See you next time.
Goodbye.
