Bad Bunny is the latest entertainer to endure a conservative backlash in the United States. This past weekend the 2026 Superbowl headliner mocked MAGA critics while hosting “Saturday Night Live.”
Meanwhile, last month, ABC temporarily suspended late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel after political pressure. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr had sent a threatening message in response to a remark that Kimmel had made about U.S. President Donald Trump’s response to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Supporters criticized the network, and some participated in a boycott of Disney, ABC’s parent company. High-powered colleagues on other shows, including Stephen Colbert, whose own show was canceled by CBS this year in similar circumstances, stood before the cameras to defend Kimmel. When Kimmel returned to the airwaves the following week, he did not back down. After first apologizing for any words that might have offended, he stood firm on the importance of protecting popular culture from government intimidation. “This show is not important,” Kimmel told his audience on Sept. 23. “What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”
Unfortunately, popular entertainers have been prime targets for U.S. government officials who didn’t like their views before. During the second Red Scare in the 1950s, actors, producers, writers, and singers were singled out by conservative anti-Communist politicians eager to make an example of them through high-profile investigations. By attacking people with large audiences, the right could send a chilling message: Anyone on the left, regardless of fame or fortune, risked having their lives destroyed by mere accusations of Communist ties. As Clay Risen argues in his book Red Scare, the battle was as much a culture war as it was about politics—a knock-down, drag-out fight over the character of the United States.
Pete Seeger was among the entertainers who refused to buckle to political pressure. Though their commercial careers often suffered, he and his allies became heroes of the 1960s counterculture and enduring symbols of free speech. Their fight still resonates today, as many in 2025 are taking significant risks to challenge a U.S. administration intent on eroding the nation’s most cherished rights. Seeger and his story remain an inspiring chapter in the ongoing struggle to defend the First Amendment.
By the time he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in August 1955, Seeger had achieved considerable fame both in the musical world and on the left. Born in New York City in 1919, the banjo-playing Seeger had devoted himself to the emerging folk music scene in the 1930s and ’40s. Introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie and Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter by his father, Charles Seeger Jr., an ethnomusicologist, he became one of folk’s most respected figures as the genre gained a hold in coffeehouses and small concert venues. In the late 1940s, Seeger found commercial success with his band the Weavers, scoring a No. 1 Billboard hit in 1950 with their rendition of the Lead Belly folk ballad “Goodnight, Irene.” Their version of Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” hit No. 4 in 1951, and the band sold some 4 million records during this time. “If I Had a Hammer” was a labor anthem: “It’s the hammer of justice. It’s the bell of freedom.” The fans loved seeing Seeger perform live. “He was a passionate person,” Weavers bandmate Ronnie Gilbert recalled after his death in 2014, “and that was what people saw. People absorbed his passion and his ideals.”
Like many entertainers of the era, Seeger was extremely active in left-wing causes. He joined the Communist Party USA in 1942, during the years of the Popular Front, when a wide-ranging network of progressive groups championed labor, civil rights, small farmers, and other marginalized groups. Later in the decade, Seeger left when he learned of the horrendous nature of Joseph Stalin. As part of the Almanac Singers’ repertory, he brought anti-fascist and pro-union songs to sizable national radio audiences during World War II. He also campaigned for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party candidacy in 1948. Seeger made no secret of his political affiliations. Indeed, he was proud through music to stand by the hard-working, common American. Seeger, who served during World War II in a U.S. Army unit of performing artists, formed People’s Songs after the war, an organization that collected and distributed political songs.
By the early 1950s, Seeger had become a target of the right-wing forces sweeping the nation. In June 1950, the conservative broadside “Red Channels” accused Seeger of being a Communist, though he had left the party by then. The FBI leaked files to reporters about his activism. The Weavers were blacklisted from radio stations and concert venues as owners concluded that their popularity was less valuable than the potential cost of hosting them. Unable to earn a decent living and under relentless political pressure, the band broke apart.
On Aug. 18, 1955, the HUAC subpoenaed Seeger to testify. By then, the committee was infamous for its anti-Communist investigations. In 1947, the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors accused of Communist ties, were jailed and blacklisted. Traveling the county to generate headlines, HUAC held the hearing that included Seeger in the U.S. federal courthouse in New York’s Foley Square. The committee went right to work, probing his well-known left-wing activities and the lyrics of his music.
Seeger, who was wearing a tweed jacket and yellow tie, refused to bend the knee. Unlike the Hollywood Ten, he didn’t invoke any amendment. Instead, he argued that the committee had no right to even ask the questions it did. “I feel these questions are improper, sir, and I feel they are immoral to ask any American this kind of question,” Seeger told HUAC Chair Francis Walter, comparing the situation to Jesus Christ being questioned by Pontius Pilate. Seeger defended his own right, and that of every American, to support any worldview he found compelling.
Nor would he name names. When the committee pressed him about whether he had played the song “Wasn’t That a Time?” to a politically controversial group in New York, Seeger wouldn’t entertain the question but did offer to play it in the hearing room. In his comments, Seeger refused to cede patriotism to his interrogators. “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature, and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this committee,” he told Walter, “that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours … that I am any less of an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir.”
In 1956, the House of Representatives voted to hold Seeger in contempt of Congress. In March 1957, a federal grand jury indicted him on 10 counts, one for each question he didn’t answer. It took four years for the case to come to trial. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1920 to protect free speech after the first Red Scare, Seeger faced conviction. In March 1961, at age 42, he was found guilty and sentenced to 10 sequential one-year prison terms. Shortly before the sentencing, he had played music for reporters at a press conference, after which he explained: “I’ve sung for Americans of all political persuasions, for hobo jungles and the Rockefellers. … I’m proud I can bring good songs to the people. I’m a catalyst cutting across lines.” A year later, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction on a technicality. His sentence was vacated.
Though Seeger’s commercial career never fully recovered, his principled stand earned deep admiration throughout the music community. His magazine Sing Out! was a go-to publication for the folk movement. Bands such as Peter, Paul and Mary covered his songs, and he was a co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival. When ABC barred him from appearing on the folk music show Hootenanny because he refused to sign a loyalty oath, numerous performers, including Bob Dylan, boycotted the program in solidarity. In 1965, Seeger was asked about having been blacklisted after the HUAC hearing, saying of the committee: “This group of people are actually … in my opinion, a group of American fascists. Their idea of America is an America where everybody agrees with them.”
Recording for the smaller Folkways Records label while teaching in schools as well as performing in union halls, high schools, and on college campuses, Seeger emerged as a highly respected figure in the civil rights movement. In September 1957, he played “We Shall Overcome” at a folk school in Tennessee with Martin Luther King Jr. in attendance. During Freedom Summer in 1964, he performed for Black audiences and white student activists in Mississippi.
Only in the late 1960s, as the nation grew more disillusioned with the status quo, did the mainstream media begin to welcome Seeger back. While they had changed, he had not. In September 1967, CBS executives removed his performance from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour after he sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” with its line “And the big fool said to push on,” which was critical of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and the war in Vietnam. Seeger had written the song after seeing a picture of U.S. soldiers trudging through a river in the Mekong Delta. The showrunners had assured executive William Paley, who had received direct complaints from Johnson about earlier skits that had mocked him, that there would be no political content in the music. Tom and Dick Smothers were furious about the censorship and complained about what happened. When the Smothers Brothers welcomed him back on Feb. 25, 1968, the network suits allowed them to air Seeger singing “Waist Deep.” Some 13.5 million households watched. By then, Seeger had become a vital musical voice in the burgeoning anti-war movement.
Over time, his courage became the stuff of legend. In 1994, Seeger received a National Medal of Arts from U.S. President Bill Clinton and a Kennedy Center Honor. When Barack Obama was inaugurated as U.S. president in 2009, Seeger performed Guthrie’s classic “This Land Is Your Land” alongside Bruce Springsteen. Seeger died on Jan. 27, 2014, at 94. In a tribute, Obama said: “Over the years, Pete used his voice—and his hammer—to strike blows for worker’s rights and civil rights, world peace, and environmental conservation. And he always invited us to sing along. For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger.” In 2024, Edward Norton portrayed him in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.
Seeger remains a testament to what popular entertainers can achieve in dangerous times. With their enormous platforms, each act of defiance against overreach, abuse, or oppressive government action delivers a powerful symbolic blow for civil liberties. Musicians and other performers who stand their ground and defend their principles, even at the cost of their careers, give countless Americans the courage to do the same. The inspiring collective power of saying no lies at the heart of every successful countermobilization against strong-armed governments.
Seeger’s legacy still looms large. In the months ahead, political threats will not disappear. Trump is only ramping up his campaign against all political opponents. Nor will the power of every entertainer who draws a line in the sand, regardless of the personal cost.