Randy Fine Says Macklemore Has Free Speech, Not a Right to Perform 'Antisemitic Garbage' | TMZ DC

Randy, good to see you mate. Now this Macklemore, Ed Sheeran thing has like taken fire. Everyone's talking about it. A lot of people defending Macklemore, defending free speech. Now I want to ask you, over 10 years ago Macklemore appeared in a costume and it looked like, you know, a caricature of a Jewish person. He apologized for that, say he didn't mean it that way. But do you think that that photo, which have you seen it? Yes I have. Do you think that photo kind has any impact upon today's controversy? Should we bring it into today's? It absolutely does. It's inconceivable that he didn't know what he was doing when he put on that outfit. That outfit played into the worst anti-Semitic tropes going back hundreds and hundreds of years, putting on a prosthetic nose and everything else to poke fun at Jews. He's clearly an anti-Semite. Does that mean he has the right to stand on the street corner and be an anti-Semite? Of course he does. That's what freedom of speech does. But that doesn't mean you have the right to go into a stadium owned by someone else or a concert tour being run by someone else and be part of it. If it did, any of us could call up Ed Sheeran and say, hey I have freedom of speech, put me in your concert. Well we'd have to be musically talented and you know. I would argue someone who believes in these things isn't very musically talented. I mean he's got some bang. You don't like thrift shop? You don't like thrift shop? I don't. I mean look, one way TMZ can clearly make me look bad is by talking about my lack of knowledge about popular culture. I hang out with my kids and I work. That's all I do. So you're defending Robert Crafts, right? You're defending Ed Sheeran? He has freedom of speech. He has the freedom to decide what speech takes place in his house. It's not a government building. Isn't it publicly funded? I don't know. He owns the stadium. I don't know. I don't know the details of it, but it's his stadium. But then he can ban people. If people say something about AI, he doesn't like. Sure. It's his stadium. That's cool. Should someone be able to come into your house and say anything they want in your own house? It's your house. You decide who comes into your house. It's a big house. It's a stadium, but it's his. And I respect the fact that he doesn't want this sort of anti-Semitic garbage coming into his stadium. And by the way, that's his right to do that. I wish more people agreed with that. If you go to a concert, you should be going to get entertained. If you want to go to a political rally, go to a political rally. There's no reason to bring the two of them together. But I mean, the costume we spoke of, that happened over a decade ago. And these days, all he's doing on stage is saying, free Palestine. And he cares for the innocent people. He's even saying like, this isn't about you. What's that have to do with putting on an entertaining performance? It is nothing. A lot of performers take a moment to speak their views. Like Kanye is getting booked at these stadiums. Well, I don't know that I would do that either. But Robert Kraft has the right to do it. This guy doesn't have the right to complain. He can go get his own concerts, perform on his own time in his own venues. But what he has said and done is disgusting. It is anti-Semitic. It's not appropriate. And I applaud Robert Kraft for what he's done.