If you’re a “born in the wrong generation” bohemian who yearns for the acoustic progressivism of legends like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell but was instead reared in the digital hellscape that is social media, you might be familiar with the sentiment that times are bad when the folk starts getting good.

The political rage of extrajudicial United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings in Minneapolis has inspired a new scene of folk artists to take to Instagram Reels in vintage leather and post guitar ballads dreaming of peace and justice. But this Jesse Welles-inspired movement equates to nothing more than online clout. There is no real action being taken. 

The majority of these songs are just noise hidden behind a facade of woke Americana. These songwriters aren’t proposing solutions or attempting to move forward: They’re only griping in the present. 

Not to say that I don’t agree with the baseline messages being communicated here: it’s obviously easy to condemn recent ICE actions and oppose United States involvement in foreign wars. But it’s even easier to superficially empathize with these arguments while not truly backing them.

Welles gained popularity in 2024 for sarcastically mocking figurehead companies such as Walmart and Boeing while sporting his 1956 Harmony Stella acoustic guitar in front of lush fields and powerlines. Comment sections have even taken to calling him the second-coming of mid-20th-century folk legend Woody Guthrie. 

But he lacks even half of the spine Guthrie had. Welles seemingly has enough conviction to call the government a “bloated, inefficient bureaucratic mass,” yet refused to publicly share his 2024 election decisions in a Rolling Stone interview. Guthrie, meanwhile, was a contributing writer to the communist Daily Worker and publicly supported labor unions to a degree that warranted an FBI file on him as a communist threat.

Compared to another TikTok-folk contemporary, Mon Rovîa, Welles is the epitome of inauthenticity. Mon Rovîa, a singer born in Liberia during the country’s civil war, uses his soundtrack of Afro-Appalachian melodies to raise money for organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union. He doesn’t just milk his followers’ despair for likes. 

This represents a larger issue of performative activism in society. Everyone reposts tragedies without taking steps to stop those tragedies from happening in the first place. 

You won’t find most of these Instagram folk artists on the streets at anti-ICE events just like you didn’t see most of those who posted with #BlackoutTuesday at a Black Lives Matter protest. Being a revolutionary is not easy, and although social media can be a good platform for political organization, it’s rarely a catalyst for real-life action.

But this recent phenomenon of misappropriating political rage is a classic scenario of the loud minority of performative influencers misrepresenting the quiet majority of authentic artists. Music is one of the most powerful tools to harness emotions of political rage when performed by artists who are actually enraged.

Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello organized a benefit concert in Minneapolis and was seen sporting a homemade sign at protests in Minnesota and California all in the few days following Alex Pretti’s death. Any posts made to his social media accounts were about inspiring collective action in support of the anti-ICE movement, not about farming engagement.

If songwriters like Welles actually cared about the words they sing, they’d be blasting their songs outside the hotel rooms of ICE agents at 2 a.m. like many Minneapolis musicians have chosen to do. Artists who create authentic protest music aren’t preying on the downtrodden emotions of the public in times of crisis because they’re too busy channeling these feelings into action.

Take Springsteen’s performance at Morello’s benefit concert as well as his recent song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” for example, a track he dropped four days after the killing of Pretti. The choruses take a break from the vivid descriptions of violence currently taking place and instead look towards a better future where we’ve grown as a nation. There are solutions here, not just issues.

There should undoubtedly be time to mourn those unjustly killed. What’s more important, though, is to quickly follow that mourning with resistance to ensure that those deaths weren’t in vain. 

Protest songs shouldn’t make you want to shed a tear while curled up in your bed –– they should inject you with an unquenchable thirst for justice that can only be achieved through action. Don’t just double tap a “woke” singer/songwriter’s cover of “This Land Is Your Land.” Go scream it at your local protest.