False Claim that Punk Band Dropkick Murphys Was Suspended by X Over Anti-Trump Comment Goes Viral
By Sam Howard
What happened: Anti-Trump social media users are falsely claiming that Elon Musk’s X suspended the account of Celtic punk bank Dropkick Murphys after lead singer Ken Casey criticized President Donald Trump and X owner Musk in mid-March.
Context: On March 16, the Instagram account for liberal news organization MeidasTouch Network posted a video of a Dropkick Murphys concert, apparently one of the band’s St. Patrick’s Day weekend shows in Boston. In the video, Casey rails against Trump supporters who wear MAGA hats.
Casey said: “If you’re in a room full of people and you want to know who’s in a cult, how do you know who’s in a cult? They’ve been holding up a hat the whole f---ing night to represent a president. This is America, there’s no kings here.” Casey also talked about the black MAGA hat that Musk sometimes wears, calling it a “black-on-black Elon Musk true Nazi edition.”
A closer look: The video of Casey generated online praise from Trump critics, including many who claimed that X suspended the Dropkick Murphys X account in an attempt to quash dissent on the platform.
Anti-Trump Threads user @wvubeerguy stated in a March 18 post: “Did Elon Musk declare war on Boston? Because banning the Dropkick Murphy’s on St. Patrick’s Day seems like an act of war.” The post was liked 5,800 times and reposted 241 times that day.
The same day, anti-Trump X user @esjesjesj stated in a post that included the Dropkick Murphys concert video, “Elon nuked their account for this.” The post received 38,400 views and 2,000 likes in one day.
The claim also spread on several generally reliable news sites, including U.S. news site NewsNationNow.com (Trust Score: 100/100) which stated on March 18: “The X account for Dropkick Murphys, a Massachusetts-based Celtic punk rock band, was suspended Monday night after the band’s frontman called out an audience member wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.” The article was edited by March 20 to add correct information about why the X account was actually suspended (see below), although no correction note was issued.
Actually: The Dropkick Murphys band itself deleted its X account in 2022, so it couldn’t have been suspended by X in 2025.
Casey told music publication Billboard (Trust Score: 100/100) in March 2025: “We broke up with [Musk] first. We quit Twitter in 2022 when he was only half a Nazi.” Casey said that after the band deleted the account, an impersonator registered the @DropkickMurphys handle, prompting the band to file a legal complaint to suspend the account.
Indeed, archived versions of the X account impersonating the band, @DropkickMurphys, reviewed by NewsGuard show the account was flagged as suspended as early as June 2024, well before the band’s March 2025 concert.