Not the Mayor's Fight
Canceling Ye's Alamodome show isn't the mayor's job, and the First Amendment wouldn't allow it anyway
Over the weekend, Mayor Jones posted that she supports canceling the Ye concert scheduled for the Alamodome on July 4. The artist formerly known as Kanye West was revealed last week to be performing in San Antonio as a late addition to a tour that has been turned away across Europe; tickets are currently on sale.
Ye’s record is genuinely repugnant: selling swastika merchandise, releasing a song titled “Heil Hitler,” and open praise for Nazism are just a few of the lowlights from his many years of controversy. He published an apology in the Wall Street Journal in January, but that changes very little.
Precisely because of that record, the mayor’s instinct to oppose Ye and his rhetoric is completely understandable. Indeed, San Antonio should support a public official making it clear that antisemitism is not welcome. That said, condemning Ye is very different from using her office to cancel him. She is wrong that this is the right fight for her office, and wrong that it is a fight worth having for the city. There are two major problems with the mayor's statement.
The first problem, and the more important one out of the two, is that this simply isn’t and never should be the job of the mayor.
Mayor Jones cannot by herself cancel this show. She is one vote on an eleven-member council, and she presides over its meetings, but which performers are booked at the Alamodome is not an issue that city council usually takes up. When the mayor says she supports canceling this show and makes a media firestorm out of it, she is not exercising any power she holds. She is instead merely broadcasting a preference she knows the city is unlikely to act on.
It comes across as fundamentally unserious to focus on fleeting controversy (for political points no less) as the things that actually matter to residents are actively under discussion right now: affordability, economic development, water security, and so on. And the share of San Antonio that would call a Kanye West concert one of those pressing, genuine problems is vanishingly small. It is certainly dwarfed by the share that thinks it is the price of free speech, a concert worth attending, or even just an economic benefit to the city.
And it is a concrete economic benefit. The show was tracking toward a sellout of a stadium that holds over 70,000 people, and San Antonio collects the rental, the surcharges, the parking, and the concessions. That is real money that the mayor wants to forgo, without the authority to do so, for a gesture she can't enforce. A fleeting statement of resistance chosen over the substance is exactly the trap.
Then there’s the more practical problem: the whole idea is unconstitutional. A government that refuses a booking at a public venue because of the speaker’s views is discriminating by viewpoint, which is precisely what the First Amendment forbids the government from doing. In a Monday interview with Texas Public Radio’s The Source, the mayor said that she supports canceling the concert because she thinks “there’s a difference between free speech and hate speech,” something that the Supreme Court has consistently disagreed with. A decision to cancel almost certainly loses in court and is an ironic one to make in Military City USA, home to so many who have sworn an oath to the Constitution.
In Florida, Senator Rick Scott pressed Tampa to cancel Ye’s shows at its own publicly funded stadium. The Tampa Sports Authority declined: it condemns antisemitism “from any source,” it said, but “we also respect free speech rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, even when we disagree with that speech.” San Antonio would be the outlier, the “anti-free-speech” city.
And who is to say where that precedent would lead us? The standard that feels appropriate and justified when aimed at a controversial hip-hop artist is the same that could one day be aimed at a pro-Israel speaker, or a conservative, or a controversial author, based entirely on whoever holds office next. In the same TPR interview, she floated giving council more oversight over which performers get booked, the exact precedent this argument warns against. We do not want to be that city.
So what San Antonio is left with is a mayor commanding immense national media attention to demand a thing she cannot do alone and the city cannot do at all: a veto over who is allowed to perform in its public buildings. That is not a power that becomes legitimate in the right hands, and a city that reaches for it looks like a place that just polices speech, no matter how justified it may seem.
The mayor is right that Ye deserves the harshest criticism. She is simply wrong about whose fight this is, and whether it is one to have in the first place. The Alamodome will likely host him regardless.