# Power to the People Festival — October 3, 2026 A one-day, two-stage benefit festival at the **Merriweather Post Pavilion** in Columbia, Maryland, organized by [[Tom Morello]] and held on **Saturday, October 3, 2026**, a month before the [[2026 Midterm Elections]]. It was the inaugural edition. Morello described the event in the announcement as being "about freedom, justice, equality and rock 'n' roll...the power everyday human beings have when they come together through music, art, community and action." Its significance for this vault is not musical. The festival is the clearest instance so far of a pattern the [[Anti-Trump Resistance Timeline]] identified in September 2026: between the March 28 mass march and the autumn, the resistance's mobilization energy stopped taking the form of street marches and started taking the form of **ticketed cultural events wired directly to voter-access infrastructure**. A portion of ticket proceeds went to [[VoteRiders]], and the grounds hosted a "Freedom Village" of organizing, mutual-aid and civic-engagement nonprofits. A concert is a fundraiser and a mailing list; a march is neither. --- ## The Lineup Announced acts included Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, [[Tom Morello]], Joan Baez, Jack Black, Dropkick Murphys, Cypress Hill, Killer Mike, Serj Tankian, Brittany Howard, Taylor Momsen, The Linda Lindas, Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, Matt Cameron, Grandson, The Neighborhood Kids, and a DJ set by Shepard Fairey. Performers reported on the day additionally included **[[Bruce Springsteen]]** as special guest, Dave Grohl, Nathaniel Rateliff, Stephen Stills, Public Enemy (Chuck D and Flavor Flav), Mike McCready, Geezer Butler, Scott Ian, B-Real and Robbie Mangano. The roster spanned roughly seven decades of American popular music, from Baez's folk-revival generation to The Linda Lindas and The Neighborhood Kids. MS NOW carried the festival as a free livestream on YouTube. --- ## The Setlist as Argument The programming was built around songs that indict the administration rather than songs that merely gesture at dissent. Per-artist setlists were logged on setlist.fm. **Bruce Springsteen's closing set** (backed by Morello's band from the third song on): 1. "Streets of Minneapolis" — acoustic, solo. His January 2026 protest song about the two people federal agents killed in Minneapolis during [[Operation Metro Surge]]. See [[Renée Good Killing]], [[Alex Pretti Killing]] and [[ICE Minneapolis Killings]]. 2. "Chimes of Freedom" — Bob Dylan, with Joan Baez. 3. "Clampdown" — The Clash, with [[Tom Morello]]. 4. "The Ghost of Tom Joad" — with Morello. The Steinbeck character is the same Dust Bowl migration that produced [[Woody Guthrie]]'s catalogue; the Springsteen–Morello version of this song is their longest-running collaboration. 5. "Fortunate Son" — Creedence Clearwater Revival, with Dave Matthews, Morello and Nathaniel Rateliff. 6. "Rockin' in the Free World" — Neil Young, with Dave Grohl, Matthews and Morello. The choice carries a second edge documented on [[Artists vs. Trump]]: the same song was playing when Trump descended the escalator to announce his first campaign, over Young's objection. 7. "This Land Is Your Land" — Guthrie, full ensemble. 8. "Power to the People" — John Lennon's 1971 single, the festival's namesake, full ensemble. 9. "Bella ciao" — the Italian antifascist partisan anthem, played from tape as the walkout music. **Elsewhere on the two stages:** - **Joan Baez** opened with Guthrie's "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" featuring Rateliff, then "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round" — a ten-minute slot, 7:55 to 8:05 p.m. - **Dropkick Murphys** played "Citizen I.C.E." — a rework of their own "Citizen C.I.A." — straight into **"Don't Call Me a Fucking Terrorist,"** an original written in 2026 and debuted at a protest and memorial at the Alex Pretti memorial site in Minneapolis that June. The song is about being called a terrorist by your own country while doing everything the country asks. They closed on "Worker's Song" and "I'm Shipping Up to Boston." - **Morello's own set** ran a Rage Against the Machine instrumental medley, "Adjourn It" with Serj Tankian, Public Enemy's "Prophets of Rage" and "Fight the Power" with Chuck D, Flavor Flav and B-Real, "Killing in the Name" sung by the audience, and KISS's "Rock and Roll All Nite" with Grohl. From the stage, Springsteen told the crowd: **"Let them hear you in Washington."** > [!warning] Sourcing — the two stage quotes and the runtime > Three items appear **only** in Heather Cox Richardson's letter of 2026-10-03 and were still uncorroborated on 2026-10-05 after a second search pass. They are recorded as her account, not as confirmed receipts. > - Morello from the stage: "Every act of art is an act of resistance." > - Springsteen from the stage, on the administration's tyranny: "This is still America ... and this will not stand." > - That the show ran ten hours. Doors opened at noon and Baez's slot ended at 8:05 p.m., so the figure is plausible, but no source states it. > [!success] Corrected 2026-10-05 — an earlier version of this page was wrong > This page was first built on 2026-10-04 carrying a `[!bug]` callout asserting that **no Dropkick Murphys song titled "Don't Call Me a F*cking Terrorist" could be located**, and treating HCR's claim as unverified. **That was a false negative, and the error was mine, not hers.** The song is real, the band played it, and HCR's account of its origin is accurate. The search failed because the title was searched in HCR's asterisked form and because the absence of a hit in one Wikipedia survey was read as a conclusion rather than as a claim. Two independent sources now confirm it: setlist.fm's per-artist setlist for this festival, and the Antiwar Songs archive entry, which dates the song to 2026 and the debut to Minneapolis in June. "Fortunate Son" and the Baez–Rateliff "Deportee" were also moved out of the single-source callout above on the same basis. ## The Guthrie Anniversary The festival fell on **October 3**, the anniversary of [[Woody Guthrie]]'s death at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in 1967. Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in February 1940, during the long tail of the [[Great Depression]], as a deliberate reclamation of the country for its working people, and he stencilled **"This Machine Kills Fascists"** on his guitars — a slogan borrowed from World War II machinists who put it on their heavy equipment. Closing a 2026 anti-authoritarian benefit with that song on that date put the event inside a specific American lineage rather than a generic one. See [[Protest Songs in America]]. --- ## KB Significance **Culture is contested terrain, and both sides know it.** The vault documents the right's long campaign against arts institutions — [[National Endowment for the Arts]] defunding drives, the [[Kennedy Center]] takeover, curriculum and library restrictions. This festival is the counter-move in the same register: not a petition about arts funding but a demonstration that the cultural apparatus can still be assembled at scale against the administration, and monetized for voter access while it is. **The mobilization form changed.** [[No Kings Coalition]] actions in 2025–2026 were marches measured in millions. The June 14, 2026 action was deliberately a concert. This was a ticketed festival with a nonprofit village attached. The trade is reach for revenue and legibility: a sold-out pavilion plus a free national livestream is a smaller crowd than a march but a larger donor file. **Free-expression claims were the explicit subject, not a by-product.** Performers used the stage to assert First Amendment protection while the administration was simultaneously litigating press access — see the September 2026 restraining order against the White House press ban on the [[Anti-Trump Resistance Timeline]]. Artists asserting speech rights in the same month that news organizations had to win theirs in court is the relevant juxtaposition. --- ## See Also - [[Tom Morello]] · [[Bruce Springsteen]] · [[Woody Guthrie]] · [[VoteRiders]] - [[Protest Songs in America]] · [[Artists vs. Trump]] · [[Music in Politics Hub]] · [[Artists]] - [[Anti-Trump Resistance Timeline]] · [[Pro-Democracy Movement]] · [[Resistance Hub]] - [[No Kings March (March 2026)]] · [[ICE Minneapolis Killings]] · [[Operation Metro Surge]] - [[2026 Midterm Elections]] · [[2026 Midterms Hub]]