Ken Casey, the founder and front man of the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, is the physical, attitudinal, and linguistic personification of Boston. Proof of this can be found in the way he pronounces MAGA. To wit: “Magger,” as in, “This Magger guy in the audience was waving his fucking Trump hat in people’s faces, and I could just tell he wanted to enter into discourse with me.” A second proof is that “enter into discourse” is a thing Ben Affleck would say in a movie about South Boston right before punching someone in the face. The third is Casey’s articulation of what I took to be a personal code: “I’m not going to shut up, just out of spite.”

The aforementioned discourse took place at a show in Florida in March. Video of the incident has moved across the internet, and it has provoked at least some Dropkick Murphy fans—white, male, and not particularly predisposed to the Democratic Party in its current form—to abandon the band. Casey accepts this as the price for preserving his soul.