For years, Coachella was the reason I stayed home for a full week every April instead of hanging out in downtown Joshua Tree, where I live full time. The influx of festival goers is overwhelming at best and a tornado of litter and entitled behavior at worst. I once saw a caravan of Coachella-branded, identical BMW SUVs pull out of the most outrageously expensive Airbnb in town, all bearing the bumper sticker “DARE TO BE YOU.” With ticket prices ranging from over $500 to $8,000, it’s easy to say this shit ain’t for me. Generally, though, if you want to spend more than your mortgage to stay in Indio, California, for a few nights and stand so far away from the stage that you discover what a concert would be like if it were made by LaCroix, I’d say you do you. But the overstyled playground for the wealthy (Honestly, what the fuck was Justin Trudeau doing there?) has bigger fucking problems.
Try telling your favorite leftist or liberal that you still eat at Chick-fil-A. Hell, in 2026, you’re better off shopping at Walmart than Target if you want to appear socially conscious. When the left boycotts, we fucking BOYCOTT. No list of demands, no celebration when the policies change. You fuck around, you find out – forever. What does any of this have to do with Coachella, you ask? The same Coachella featuring a protest set by DEVO?
Coachella is the most lucrative festival in America. Its impact on the economics of California, the music scene, and especially the town of Indio (and my little burg of Joshua Tree) cannot be overstated. You can thank the Coachella model for making every festival you might want to see way too expensive, way too fucking big, and way too full of people there to be seen, rather than to see the bands. You can also thank it, in part, for electing Donald fucking Trump.
If you just heard a record scratch in your head and are thinking, “I thought it was a place to wear lots of boho fringe and do mushrooms?!” Well, that’s exactly what Philip Anschutz, “the man who owns Los Angeles,” wants you to think.
Anschutz, with a net worth of over 19 BILLION dollars, owns more than Los Angeles. He also owns several (as in more than two) resorts, 70-plus arenas and concert venues, a fucking windfarm, oil (because of course), and just about anything else he wants. Coachella doesn’t have progressive values because Anschutz is a lover of counter-culture. It has progressive values because that’s what makes him the most money.
Where does that money go?
You might have heard of a generous $1 million donation to the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which sounds real nice until you remember this man has more money than God and only did it because he got caught donating way more than that to:
- Alliance Defending Freedom
- Family Research Council
- National Christian Foundation
But hey, he gave some cash to the queers, right? It’s fine now? Right? Well, sure, you can call the pocket change donation “restitution,” unless you have big feelings about the donation that came right after that … to Colorado Christian University.
Look, I’m not the biggest defender of forever boycotts as social activism, but I do care about where my money goes. And the money you spend attending Coachella or sitting in your living room streaming “Couchella” goes right to fucking queer people over. It goes right into the Republican MAGA machine. And any minute now, like so much of entertainment, we’ll see it start creeping more and more conservative. So make your choices, but can we get fucking real? Please? And if you’re gonna go to Coachella anyway, and you’re gonna come to Joshua Tree in your crocheted dresses and suede jackets, at least come buy some art from the local artists whose careers are getting decimated by pieces of shit like Philip Anschutz.
