A ticket sales and distribution company at the center of an antitrust investigation involving international deception, fraud and price fixing, as well as having faced criticism for playing “woke” politics, is facing another storm today.
But many of its congressional critics are unusually silent — so far.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, Ticketmaster made copious amounts of money from selling tickets to a Louis Farrakhan rally, where the antisemitic preacher defended Adolf Hitler and promoted antisemitic stereotypes about “Jewish power” in business and politics:
Ticketmaster, which charges service fees on each ticket it sells, raked in money selling tickets to Farrakhan’s annual Saviours’ Day conference in Chicago last weekend. During his speech at the event, Farrakhan assailed the “stranglehold that Jews have on this government” and claimed “Jewish power is what has all of our people of knowledge and wisdom and talent afraid.”
The event was met with crickets on Capitol Hill, with almost no one in Congress speaking out against Ticketmaster for making money off of the Farrakhan event. The reaction is a stark contrast to lawmakers’ response when Ticketmaster bungled sales last year for Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated concert tour. That fiasco was in the news cycle for weeks and led to a Department of Justice investigation as well as a Senate hearing. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, have a monopoly over the ticket industry, leading to price-gouging and a failure to crack down on automated scalping.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in [sic],” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) in a Twitter post in November. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), now the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to Ticketmaster last year raising concerns about its practices, while Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) called on the Department of Justice to investigate. None of their offices responded to a request for comment on Ticketmaster’s Farrakhan sales.
Only Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.)—who also spoke out about the Taylor Swift debacle—weighed in on the Farrakhan controversy when contacted by the Washington Free Beacon.
Responding to Ticketmaster’s decision to implicitly defend its affiliation with the Farrakhan rally, Blackburn’s office issued a press release.
“It is extremely concerning that Ticketmaster is choosing to use its platform to elevate and promote a well-known anti-Semite. The targeting of the Jewish people has gone on far too long and must stop,” the senator asserted.
In 2021, Ticketmaster joined more than 500 companies in criticizing Georgia’s election integrity law. The mischaracterization of the law as a voter suppression bill prompted Major League Baseball to relocate the MLB All-Star game from Georgia to Colorado.
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