Ken Casey carries himself like a man who has no interest in looking for a fight but would have no problem finishing one if the need arose. Glancing at his silvered hair and faded tattoos, you might even assume the stocky musician’s street-fighting days are over now that he’s in his fifties. But you’d be wrong.
Right now, Casey’s focused on using everything he’s learned to fight fascism by whatever means possible. As far as he’s concerned, “There is no neutral. If you’re neutral, you’re on the wrong side.”
As the kinetic frontman and sole remaining founding member of the Irish American “Celtic punk” band Dropkick Murphys, Casey is more likely to be found speaking to crowds of rowdy concertgoers in defense of immigrant rights, in support of Ukraine, and criticizing the Trump regime than bloodying his knuckles, but the man could never be accused of going soft. His last publicly documented physical altercation may have been back in 2013 — when he famously attacked a neo-Nazi skinhead who waved a Nazi salute while on stage during a packed New York City show — but, as recently as 2022, Casey was online threatening to “SMASH” a neo-Nazi group who used one of the band’s songs in a propaganda video (and he later challenged the group to a fight). On the band’s most recent tour — in support of their new album, For the People—the merch stall featured a T-shirt spelling it out in slime-green and bold white letters: “Dropkick Murphys, Fighting Nazis Since 1996.”
Roughly 30 years into a successful career that’s taken the group around the world and turned the band into one of punk rock’s most enduring, In These Times sat down with Casey before a show in Atlantic City, N.J., during Dropkick Murphys’ tour with fellow political-punk elders Bad Religion. As Casey tells me, his early days were rife with conflict with the boneheads and neo-Nazis who lurked around the edges of the hardcore punk and Oi! communities where Dropkick Murphys started.
“They would always show up and come after us, not just because of our politics; they were so Nazi that they would be after us for being Catholic!” he reminisces, noting that Denver was a particularly problematic area back then. “[Some of them would] have an Irish flag patch and a swastika. No, no, you can’t do that. One of them’s got to go.”
As much as the band’s anti-fascist, anti-racist politics are a crucial pillar of their message, Dropkick Murphys have long used their platform to connect with labor unions. Casey’s own connection to labor runs bone-deep, having grown up in a working-class household just south of Boston in the 1970s. Before the band’s founding — after a bar bet in 1996 — Casey worked as a union laborer specializing in demolition. In 2018, an accident at a building site left him with lasting injuries in his neck that affect his ability to play bass, and he now focuses on vocals during live shows, saving his hands for the studio.
From the band’s earliest, Oi!-adjacent days, Dropkick Murphys have always emphasized their message of working-class pride and solidarity, whether on stage or through their charity, the Claddagh Fund, which raises money for nonprofits serving children, veterans and people in recovery from drug or alcohol abuse.
“I’ve always thought of music as a selfish career, so the charitable side is how I made this be something that, as a life’s work, you could be proud of,” Casey explains. “We needed to have more of a purpose than just music.”
Searching for that purpose has seen Casey try on numerous hats — those of a philanthropist, a restauranteur, a returning college student, a boxing promoter, a golfer—while raising three kids and churning out ambitious new albums with his band. For the People, which includes special guests like Billy Bragg, brings their electric discography to 13 studio albums. The band has also released two acoustic albums using unreleased Woody Guthrie lyrics provided by the iconic protest singer’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. It all kept circling back to labor, though, and the band’s commitment to working-class values did not go unnoticed in quieter corridors; it has endeared them to the labor movement, even those who may otherwise prefer to invite less raucous types to play their events.
More recently, it’s also put Casey — a burly, middle-aged, white Boston sports fan — in the odd position of being seen as a potential mouthpiece for a very specific kind of union voter. If Vice President JD Vance was once bizarrely positioned as “the voice of the white working class” by clueless pundits, some Democrats now seem eager to pass that torch to someone who’s actually working class. Casey is game to fill that role, if not overly thrilled about it.
“I didn’t set out to necessarily be the voice of saying some of this stuff, but it has to be said, because we got to wake the fuck up,” Casey says with an exasperated shrug.
Casey’s own politics are definitely progressive, but he’s no fire-breathing anarchist. (For that, you’ll have to look a little deeper into punk’s underworld.) He’s worked union jobs, rallied with Democrats and walked picket lines, which one might argue is a pretty standard liberal baseline.
“People will call my politics radical, when my politics are pretty much ‘Look out for one another,’” he says. “I’m not up here trying to tell anyone how to cut their hair, what kind of coffee to drink, but I’m telling you not to be dumb enough to let the one percent, who wouldn’t piss on you if you’re on fire, take away your freedom and your future.”
Casey doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he’s certainly got some opinions. For one, as ICE devastates communities across the country and the Trump administration continues to target workers and the poor, he wants more high-profile bands to speak up and make it clear where they stand. Punk raged against Reagan and rocked against Bush, but now, with so many established bands choosing to stay on the sidelines, Casey is left wondering where all the real punks have gone.
“Every single show we played in the old days was like, ‘Nazis are coming, we’re fighting Nazis tonight,’” he recalls. “A lot of it’s turned into Boomer punk. A lot of people are like, ‘I’m too old for that,’ or, ‘Well, I care about my taxes.’”
Zooming out, Casey drills down on his primary thesis: Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. In his estimation, neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic Party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment, so it’s going to fall on the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty.
“I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you’re in the middle class now — if you see a worker being dragged out of his kitchen and taken off to another country, you should be ready to go be there for that worker too,” he says. “My opinion is that every politician that’s lucky enough to be an elected official right now should be chaining themselves to the doors of the Capitol. And if you’re not ready to do that, then you should let someone else take your place and step back. America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anybody out there that is a member of a labor union that is safe and doesn’t think this applies to you, he’s coming for you. They’re coming for you.”
After we parted ways, I thought about everything Casey said. Thick Massachusetts accent aside, he reminded me of men like my dad, who worked hard and did their best and still got kicked when they were down by a system that saw them as nothing more than beasts of burden. A punk rock band was Casey’s ticket out; most men like him aren’t so lucky, and he knows it. That may be why he seems so hell-bent on paying it forward any way he can, reminding people who feel left behind that they’re someone, too, and their neighbors need them.
“People like you and I were never meant to achieve our dreams,” he howled into the microphone during a performance of the song “Longshot,” glinting with sweat. “We’re conditioned to settle for something, something much less than it seems…”
It’s time to stop settling. “The working class is going to have to look at itself as a whole and say, ‘Our divisions in race, politics, religion, sectors of the workforce — all that will have to be laid aside,’” he says. “It’s a ‘workers of the world, unite’ situation. We’re all in it together against the billionaire class, and it’s going to take that in the fight to win.”
Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a labor writer for In These Times, a labor columnist at Teen Vogue and Fast Company, and regularly contributes to many other publications. Her first book, FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor, is now available from One Signal/Simon & Schuster. Follow her on Twitter at @grimkim and subscribe to her newsletter, Salvo, here.
