The group closed its set during the second weekend of the Southern California festival by displaying a political montage on the venue's large LED screens while performing the 2016 track "Oblivius."
Bright mosque imagery gave way to a portrait of Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whose 1953 removal from power was a CIA-orchestrated coup carried out with Britain, as confirmed by declassified US documents.
As lead singer Julian Casablancas sang the lyrics "What side you standing on?", the visuals continued with references to CIA and Belgian plots against Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, as well as CIA-engineered overthrows of Bolivian president Juan José Torres and Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz.
The montage also highlighted CIA involvement in the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende and the plane-crash deaths of Panamanian military leader Omar Torrijos and Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós Aguilera.
It further included suspected government involvement in Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, with an on-screen title accusing the US government of being “found guilty of his murder in civil trial.”
The visual protest closed on footage stating that more than 30 universities in Iran have been struck since US-Israeli airstrikes began earlier this year, a figure reported by Iran’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
It was followed by a clip of Al-Israa University, the last standing university in the Gaza Strip before Israeli forces demolished it in 2024.
Clips of the performance spread online like a wild fire, with one clip surpassing 3.7 million views on X overnight, before X’s censorship machine took many of them down..