Image Credit: x screenshot 
The Strokes put the Central Intelligence Agency on blast during their Coachella performance, flashing various suspected CIA regime change coups and political assassinations on giant screens behind them.
The images, flashed as the band closed out their set on Sunday night, showed various foreign political leaders’ faces who the band claimed were overthrown by the CIA and other western governments, as vocalist Julian Casablancas sang “What side you standing on?”
This takes courage…
— Power to the People ☭🕊 (@ProudSocialist) April 19, 2026
The Strokes closed their Coachella set flashing images of the governments the CIA has overthrown, the leaders the US has assassinated including MLK 👀, the war crimes the US is committing in Iran, and the genocide Israel is committing in occupied Palestine. pic.twitter.com/9HnvgX1aUh
One image featured civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., with an accompanying statement reading, “USGOVT FOUND GUILTY OF HIS MURDER IN CIVIL TRIAL.”
More on the images shown behind the band from The Guardian:
The montage showed Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, who was executed in 1961 by a Congolese firing squad with the backing of Belgian military. Lumumba was killed amid a separate CIA conspiracy to assassinate him due to the threat he posed to western control over Congo’s mineral resources, though it was Belgium that admitted “moral responsibility” and apologised for his murder in 2002.
The montage also showed Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered plot in 1954; and Bolivian president Juan José Torres, who was ousted in 1971 and then kidnapped and killed five years later.
Also shown was Chilean president Salvador Allende, who killed himself during the 1973 CIA-backed coup that toppled his socialist government and brought in the brutal military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Though some still believe the US also played a role in Allende’s death, a scientific autopsy in 2011 confirmed there was “absolutely no doubt” he died by his own hand.
Other leaders shown in the montage included Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose removal from power in 1953 was exposed as a CIA-orchestrated coup in declassified US documents in 2013; and Martin Luther King Jr, who was assasinated in 1968 after years of surveillance by both the FBI and the CIA. However, US government involvement in his killing has never been proven and a department of justice investigation in 2000 found no evidence of a conspiracy.
The screens then went on to show images of slavery, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Black Lives Matter protests.
The slideshow culminated with a photo of rubble with overlaid text stating, “Over 30 universities destroyed in Iran,” before showing the “last university standing in Gaza” getting bombed.
Amid the performance, Casablancas reportedly told the audience he was “tempted to come out tonight with a laptop and show you guys some of those Iran Lego videos,” referring to propaganda videos released by the Iranian regime depicting perceived failures on the war front by the United States.
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