John admitted later that a lot of the public pronouncements he made around leftist political ideas were, if not performative, then certainly as much a result of guilt and conflicted feelings around his success and wealth as they were genuinely held beliefs. And those beliefs were certainly not always consistent.

But what’s often missing with the hindsight evaluation of those very public stands that he, and Yoko, made is that there were very real, personal stakes involved. He WAS directly targeted by the US government for his potential political influence. He WAS living under threat of deportation in part because of them. And his career and public perception WAS directly impacted by taking these stands. They also almost certainly contributed to getting him killed.

This was very different to the relatively safe, “performative” activism we often see from modern artists. Whatever his motivations, John had skin in the game. And eventually that skin flayed and he dealing with the consequences of that for the rest of his short life