Last weekend, the Joe Biden campaign debuted a new advertisement that spotlighted the plight of independent venues during the coronavirus pandemic. It was notable not only for its message but for the music featured in it, as it included a rare licensed song from the Beastie Boys, who almost never allow their music to be featured in ads.

The video was centered around the Ann Arbor venue The Blind Pig, which has been open for almost 50 years, and was narrated by the bar’s current owner Joe Malcoun. “Right now, it’s an empty room,” Malcoun said in the advertisement. “This is the reality of Trump’s COVID response. We don’t know how much longer we can survive not having any revenue.”

The ad has now been pulled after Malcoun received threats after conservative publications and the Donald Trump campaign latched onto the fact that Malcoun was a wealthy tech investor as well as the owner of the bar, which he purchased with a group of investors in 2017. In a 2018 interview, Malcoun explained that his wife inherited a large sum of money from her grandfather, which allowed him to make investments into companies. “We knew there was something, but we never knew the extent of it, and it was almost like winning the lottery and we were very young,” he said in that interview.

The Biden campaign say they were aware of Malcoun’s background before agreeing to the ad, and a spokesman for the Biden campaign told The New York Times this:

The price for having a voice in our political process cannot be endless harassment. And yet, that is what Joe Malcoun and his family currently face as he was doxxed, harassed and threatened after the Trump campaign has sought to smear a community leader who dared to speak out against Trump’s failed response to the Covid crisis. It is shameful.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign said: “In their desperation to pin something else on the president, they fabricated a story in a last-ditch effort to lie to voters because nothing else has worked — and they got caught.”

The ad, which has been pulled from YouTube and television, still lives on in a tweet:

For more information about the immense struggles venues face because of the government’s pandemic response, visit the National Independent Venue Association website.