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Kanye West’s antisemitic spiral, explained

Kanye West is dining with white supremacists and openly praising Hitler. How did we
get here?
By
Aja Romano @ajaromano

Updated
Dec 2, 2022, 11:56am EST

Kanye West at Paris Fashion Week, October 2022.

| Edward Berthelot/GC Images
Aja Romano
is a culture reporter for Vox, focusing on criticism and the ethics of culture. Before joining
Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot.

Fake children, lost Black tribes of Israel, and vast conspiracies, all leading to an incendiary
Thanksgiving-week dinner with Donald Trump and a hard-line white nationalist and public
praise of Hitler’s Nazi regime: This is not the Kanye West we used to know.

Ye, né Kanye, habitually draws headlines for more than just his music, whether it’s for his
outspoken comments on race and politics, his beefs with other artists, or his contentious
relationship and divorce from Kim Kardashian. Ye is so much, all the time, that it might be
easy to skim past the last several months of non-stop Ye controversy.

But even for Ye, his abrupt public embrace of antisemitism and counterintuitive right-wing
political rhetoric, resulting in his bringing avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes to dine
with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, has been disturbing. He’s since followed that up with a
swift tour of right-wing media, including an appearance on Infowars in which even the
famously incendiary Alex Jones had to counter Ye’s blatant antisemitism.

The controversy following the November 22 dinner has led to multiple defenses from
Trump, in which he consistently claimed to have no idea who Fuentes was but reportedly
chose not to distance himself from the ideologies espoused by West or Fuentes. In one
of his more recent attempts at disavowing the incident, issued on Truth Social on
November 26, Trump framed the entire event as a backfiring attempt to “help a seriously
troubled man” — that is, West himself.

Trump claimed Ye had asked him for “advice” on whether or not to launch another run for
president; three days after the dinner, West officially announced his candidacy. In a
since-deleted tweet accompanying the announcement, Ye shaded Trump, bragging that
he’d asked the former president to be his running mate, and praised Fuentes, describing
him as a loyalist. He also indicated he’d invited disgraced right-wing reactionary Milo
Yiannopoulos, whose controversial career flamed out in 2017 after old remarks surfaced in
which he defended pedophilic relationships, to be his campaign manager. Meanwhile, the
backlash against Trump has been so severe that it’s caused even formerly loyal Trump
advisors to distance themselves.

Kanye, however, has seemed completely unfazed — and unfortunately, his bizarre
antisemitic outbursts have only escalated. Following the Mar-a-Lago scandal, he appeared
on right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool’s podcast on November 28, accompanied by Fuentes and
Yiannopoulos. However, after a 20-minute rant against various individuals, in which he
repeatedly alleged a Jewish conspiracy to suppress him, Kanye abruptly ended the
interview when it seemed as though Pool might push back against his antisemitism by
resisting his guests’ use of “they” and “them.”

On December 1, the situation, somehow, worsened when Kanye appeared on The Alex
Jones Show. Over the course of the broadcast, he repeatedly praised Hitler and the Nazi
party, insisting that he “loves” Nazis and “likes” Hitler, and at one point blatantly declaring,
“The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of
value to the world.” His remarks placed Jones in the rare position of attempting to help
Kanye walk back his extremism by reminding him that Nazis “did a lot of very bad things.”

“But they did good things, too,” Ye responded. “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all of
the time.”

That was in the morning. By evening, Ye had been indefinitely suspended from Twitter
for posting an image of a Nazi swastika inside of a Star of David.

It might be hard to understand how West, in no time at all, has become a poster child for
antisemitism and white nationalism — but that’s partly because so much has happened so
quickly. Beginning with an October 3 appearance at Paris Fashion Week, through a
controversial Fox News interview — and unaired footage from it that was even more
controversial — and then on social media, Ye has revealed the latest phase of his bizarre
political evolution: A growing embrace of antisemitic conspiracy rhetoric, a turn toward
white supremacist rhetoric concerning the death of George Floyd, and the surprise
purchase of a controversial right-wing social platform.

On October 25, amid growing pressure, sportswear powerhouse Adidas announced it was
ending its longtime partnership with the rapper amid the controversy. Kanye’s relationship
with the company spanned almost a decade and included multiple collaborations with
Kanye’s billion-dollar clothing line, Yeezy.

Overall, Ye’s behavior and statements have raised public concern and debate over his
politics, the nature of his growing extremism, the state of his well-known mental health
issues, and whether anyone in his position should be given a platform at all.
Even more alarmingly, his recent hateful rhetoric has begun to embolden white
supremacists who’ve recently been spreading bigoted hate speech — and using West’s
name to bolster their arguments.

Ye has been careening through extremist conspiracy tentpoles

The hip-hop legend made headlines for all the wrong reasons when he showed up at Paris
Fashion Week to stage a guerrilla fashion show related to his own YZY clothing line. Ye
invited his friend of some years, controversial conservative pundit Candace Owens, to
attend the event, which the New York Times characterized as a messy “experience” that
was more about celebrating the aura of Ye than the clothes on the runway.

Ye and Owens used up every bit of media attention on themselves by wearing matching
“white lives matter” shirts, which she proudly shared on social media. The phrase
originated with extremist white supremacist groups in response to the Black Lives Matter
movement and is closely associated with white supremacist ideology.

The ensuing outrage this stunt provoked might have quickly faded like most Ye-related
outrage, had he not quickly followed it up with an even more shocking appearance on
Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. The interview, a two-hour pre-taped conversation with
Carlson, was filmed in response to Ye’s fashion show and aired over two nights on October
6 and 7. In the interview, Ye explained that he thought wearing the shirt would be “funny”
and a mark of both his “brilliance” and his connection to God. “The answer to why I wrote
‘white lives matter’ on a shirt is because they do,” he said. Carlson inserted commentary
throughout, reminding viewers to observe how sound of mind and rational West appeared.

Throughout the interview, Ye made provocative insinuations about Jews and money and
went on unprovoked tangents. His unsettling statements suggest he is growing increasingly
paranoid, adopting a range of bizarre conspiracy theories and delusions, and harboring
growing antisemitic tendencies. As disconcerting as the interview itself was, Vice later
reported that Carlson’s show strategically edited it to make Ye’s remarks appear more
coherent and less antisemitic than they apparently were. Even the broadcast footage was
striking, however.

At various points, Ye did seem to be his old trenchant self. He indicated he’s still, at least
nominally, thinking about the impact of racism, regardless of what T-shirts and hats he
wears. “For politicians, all Black people are worth is an approval rating,” he told Carlson, in a
direct criticism of Trump. “The Democrats ... and the Republicans feel that they don’t owe
us anything.”

But he also seemed fixated on the idea that Blackness itself is an identity that Black people
need to distance themselves from. The concept of Blackness was, he alleged, created by
white people. Instead, he offered up Black community power — through the form of real
estate development and financial control — as an alternative, bizarrely adding, “The people
that make money and the powers that be, I am your true Nikola Tesla.” It’s not clear what he
meant by this, but it sums up the interview as a whole: some sharp observations colliding
with a fixation on power, characterized by incoherence, grandiosity, and conspiracy
rhetoric.

Ye’s conspiratorial thinking was on display at several moments that made it to air — like
when he accused the media of conspiring to keep fellow rapper Lizzo fat in order to
promote “clinically unhealthy” lifestyles. (Lizzo seemed unfazed by the shade.) He
explained the media’s motive as “the genocide of the Black race.”

Ye also claimed to Carlson that “the people at The Gap” knew about the Uvalde mass
school shooting before it happened, a statement Carlson smoothly finessed into Ye
suggesting that it was a “coordinated message” from the media. (It’s not clear what the
connection was, but given Ye’s recent contractual disputes with The Gap, it seems
possible that Ye’s reference to “78 specific outlets” that he implied had coordinated a
shooting-related message was a reference to Gap outlets that Carlson misinterpreted as
media outlets.)

Unsettlingly, Ye accused Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of orchestrating Middle East

peace treaties in order “to make money” for himself. Then he added, “I think that’s what
they’re about. I don’t think that they have the ability to make anything on their own. I think
they were born into money.”

At the time of the interview airing, you could be forgiven if you interpreted Ye’s use of
“they” here as a reference to Trump’s relatives. But it would soon become alarmingly clear
that Ye was being straightforwardly antisemitic here, embracing one of the oldest, most
bigoted conspiracy theories — that Jewish people secretly control the world’s systems of
finance.

This became rapidly apparent once Ye blasted out more antisemitic remarks via Instagram
and his only recently revived Twitter account, in posts that both platforms have since
removed. Ye first posted to Instagram, sharing a long series of screenshot texts between
himself and fellow rap legend Sean Combs, after Diddy apparently tried to reach out to
share his concern for Ye promoting the “white lives matter” slogan. Ye, clearly angry, told
Diddy he was focused on selling his merch. Then he added, “Ima use you as an example to
show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.”

The outcry over Ye’s antisemitism was immediate and sustained, and his Insta posts were
quickly deleted. But Ye then tweeted into the ensuing wave of backlash. He revived his
account by linking a Forbes article about likely future Twitter owner Elon Musk
welcoming him back to the platform following his Instagram cancellation. In the same
tweet, however, he abruptly threatened the world’s 15 million Jewish people: “I’m a bit
sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 [sic] on JEWISH PEOPLE,” he
wrote, an apparent reference to going on “defcon” military alert.

Though this tweet was deleted — and Ye’s Twitter account was briefly locked in response,
though it was quickly unlocked — another, in which Ye seemed to rhetorically suggest
Jewish people invented cancel culture, initially remained online. It was also eventually
deleted.

The statements drew a wave of backlash from fellow celebrities and Jewish organizations.
LA’s Holocaust Museum invited him to visit; the Anti-Defamation League strongly
condemned him and began tracking his hateful statements. Musk tweeted that he’d
talked to Ye and expressed his concerns, which he indicated vaguely “I think he took to
heart.”

Incredibly, all of this happened before Vice revealed on October 11 that Carlson had
strategically edited his interview with Ye, and that the parts that didn’t air were even more
offensive and conspiratorial in nature.

Some of the edits were directly political, like Fox’s omitting Ye’s offhand comment that he
received the Covid-19 vaccine. But most fully undermined his credibility and claim to
rationality. Most of the unaired antisemitism regurgitated the “Jews control finance”
conspiracy theory, but some was convoluted and difficult to parse, like when he claimed
that Black people were the real “12 lost tribes of Judah,” a claim that seemed to be linked
to an extremist religious sect that believes Black people are really Jewish.

Most baffling of all, Ye claimed that fake children had been installed in his home to corrupt
his children.
As Vice reported:

“I mean, like actors, professional actors, placed into my house to sexualize my kids,” he told Carlson. He
referred to the “so-called son” of an associate, seemingly to imply the child was fake. “We don’t, we
didn’t even believe that this person was her son because he was way smarter than her, right?”

While this is all pretty heartbreaking for Yeezy fans, it didn’t stop there. During an October
16 appearance on Revolt’s Drink Champs podcast, Kanye brought up Owens’s recently
released propaganda film, Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM. (The
podcast episode has since been removed.)

“I watched the George Floyd documentary that Candace Owens put up ... They hit him with
the fentanyl,” he said. “If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that.”
Owens’s film purports to question the official findings about Floyd’s death, bolstering a
thoroughly debunked argument used by Derek Chauvin’s defense at his trial for Floyd’s
murder. Kanye then went on to protest “the Jewish media” for censoring him.

Kanye is clearly smarting from recent run-ins with media and social media platforms that
have censored him for hateful rhetoric and disinformation. On October 17, the controversial
platform Parler announced that Kanye West would be acquiring it for an undisclosed
amount. Parler is known for housing right-wing extremism, harboring disinformation and
conspiracy theories, and welcoming Donald Trump after he was banned from Twitter, all
under the banner of free speech. It’s currently owned by Owens’s husband, George Farmer,
who told the Wall Street Journal that conversations about the purchase arose during
Owens’s appearance at Kanye’s fashion show.

This is obviously a lot to process. But the basic problem with all of these statements is that
it’s unclear how much is pure trolling for publicity, how much Ye really believes, and how
much his long history with bipolar disorder has spiraled into a disturbing increase of volatile
behavior and activity. (Bipolar disorder, of course, does not cause antisemitism.)

This question has hovered over his public behavior for years, but especially ever since his
very public breakup with Kardashian: That is, is he embracing a deliberately edgy public
performance in order to commandeer the spotlight, perhaps to sell products or draw
people to his growing religious commune? Or is he truly going down a mental health
rabbit hole, the way so many people have as they get drawn into conspiratorial beliefs or
struggle with personal stressors?
Unfortunately, this nuance doesn’t matter to the actual white supremacists and
antisemitic extremists whose own bigoted ideas have found mainstream expression
thanks to Kanye. On Saturday, October 22, antisemitic demonstrators in Los Angeles rallied
on a freeway overpass, displaying a banner declaring “Kanye was right.” Over that same
weekend, residents in Beverly Hills were targeted with bigoted fliers promoting hate
speech and antisemitic propaganda. While the demonstrations have reportedly been
happening in the area for several weeks, Ye’s comments appear to have added fuel to an
already blazing fire.

And that’s to say nothing of the actual white supremacists, like Fuentes and Yiannopoulos,
that Ye is directly amplifying and bringing to renewed prominence.

Kanye West loves a controversy

Prior to 2005, West largely confined his controversial opinions to his excellent hip-hop
albums, but that changed with Hurricane Katrina. A live celebrity-studded fundraising
effort during the disaster went completely off the rails when West, standing next to a
dumbfounded Mike Myers, famously shone a spotlight on the inherent racism behind
the Bush administration’s handling of the disaster: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black
people.”

In his current conservative mode, Ye has since attempted to distance himself from that
statement, saying it represented a “victimized mentality.” But at the time, what made this
moment instantly historic was not only the greater truth it represented about politics and
racism, but Ye’s casually blunt approach, as if there was nothing else he could have said
and he wouldn’t even know how to approximate saying anything else more polite.

It was the same casually shocking approach he used when interrupting Taylor Swift’s
award acceptance at the 2009 VMAs four years later to declare straightforwardly that
Beyoncé should have won instead — another legendary moment that spawned the
subsequent decade-long feud between Swift, West, and Kardashian. Heading into the
2010s, West steadily ramped up both his interpersonal conflicts and his edgy,
unpredictable behavior: His early friendship with Drake abruptly became another decade-
long feud when he cut Drake from his 2010 single “All of the Lights.”

2013 saw him first dally with white supremacist symbols, wearing a confederate flag that
he claimed he was attempting to “reclaim.” He also sold the flag shirt as merch for his
“Yeezus” tour that year. The debate about that stunt was essentially the same as the
debate we’re having today: Was Ye genuinely trying to create discussion and dialogue, and
if so, what kind of dialogue could be created around such an incendiary symbol? Or was it a
pure publicity stunt? In 2013, though, West had yet to publicly flirt with white supremacist
principles, so this debate in the abstract felt less real than it subsequently would.

By 2016, however, he was voicing his support for Trump and wearing MAGA hats. In 2018,
he caused public outrage when he stated during an appearance at TMZ that slavery was
“a choice.” In 2020, he ran for president himself, albeit in the most erratic way possible.
P.R. Lockhart smartly outlined West’s political evolution for Vox, pointing out that it’s
always been linked to his quest for cultural power and influence. Somewhere around the
time he was donning the confederate flag, he seemed to become enamored with the idea
of co-opting controversial iconography and rhetoric, as if absorbing them into his personal
brand could negate their power. But over time, his use of symbols and rhetoric have grown
more extreme and more violent — so much so that it’s gotten hard to keep track — and
further gotten hard to tell how much of this is irony, how much of it is innocence, and how
much of it is a sincere embrace of white supremacist rhetoric.

Complicating all of this is his mental health. In 2020, he raised widespread alarm for what
seemed to be a significant mental health spiral during the deterioration of his
relationship with Kardashian. Throughout 2022, he’s drawn repeated concern over his
artistic depictions of his ex-wife’s then-boyfriend Pete Davidson, after repeatedly
describing Davidson’s murder. Again, we have to ask: Is it a real obsessive fixation, or is it
trolling? And at what point does it stop mattering?

Throughout this period, he’s been drawn to critique the idea of “cancellation” and criticism.
Promotion for his 2021 album Donda saw him conflagrating a stage version of his
childhood home at a concert featuring musicians Marilyn Manson and DaBaby, who have
been accused of sexual assault and homophobia, respectively. All of this suggests he’s
creating an insulated bubble for himself that renders him impervious to criticism. After all,
troublesome artists who’ve been criticized themselves are arguably less likely to judge him
for his own controversial behavior. And we saw how he reacted when Diddy tried to reason
with him. This is a man who, after all, has always had a god complex.

On top of everything, he’s seemingly going down a very niche religious path — both through
his quirky “Sunday Service” and his new “mysterious religious school.” As we’ve seen
with another recent celebrity downward spiral, that of Ezra Miller, the whole “cult-like
religious commune” thing will likely inflate his ego and validate the narrative of specialness
he’s writing himself into — none of which is likely to encourage him to seek help for
whatever is going on with him.

Ye’s rhetoric has brought significant consequences. High-end designer Balenciaga

dropped Ye as a partner around October 20, amid the growing backlash. Hollywood’s
powerful Creative Artists Agency, which represented Kanye on tours, dropped him as a
client on October 24. MRC, the film production company behind successes like Knives
Out, Ted, and Netflix’s Persuasion, announced in a lengthy callout post on its website on
October 24 that it would no longer move forward with plans to distribute its recently
completed documentary on Kanye’s life. “The silence from leaders and corporations when
it comes to Kanye or antisemitism in general is dismaying but not surprising,” the
company’s leaders stated.

In the biggest blow to Kanye’s fortunes, his lucrative partnership with Adidas was initially
under review and ultimately dissolved. Under growing scrutiny, the company announced
on October 25 that it was ending its partnership with Ye and his Yeezy clothing line. The
sportswear giant said in the statement that pulling its Yeezy collaboration would cost it up
to 250 million euros, or $248 million, in net 2022 income. Still, “Ye’s recent comments and
actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous,” the company stated. Kanye
boasted on the Drink Champs podcast that he could “say antisemitic shit and Adidas can’t
drop me ... now what? Now what?”

It’s a good question. Perhaps the dismay of his own fans will prove to be a corrective; in
reaction to his latest wave of pro-Nazi rhetoric and overt Holocaust denialism, Reddit’s
r/Kanye sub declared itself over and began filling with Holocaust awareness posts (and,
more humorously, odes to Taylor Swift). “We had a good thing,” ran one post, riffing off a
Breaking Bad meme. “[W]e had Jay Z, we had the best album of all time, we had everything
we needed and it all ran like clockwork. You could have shut your mouth, sang, and made as
much money as you needed, but you just had to blow it up, you and your pride and your
ego.” On December 1, the same day West appeared on Alex Jones to tout Hitler, Billboard
tweeted — then quickly deleted — an announcement that Kanye West was the year’s top-
selling gospel artist. If Ye’s looking for validation from fans, he’s losing it fast.

In perhaps the most telling sign of change, the House Republican Judiciary Committee’s
official Twitter finally deleted its controversial “Kanye. Elon. Trump” tweet. The account
had tweeted the incendiary statement in October, implying that West, Trump, and new
Twitter owner Elon Musk were heralding a new cultural era of right-wing political
ascension. Apparently there’s no room in that group for Hitler.

Still, thus far, the fallout from his behavior and rhetoric has only made Kanye double down,
and as long as he’s able to find media to platform his reprehensible views, he’s committed
to airing them. It’s unclear whether those outlets will manifest now that he’s begun praising
Nazi Germany. What is clear is that the Ye we see before us isn’t the Ye we once knew. The
clear-sighted Kanye of 2005 and 2009 has been replaced by a guy who claims people are
hiring out replacement children just to mess with him.

Ye answers to almost no one, so it’s unclear what, if anything, can get through to him and
curb his mayhem, especially following his divorce from and anger toward Kardashian.
Certainly, it won’t be a smirking Tucker Carlson, encouraging him by telling him he’s
“speaking the truth.” Someone needs to speak the truth to Ye about himself — if anyone
still can.

Update, December 2, noon ET: This story, originally published on October 12, has been
updated multiple times, most recently to include information about Kanye’s latest
appearances in right-wing media and the reactions to them.

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