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“Kanye West once suggested slavery was a choice. He called the COVID-19 vaccine ‘the mark of the beast.’ Earlier this month, he was criticized for wearing a ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirt to his collection at Paris Fashion Week. Now the rapper who is legally known as Ye is again embroiled in controversy — locked out of Twitter and Instagram over antisemetic [sic] posts that the social networks said Sunday violated their policies. In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE’… ‘You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda,’ he said in the same tweet posted late Saturday, which was removed by Twitter.” AP News
Both sides condemn West’s antisemitic comments:
“Ye has promoted the notions that Jewish politicians are motivated solely by profit, that Jewish people exert an outsize level of control, and that Jews are actually black — the foundational and historically inaccurate claim at the center of the radical Black Hebrew Israelite ideology, which not only fueled two deadly attacks in December 2019 but also the waves of physical violence against Jews in black communities…
“When we consider this [in the] context of recent comments made by Ye, including the claim that Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, only pushed for the Abraham Accords to ‘make money’ or that ‘black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people’… [it is clear that] Ye is antisemitic.”
Ian Haworth, Washington Examiner
“It’s a common misconception that anti-Semitism is simply a personal prejudice toward Jewish people. It’s not. It’s also a conspiracy theory about how the entire world works, blaming shadowy Jewish figures for countless societal problems. Kanye’s tweets aptly illustrate why this form of anti-Semitism is so difficult to uproot: It’s a self-affirming conspiracy theory. The anti-Semite claims that Jews control everything. Then, if they are penalized for their bigotry, they point to that as proof. Heads, they win; tails, Jews lose…
“This dynamic creates an agonizing catch-22 for Jews when they are confronted with prejudice: If they say nothing, the hatred spreads unchecked. If they say something, and it results in any consequences for the anti-Semite, the bigot just uses that as evidence for their anti-Semitic worldview… There is no way for Jews to square this circle. Anti-Semitism is a non-Jewish problem, and it requires a non-Jewish solution.”
Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic
Other opinions below.
“[There are] good reasons why conservatives have taken positive notice of Kanye’s periodic forays into right-leaning politics, from denouncing abortion’s effects on black Americans to boosting Donald Trump to trolling the Black Lives Matter organization to going on Tucker Carlson…
“There is likewise value in the openly Christian elements of his music and his public speech. He’s bringing some conservative or right-leaning messages to people who don’t hear those messages very often, and he’s showing the courage to buck the leftist conformity of the industry and genre in which he swims. It helps that Kanye is, like J. K. Rowling or Elon Musk, too big to cancel…
“He’s a huge celebrity with some good ideas and some terrible ones. A healthy culture can recognize him as a talented artist and an occasionally useful partner in the culture wars, but we need not choose between excusing him at his worst or permanently ‘canceling’ him for it. On this occasion, there is no excusing.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
“Most celebrities from the entertainment and sports industries are center-left to progressive, which means we don’t get nearly the same kind of coverage for our values and positions. When any celebrity, especially an A-lister like Ye, suddenly offers any small hint of validation and coverage, they end up getting tons of promotion without any sort of thought as to what else they might say or believe, or even whether their statements are principled or just a trolling effort against one side or the other. When we do that, we find ourselves burned in the end, more often than not…
“We should make sure that (a) a sudden seeming convert to the Right is what they seem, (b) carefully consider prior actions as part of the evaluation, and (c) confirm that said celebrity can clearly argue from first principles rather than just push out talking points before rushing to promote him or her as a Hero of the Right. We have more allies than we know that can pass such scrutiny, even in the entertainment/sports celebrity industries, but episodes like this make it more difficult for them, and more difficult for everyone.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“West is often described as a ‘freethinker,’ but in the political space, he isn’t. He’s simply a Black artist willing to regurgitate conservative — sometimes bordering on white supremacist — talking points as if they were his own…
“West is the same man who in 2013 was selling merchandise with Confederate flags on tour. As he explained to a radio station that year about people’s appalled reactions: ‘Any energy is good energy. The Confederate flag represented slavery in a way. That’s my abstract take on what I know about it, right? So I wrote the song ‘New Slaves.’ So I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag. It’s my flag now.’ Kanye pitches it as co-option, but it is, in fact, basic shock-value antics that promote and normalize anti-Black hate symbols…
“As West put it himself, ‘any energy is good energy,’ which is just an almost spiritual, if jargony, way of reinterpreting what Oscar Wilde wrote in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ in the late 1800s: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ The spirit of that idea led to ‘all publicity is good publicity.’”
Charles M. Blow, New York Times
“The left-wing line on West, which amounts to ‘mental illness does not make you a bigot, only bigots are bigots’ is too simplistic and dismissive. Mental illnesses are not all alike, and painting them with a broad brush is silly…
“No, your anxiety does not make you spout antisemitic conspiracy theories. But a small number of serious mental illnesses can indeed make a person delusional, prone to conspiracy theories and extremely vulnerable to latching onto bigoted beliefs as a way of making sense of a world that, because of their mental state, has become unintelligible…
“It’s also possible that a person can be both a bigot and mentally ill… Those who know West personally and love him and have his best interests at heart should push him to hit pause, seek help and refrain from public provocations – and perhaps seek out a quiet life away from celebrity and out of the public eye.”
Jill Filipovic, CNN
