Kanye West has been a troubled guy for a long time now. Anyone who’s a fan of his work (most people under 40) saw this whole mess coming for a while. After 808s, and the loss of his mother Donda, Kanye has seemed, well… off. In the last few years, as his mental health has slipped further and further away from its tethers to reality, his publicity stunts have become more and more extreme, lacking any sort of ties to his work. He’s clearly not well.
In this, the latest episode of the Kanye West Show, he’s developed into someone who embarks on endless antisemitic tirades. He regurgitates half-baked conspiracy theories, doubles and triples down on them in interviews, each one slightly more unhinged than the last. In an interview with Piers Morgan last week, he put the veteran blowhard on the defensive, being forced to take the side of the offended in the face of a manic and ranting West.
Since Kanye’s first remarks, there’s been some fierce debate in the Jewish world, some choosing to defend him as he plays shows in Israel, others not allowing him even a smidge of allowance for what is clearly, at least partially, the manic rantings of someone quite unwell.
But this weekend’s events have shown that regardless of what’s happening in the confines of West’s tortured mind, his actions and words are seeping out into the real world of real hate towards real Jews.
The ‘Goyim defence league’, a tiny collective of attention-seeking provocateurs, has co-opted Kanye’s message, turning it into a new campaign on a freeway in LA, Covering a concrete bridge with signs proclaiming that ‘Kanye West is right”.
Hate in America:
— Oren Segal (@orensegal) October 23, 2022
Yesterday, the head of an antisemitic and white supremacist group (and his supporters) dropped banners over the 405 in Los Angeles. One banner read, "Kanye is right about the Jews.” pic.twitter.com/FQBFIm0WLX
This is an unambiguous attempt to threaten and harass Jews in America's second-biggest city. It’s racist, it’s hateful, and the sort of thing that many will see as a canary in the coal mine amidst a backdrop of rising antisemitic incidents across the world.
There’s a pretty good chance that this group, not ones to particularly need a rationale to go on a big anti-Jewish campaign, would have done something like this without Kanye’s ranting over the last month - indeed they pulled the same stunt in 2020. But when someone with a profile as big as West is given breathless wall-to-wall coverage of every hateful thing he chooses to spit out into the world, regardless of how ill he is, then it gives racists like this cover.
It allows them to use Kanye’s cultural capital, earned over a remarkable 20-year career, and utilise it for hating Jews. It appeals to anyone that’s ever heard of Kanye, potentially offering someone a new route into the oldest hate.
It’s no longer about Kanye West, It’s no longer about his circus of enablers in the media and Twitter. The only way this ends is if enough people with the same clout as Kanye start speaking out. As he slowly burns his professional bridges and fizzles into irrelevance, the messages he espouses must be condemned, even if you have the patience and understanding to realise that the ramblings of the mentally ill sometimes do not reflect the real person.
If celebrities don’t have the balls to come for Kanye directly, they should be comfortable condemning the virulent ideas that are taking hold because of him.
