'I Love Hitler:' Kanye West Spews More Antisemitism on X
After nearly two years of keeping his damn mouth shut about the Jews, one of the world's most prominent bigots returns to reaffirm the hatred in his heart.
“If I had ever been here before / I would probably know just what to do / Don't you?
If I had ever been here before on another time around the wheel / I would probably know just how to deal / With all of you
And I feel / Like I've been here before
We have all been here before / we have all been here before”
— Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Deja Vu” from 1970 …
I am very sorry to inform everyone that one of the many demons chewing on the soul of former billionaire Kanye West has again chosen to use social media to promulgate neo-Nazi hate against the Jewish people, the LGBTQ community, and Caucasians.
Here are screenshots of his postings—viewed by million of people—made today on X:
A friendly reminder:
Back on November 22, 2022, I started a series on antisemitism (which ultimately reached 100 installments) by writing about West dining with neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes and President Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
I wrote about the Sieg Heil heard ‘round the world here:
How interesting that, amidst all this hate, West took a moment to express his love for a genocidal, authoritarian regime:
Now, I already know what many people will say to my highlighting the threat of a far-right neo-Nazi like West:
“Nazis are so marginal, and there’s, like, none of them out there. The real antisemitic threat is coming from the woke leftists!”
There’s this tendency by ignorant leftists and self-righteous right-wingers to want to insist that the “real” antisemitism threat is solely on the other side, that the antisemites in their own ideological movement are marginal and without influence.
This is some bullshit, OK?
Strap yourself in! We’re taking a trip on the wayback machine: It’s time for a history lesson.
Here’s the newest book on antisemitism that I’ve added to the growing collection:
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is by David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago and also the director of the school’s Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He is the author of such other titles as Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Medieval and Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2014) as well as co-author of Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
I have only just begun this 610-page book, digging into the scholarly depth of its first chapter on antisemitism in the ancient world, starting with the narratives about Jews that developed in Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It’s one of those books that one needs to read slowly, since it’s so dense in its facts and analysis.
Here is the table of contents:
Expect more references to Nirenberg’s book in my future writing on antisemitism. The perspective he provides is astonishing and illuminating.
I thought it important to include the entire table of contents from the book to establish what should be an obvious fact: Throughout history, different cultures have fomented hate against the Jewish people in different times, at different places, under different circumstances, and to accomplish different goals. What we oversimplify as “antisemitism” is not a unified, singular problem. It’s not akin to a virus. It’s more like the very concept of disease itself.
There are so many different forms of antisemitism that emerge for so many different reasons that it’s just deeply wrong to understand this as one movement or concept. It’s more apt to understand antisemitism as a central component in many different forms of neo-pagan, death-worshipping ideology, which we merely choose to categorize with the ideological labels “far right,” “far left,” “Islamist” and so forth.
I explained aspects of this in earlier installments of the “Antisemitism and Culture” series:
Let’s go down the line and label some of the forms of antisemitism out there, using only the categories named by Nirenberg in the table of contents above: Egyptian empire, Greek empire, Roman empire, early Christianity (think “synagogues of Satan”), the early Christian church, Islam, the Medieval period, Spain, the Inquisition, the Reformation, Shakespearean England, the Enlightenment, modern revolutionary movements, and the centuries of philosophers who inspired them.
While these various strains of antisemitism have intermingled and often blended together, it does not change the reality on the ground that these are all different groups and they need to be understood as different kinds of threats—not just to Jews, but to all people.
Yes, to all. And often, some of the most dangerous threats today come from neo-Nazis on the far-right.
Here’s a story that I wrote this week for The Algemeiner:
US federal prosecutors in Maryland have convicted 29-year-old Brandon Russell, co-founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, for planning to strike the state’s power grid in hopes of sparking a racial war.
On Monday, after an hour of deliberation, a jury found Russell guilty of one count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, the Associated Press reported. He had developed the plan to use a sniper rifle to shoot at electrical substations around Baltimore with his girlfriend Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, who a judge sentenced on Sept. 25, 2024 to 18 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release after her acceptance of a plea deal.
Russell faces as much as 20 years imprisonment; his defense attorney Ian Goldstein said they plan to file an appeal and that his client’s conviction was a result of “a setup from the very beginning.” Prosecutors said that had Russell’s plot succeeded, the damage could have topped $75 million.
Yes, the pro-Hamas protests by campus leftists and the usual neo-Marxist groups have been horrifying to see. Yes, they’ve committed plenty of crimes. But they’re usually not engaging in the same level of violence that neo-Nazis do.
We can have some discussion about whether there is a higher quantity of antisemites on the far left or the far right if you deeply insist. At this point, I don’t think we can really know for sure. I haven’t seen any sort of empirical research yet establishing this one way or the other. While the ADL and others can poll broadly about antisemitic attitudes and specific antisemitic tropes, it’s much harder to try to establish numbers of specific types of antisemites. It may not even be possible yet with modern polling techniques. (But if anyone does know of solid data of this type, then please share it in the comments.)
When it come to antisemites, the intensity—the quality—of the hate may often make more of a difference than a larger quantity of milder believers. The ignorant far-left college students out chanting in the quad for Hamas lack the intensity of neo-Nazis like Brandon Russell and his girlfriend, Sarah Beth Clendaniel, who actively plan terrorist attacks. I wrote so many news articles over the last two years about police arresting some neo-Nazi for some minor crime, only to discover a cache of weapons and Third Reich memorabilia at their homes.
And so we return to conclude with Mr. Kanye West.
West has sold more than 39 million albums. Forbes estimates that he possessed a net worth of more than $2 billion at his peak, with his fortune now down to $400 million following his initial antisemitic outbursts.
But he still possesses a huge microphone, amplified by a website owned by the wealthiest man in the world.
His actions are fueling the hate that creates more lost souls like Russell and Clendaniel.
We must oppose him and his acolyte, Candace Owens, with just as much ferocity as we would Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Don’t let your partisanship blind you to moral clarity.
Update, 2/10/2025: West has deleted his X account and started selling Swastika t-shirts on his Yeezy website.
Updated, 2/11/2025: The online store to buy the shirts has now shut down.
To the surprise of absolutely no one