Kanye West’s antisemitism has no deeper meaning. Stop looking.
Explanations for
Kanye West’s antisemitism and anti-Black conservative views have become a cultural industry unto themselves, and no wonder. The multihyphenate artist now legally known as Ye is a kind of political kaleidoscope. From one angle, his descent invites debates about what mental illness does and doesn’t do to those who suffer from it. From another, it’s about what kind of Black person conservatives are willing to embrace.
All these questions are beside the point. Antisemitism is a scourge, no matter how a person arrives at it. Analyzing West’s trajectory or the meaning of his descent won’t provide a definitive explanation of him, or of anyone else. The only thing this endless analysis achieves is to repeat and rebroadcast this bile. West’s rants against “Jewish Zionists” and “the Jewish media” are a tired repetition of one of the oldest, and most dangerous, antisemitic tropes portraying Jews as some sort of transnational cabal that controls the world. This is hate speech, pure and simple.
West claimed on the “Drink Champs” podcast Sunday that the threat that got him suspended by Instagram and Twitter — “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” — was a misspelling. He said he actually meant “DEFCON 3,” one of the graduated states of readiness of the U.S. armed forces. The most charitable interpretation is that he wasn’t saying he wanted to kill Jews, just that he wanted to go to war with them.
West’s words do not come in a vacuum. The Anti-Defamation League said in April that there were 2,717 reported incidents of antisemitic assault, harassment and vandalism in the United States in 2021 — an all-time high since the ADL began tracking such incidents four decades ago, and a stunning 34 percent increase over 2020. During a peak in May 2021, wrote ADL National Director Jonathan Greenblatt, “Jews were being attacked in the streets for no other reason than the fact that they were Jewish.” Those who loathe and scapegoat Jews as “the other” should be denounced and left to spew their garbage in the privacy of their homes, or, in West’s case, their mansions.
But in a dangerous sign, some on the far right are giving West a platform to denounce the supposed left-leaning
“elites” who have censored him. That’s a convenient, but ugly, way to rebrand the unique evil of antisemitism as just another unfairly marginalized view.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson did just that in a lengthy recent interview with West. Carlson edited out West’s antisemitic ravings from their interview, focusing instead on West’s recent appearance during Paris Fashion Week wearing a “White Lives Matter” Tshirt. West was accompanied by right-wing provocateur Candace Owens, who is African American and has denounced the Black Lives Matter movement, and who wore a similar outfit.
West didn’t offer much of an explanation, saying, “I do certain things from a feeling. I just channel the energy. It just feels right. It’s using a gut instinct, connection with God and just brilliance.”
But for Carlson’s purposes, West didn’t have to be coherent. Carlson was able to present to his viewers a famous Black man who was being “punished” for holding views abhorred by the gatekeeping cultural “elites.” West’s embrace of conspiracy theories isn’t limited to antisemitic paranoia. Indeed, West even doubts the proven facts of the event that brought the Black Lives Matter issue to international prominence: the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. His pal Owens has released a preposterous “documentary” claiming that the sequence of events proved in court — and witnessed by the world via cellphone video — did not actually happen.
“They hit with the fentanyl,” West said on the Sunday podcast. “If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that. They said he screamed for his mama. Mama was his girlfriend. It’s in the documentary.”
None of that is true. The medical examiner ruled that Floyd’s death was a homicide, caused by cardiac arrest resulting from the pressure of police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck. Chauvin was convicted of murder and is serving a 22½-year prison sentence.
In the podcast, West combined his antisemitism and selfloathing into the slander that “Jewish people have owned the Black voice.” In truth, however, it is West’s voice that is being “owned” and used by farright grifters seeking to profit by stoking White populist anger against both Jews and African Americans. If that’s what it means to be free and independent, count me out.
And count me out of the search for meaning in West’s descent. There is no deeper insight here, just the truth that antisemitism is noxious, and that we’re a tragically long way from defeating it.