Kanye just blew up Republicans' plausible deniability about stoking anti-semitism
On Thursday afternoon, rapper Kanye West appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show to discuss the former’s theories about Jews. Jones is no stranger to peddling antisemitic tropes — in the interview, he expresses belief in a nefarious “Jewish mafia” — but West went further than even Jones likely imagined.
“You’re not a Nazi. You don’t deserve to be called that,” Jones says.
“Well, I see good things about Hitler,” Kanye replied.
In the interview, Jones tries to do damage control, telling West that “I’m not on that whole Jew thing” and cutting to a commercial just after West once again affirms, “I like Hitler.” But he couldn’t unring the bell. West, whom Jones was trying to stand up as a kind of free speech martyr, had expressed his support for Hitler. The effort to claim his celebrity for Jones’s cause had blown up in his face. (Jones has disavowed antisemitism in the past.)
What West says in this interview is despicable. His evolution into America’s most famous antisemite has almost certainly emboldened the antisemitic fringe — perhaps even endangering Jews.
In the process, West has also inadvertently exposed people like Jones for what they really are: wink-nudge enablers of antisemitism.
Since Donald Trump brought the far right into the GOP mainstream back in 2015, it has become increasingly common to hear coded language about Jews: attacks on “globalists” or “George Soros” that provide the speaker plausible deniability while signaling to antisemites that they’re on their side.
When Jews and anti-hate groups criticize these dog whistles, the people deploying them act shocked. “How dare you call us antisemitic! Why are you trying to shut down open discussion about the liberal agenda? Cancel culture!”
In the past few weeks, as West has drifted toward fringe conspiracy theories, many of these same actors have courted him as a potential ally. Donald Trump had dinner with him, Tucker Carlson had him on his show, and an official GOP Twitter account celebrated him. They all seemed to assume that West knew how to play the game — sell the anti-woke message, maybe even broadcast some dog whistles to the fringe, without actually crossing the line into out-and-out hate speech.
They were wrong.
How Kanye West killed the GOP’s plausible deniability
The current controversy started in early October. On the night of October 8, Kanye West tweeted that he planned to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Two days prior to that tweet, which came on the heels of another controversy about the rapper wearing a “white lives matter” T-shirt at a fashion show, Carlson had aired an interview with West claiming that he was being silenced for being a free thinker.
“Crazy? That was not our conclusion. We’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes,” Carlson told his audience.
In the interview, West went in on many of Carlson’s favorite topics. He railed against the alleged “genocide of the Black race” being perpetrated by Planned Parenthood and accuses “liberal Nazis” of trying to silence him (at this point, West still seemed to understand you should say that Nazis are bad).
After the interview aired, Vice acquired some of the footage that Carlson had cut from the conversation. In the clips, West expresses some paranoid beliefs — like that “fake children” and “professional actors” had been placed in his home to “sexualize [his] kids” — and made a series of strange and/or bigoted comments about Jews. “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering,” West told Carlson.
Of course, editing out those parts made sense from Carlson’s perspective. These clips showed the lie in Carlson’s claim that Kanye did not appear “crazy” in the interview. He knew what West had really said, how bizarre and offensive the uncut interview was. By cutting the (relatively) unhinged portions, Carlson could present a (relatively) mainstream West as a martyr for the conservative cause — and save West from his own blatantly antisemitic remarks.
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