Being a terrible human being hasn’t been an obstacle to making good, or even just interesting, music. Kanye West is just a Jerry Lee Lewis for the 21st century. But making popular music shouldn’t be a defense against repudiation. Kanye West is finding that out.
The rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, sent an Instagram post Friday suggesting fellow musician Sean “Diddy” Combs was controlled by Jewish people — a common antisemitic trope. Within hours, Instagram had removed the post and locked his account.
That sent Ye to Twitter, where he was publicly welcomed back by Elon Musk, who may soon take ownership of the company. Within hours, however, Ye had posted a separate antisemitic tweet that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Twitter, like Instagram, was quick to block the post and lock his account.
Unforgivable. That is Nazi shit, and it doesn’t matter that it’s coming out of a black man’s mouth. Actually, it may matter a great deal: conservative free-speech warriors are using it as an excuse to lay the groundwork for permitting antisemites and racists to freely promote their rotten ideas. They want to be able to shriek antisemitic jargon on the internet; they want to normalize it so that newspapers can freely post editorials blaming a Jewish cabal for every problem; they want it to get so familiar that they can sneak debates about “the Jewish question” into school rooms. That’s the future we should dread.
But a conservative-led movement to rein in what some see as “censorship” by Silicon Valley giants is poised to alter how they approach such decisions. Between a growing field of state laws that seek to restrict content moderation and Elon Musk’s determination to loosen Twitter’s policies, posts such as Ye’s could soon become more prevalent online.
A law passed by Texas last year, which could become a model for other Republican-led states if upheld by the courts, prohibits large online platforms from censoring users or limiting their posts based on the political views they express. Legal experts told The Washington Post that such laws would make it much riskier for social media companies such as Meta, which owns Instagram, and Twitter to moderate even blatantly antisemitic posts such as Ye’s.
And Musk has said that one of his goals for Twitter, should he complete a $44 billion deal to purchase the company and take it private, is to provide a forum for legal speech of all kinds. “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed,” he tweeted in May.
I guess death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE
is a kind of political statement, but it’s also something much more. It’s hate speech. It’s a threat of violence against people for the crime of being born to a certain set of parents. It’s a promise of cultural annihilation, the eradication of a people’s traditions and ideas. What’s also disturbing is that conservatives seem perfectly willing to equate those kinds of eliminationist views with their own political philosophy.
Offensive posts are nothing new on social media, of course. But the largest platforms, including Meta, Twitter, Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok, have become much more active in recent years in developing and enforcing rules that restrict posts deemed threatening or hateful toward other users or groups of people. Those efforts have at times drawn backlash from prominent conservatives, from former president Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Musk, who argue tech companies have gone too far in suppressing conservative voices.
So, telling people that they can’t go around threatening to murder other people is “suppressing conservative voices”? That’s a confession. Apparently, killing people who are different in some way has now become a conservative value.
I’m all in favor of suppressing conservatives then, just as I’m in favor of suppressing the KKK.
I don’t know if he pushing buttons to monetize his products (backfiring!) or in a manic phase or both. If memory serves Diddy said enough is enough and threw shade on Kanye’s latest stunt, the contrarian White Lives Matter nonsense. He and Candace Owen are carving space in the contrarian black conservative zone, but Kanye’s latest antics may be further than she’d push.
On the Diddy response tirade Kanye said: “The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also” [ https://www.npr.org/2022/10/09/1127732183/kanye-west-instagram-twitter ] …which sounds Black Israelite. Weird and inflammatory stuff. Some Black Power offshoots, typically Nation of Islam and others weirdly dovetail on similar conspiracy theories as white nationalist groups. They focus bile on Da Jews.
There’s also odd tropes that some nefarious “They” (Illuminati or maybe Jews?) are coercing black male celebrities to wear dresses. Not sure if Kanye has latched onto this sort of thing too.
He’s heading quickly over the same self-destructive cliff as Mel Gibson.
To me the worst thing about this sort of outburst is that it reveals that, apparently, the person has felt that way for a long time – they’re only just now letting it show. So Kanye has been walking around hating on Jews for years but biting back the filth in his mind so it doesn’t come out of his mouth. Now, he reveals what he really thinks. It’s not cancel culture or wokeness, it’s that he revealed his inner attitude to be repulsive.
Ye, of course, ran to appear on Tucker Carlson and commiserate over being banned. He sounded sick, confused, and incoherent in the interview — he desperately needs a mental health intervention for that. His antisemitism, however, is not a symptom of mental illness, he’s just a bad little bigot.
“He and Candace Owen are carving space in the contrarian black conservative zone, but Kanye’s latest antics may be further than she’d push.”
Think again. Candace has gone all-in on defending Kany, claiming his antisemitic tweets are not antisemitic at all.
I see the Ye learned history his Jewish history from the Apostle Rufus in the movie Dogma.
Damn thee infernal device!!
I see Ye learned Jewish history…
Is making death threats legal?
So… we’re all shocked that the stalker creep who is busy stalking his ex-wife is also racist AF?
Why?
Haters seldom limit themselves to just one flavor.
Sure, Ye is definitely in need of an intervention for a lot of things (SO MANY things) which is admittedly unlikely to happen, at least until he is forcibly committed or put on involuntary hold. But mental illness doesn’t make you a bigot, it just turns the inside voice into the outside voice.
If you could wave a magic wand and take away Ye’s mental illness(es?), he’d still be a creep and a bigot.
@5 well, you beat me to it, but you weren’t the only one who thought it.
PZ;
Or, as some would would phrase it,
“das judische frage”.*
BTW the only black jews I have heard about come from Ethiopia.
(*der frage? I can never recall gendered German words. )
Nerd reaction.
The only impressive “Ye” I ever can recall is a soviet-era prefix for some Mach 2 aircraft designs by the Mikoyan – Gurevich design bureaux.
Or the town criers; “Hear ye, hear ye, Kanye West is an idiot”
I follow several black Americans on Twitter who are Jewish. It’s not that unusual. Sammy Davis Jr? Ever heard of him?
Look, Britney Spears ended up under a conservatorship for a lot less. Why has this jackass not been put under a 72 hour hold?!
Yes, thanks for reminding me of Sammy Davis.
I figure a lot of black people converted when Christianity was tightly associated with (even more) blatant racism.
Later, we got wossname (not Malcolm X, his guru) with Black Muslims, and he may have been instrumental in spreading anti-semitism among black comnunities (but there were probably several sources).
“…the same self-destructive cliff as Mel Gibson ”
Yes, but Gibson is nominally sane.
Kanye West has been so weird that signs of anti-semitism may have got lost in the background noise of crazy, until now.
@#13: Elijah Muhammad.
I always thought it was called DEFCON, defined as the “defense readiness condition” of the US Air Forces, back when SAC was packed full with B-36 “Peacemakers” before ICBMs made them obsolete.
Not that I needed any confirmation of him hanging askew off the hinge-jamb, but [Kan]Ye is a crazy xian, and christi-insanity is the ultimate “Death Con”, right?
And wasn’t jesus jewish anyway?
Bipolar disorder with psychotic features.
This mental illness does not get him off the hook for his awful tweets but doesn’t it give the anti right wing arguments strength if it gets promoted that they are quoting the rantings of a person who is bonafide delusional?
“…. Look, Britney Spears ended up under a conservatorship for a lot less. Why has this jackass not been put under a 72 hour hold?!….”
Isn’t the answer obvious? Britney was female.
I have no idea what death con 3 is. I doubt that Ye does either.
There is a military state called DEFCON for (Wikipedia): The defense readiness condition (DEFCON) is an alert state used by the United States Armed Forces.[1]
We are currently in the USA at DEFCON 4.
DEFCON 3 isn’t all that high.
We’ve only been at DEFCON 2 twice.
raven,
Raven, is it not clear to you? You wrote it yourself: [death con::defcon].
Artist-type, nearly homophonic claim.
So… working entirely on what you yourself wrote, “DEFCON 3 ROUND HOUSE Increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness Air Force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes”, and ““death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.””.
So that much is obvious, hopefully to you too now I’ve pointed it out.
And, of course, black people are “actually Jew:.
It follows that he advocates for “death con 3” on (sorry, On) himself.
(Perverse, but there it is)
PZ, no question that is some racist shit there, but I give some leeway to people with mental health disorders that predispose to paranoia (which I suspect is the case with Kanye). Disordered thinking makes it impossible for the person make rational judgements and they tend to pick up whatever paranoid conspiracies they stumble across. John Nash had antisemitic delusions, but only when his schizophrenia was active.
This is not to excuse antisemitism, and having a mental health condition doesn’t give an automatic pass. It also doesn’t mean we should let hate speech slide just because it came from someone with mental illness. This kind of hate speech should be blocked by social media platforms, regardless of Kanye’s mental state at the time of writing.
(Note: disordered thinking doesn’t just mean bad or illogical thinking, which is a pretty normal human experience; it denotes a severe disruption of logical connections, and anyone who has talked with someone in the middle of an acute psychosis would understand the difference between antisemitism due to reprehensible personal values and antisemitism due to a functional inability to have coherent thoughts, with paranoia that has attached itself to one of the many targets of hate in the community. I have met people with all sorts of psychotic delusions, including alien mind control, demonic possession, being hunted by the CIA, being a direct agent of god, having a doppelganger trying to displace them — and I don’t think we should be putting too much moral weight on these beliefs.)
The Kardashian orbit seems to be a very screwy place to be and I avoid that whole reality show hellhole like the plague, but just skimming Google News aggregation on a regular basis plants alien thoughts in my head. I don’t want them but there they are tormenting me every so often. This latest Kanye meltdown comes on the heels of his very public inability to not get past the bizarre linking of Kim with SNL alum Pete Davidson. Why do I know that? And why do I care? Hot mess doesn’t quite cover it. Seriously stalking vibe. I guess I’m forced to process it because it’s a public spectacle. I have no choice in the matter. Kinda like the Depp-Heard poopy bed.
There’s this (from the celebrity fishbowl): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leylamohammed/pete-davidson-kanye-west-kidnapped-decapitated-music-video
And this:
https://people.com/tv/pete-davidson-in-trauma-therapy-due-to-kanye-west-social-media-attacks-source/
So this latest barrage by Kanye is just another installment of an ever disturbing pattern of deterioration. I wouldn’t be interested but headlines keep calling out to me like a Grand Guignol. It might help to know that the Kardashians burst onto the scene as some bizarre echo of the OJ trial…another celebrity shitshow. Grand Guignol…
hemidactylus, Grand Guignol features brutal horror involving bloody gore, maiming, and murder.
Not quite the same thing.