POLITICS
Virulently antisemitic comments by Kanye West
spark new GOP criticism
“I like Hitler,” Ye told right-wing conspiracy
theorist Alex Jones, later adding: “I love Jewish people, but I also love
Nazis.”
By ANTHONY
ADRAGNA and OLIVIA OLANDER
12/01/2022
04:28 PM EST
Updated:
12/01/2022 10:27 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/01/ye-antisemitism-republicans-hitler-00071695
A
virulently antisemitic Thursday interview with Ye by right-wing conspiracy
theorist Alex Jones is sparking new GOP condemnation of the rapper formerly
known as Kanye West, nine days after Ye brought a white supremacist to dine
with Donald Trump.
Ye appeared
on Jones’ “InfoWars” show with Nick Fuentes, his guest during the Trump dinner
— a known racist and antisemite — and made a host of antisemitic comments with
his face covered by a black mask, repeating the lie that the Holocaust did not
happen and praising Adolf Hitler.
The GOP,
which once seemed to revel in associating with the rapper’s erratic behavior
and vocal support for Trumpism, has now faced a series of Ye-related headaches
in just the past few weeks — from the antisemitic comments that got him kicked
off Twitter, to making hateful and ahistoric claims on right-wing media, to his
association with Trump himself.
New York
Rep. Lee Zeldin, one of the few Republican Jewish members of Congress who
narrowly lost his bid for governor this year, condemned the rapper in a
statement.
“Kanye West
is a deranged antisemite. I want absolutely nothing to do with that lunatic.
He’s totally bad news,” he told POLITICO.
The
Republican Jewish Coalition slammed the Ye-Fuentes appearance with Jones, who
was recently ordered to pay $965 million in damages to those who suffered from
his lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax, as a
“horrific cesspool of dangerous, bigoted Jew hatred.”
Without
mentioning Trump by name, the GOP Jewish group urged “all political leaders to
reject these messengers of hate and relegate them to the dustbin of history
where they belong,” a reference to Ye, Fuentes and Jones. The group added:
“Conservatives who have mistakenly indulged Kanye West must make clear that he
is a pariah. Enough is enough.”
Rep. Ashley
Hinson (R-Iowa), a rising star in the GOP, tweeted that Ye’s “anti-Semitic
comments today were disgusting,” blasting the rapper in “the strongest possible
terms. We must call out this hateful rhetoric and root out anti-Semitism
wherever it rears its ugly head.”
The social
media platform Parler announced plans to halt their intent of sale to Ye on
Thursday, but said they had cut ties with him in mid-November.
Republican
lawmakers, who mostly declined to condemn Trump over his meal with Ye and
Fuentes, focused their fire primarily toward Fuentes in denouncing the meeting.
Ye’s
high-profile, unpredictable words and behavior have not stopped conservatives
from elevating him as a messenger of the MAGA movement and Christian
evangelism; the man who once declared that “George [W.] Bush doesn’t care about
Black people” swung drastically to the right, espousing support for Trumpism
and meeting with the former president multiple times.
Following
the Thursday interview, a Twitter account representing the House Judiciary
Committee’s GOP members deleted an October tweet that said simply “Kanye. Elon.
Trump,” appearing to praise Ye alongside the new owner of Twitter and the
former president. The tweet had drawn scathing criticism from Democrats on the
now-Musk-owned social platform as Ye escalated his public antisemitic comments
in recent months.
Ye himself
was restricted from Twitter in October, after posting that he would go “death
con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE.” He lost corporate partnerships, including celebrated
collections with Adidas and Gap, shortly after — even as the minority Judiciary
Committee tweet remained online.
A
spokesperson for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the party’s top member on the
Judiciary panel and its chair-in-waiting, did not immediately return a request
for comment on the tweet’s deletion.
Earlier in
October, conservative media personality Tucker Carlson hosted Ye in a lengthy
interview. The rapper had recently revealed a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt at
Paris Fashion Week.
“Is West
crazy? You can judge for yourself,” Carlson said before broadcasting nearly two
hours worth of the interview, in which Ye defended the “White Lives Matter”
message.
Ye, who
launched an independent presidential campaign in the 2020 cycle, has acknowledged
having bipolar disorder. However, no particular belief system is a symptom of
bipolar disorder, and “racism itself is not a mental health disorder,”
University of Georgia Prof. Isha Metzger told the Washington Post last month.
The raw
footage of the interview included even more disconcerting content than what
appeared on TV, Vice News later reported, including strange metaphors about
Black people and an implication that Jewish people participate in “financial
engineering,” a historically antisemitic claim.
“Crazy?
That was not our conclusion,” Carlson told his viewers on-air.
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