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I can't even lie, I constantly go back and forth on Mr West.
Mainly between a unique form of existential horror that I had no idea I was even capable of feeling, and fits of headache inducing hysterical laughter at how patently insane this entire situation is.
Currently, he's my favorite unhinged celebrity. Which is saying something, because I'm not exactly a celebrity drama kind of guy, but the noxious combination of Kanyes accolades, his reputation, his general attitude for almost his entire existence of believing he's adjacent to a God, then his cult-like following, combined with the sheer brain-breaking stupidity that is modern US politics has created a black hole of non-stop bonkers insane stream-of-consciousness verbal and political diahrhea that until now, sunlight had not touched.
The hits just keep coming with this guy.
Not unlike the weird, culty fan base surrounding Taylor Swift and Elon Musk, Kanye West has a seemingly unshakeable foundation of listeners and followers. For about as long as I've known Mr West to be controversial for various reasons, I've also known people who feel the need to defend his actions or words at almost every turn. His mothers death greatly impacted him, he isn't taking his medication, he is taking too much of his medication, the Kardashians fucked him up, it goes on and on. It's identical to when Swifites on Twitter relentlessly post about how Taylor feels about everything like she's some kind of brood mother who'se the overseer of a worldwide hive mind. Elon fans are like this too, they're just way, way more pathetic.
Grown men saying the cyber truck looks cool. Its 7 polygons and 4 circles. A monkey on fentanyl could design a better vehicle.
Anyways.
My point for sending strays at Swifites, which is arguably as dangerous as starting a fight with BTS fans on social media, is to highlight that as weird and culty as these fandoms can seem to outsiders, at the end of the day, it's essentially harmless fun. People love their favorite music, love their favorite artists, and since Taylor Swift is more monolithic brand name than human person at this point, it would most likely take an enormous shift in the manufactured public image of Swift in order for that fan base to turn against her. In fact, I'm not exactly sure that really anything Taylor Swift ever did would eliminate her fan-base in any demostrable sense.
Celebrity cult worship is an unhealthy aspect of society. We're extroidinarily lucky that the team behind Taylor Swifts popularity aren't actively working to convert all those teenage girls into Nazis.
Like, really goddamn lucky.
We're also lucky that Kanye West doesn't have any promotional teams anymore, and that anyone with a single functional brain cell in their head has put enough distance between themselves and Kanye that you could fit the Atlantic in it.
Because as I'm sure you can remember, at one point, Kanye West was just as popular, if not more popular, than Taylor Swift. The man was an icon, credited with changing hip-hop forever. HIs accolades in the music industry rival some of the most legendary to ever pick up a microphone, or produce music. Albums like My Beatiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and College Dropout are most likely going to stay in the public consciousness forever.
Then, well......ya know. MAGA, and the Nazi shit. Saying slavery was a choice, aligning with Trump seemingly out of nowhere, going on Drink Champs to say that Adidas couldn't eliminate his sponsorship even if he was openly anti-semitic. (They dropped him 24 hours later.) Then going on Tim Pools podcast to drop the now infamous "I love Hitler" line, which even the lowest of the low bottom feeding conservative reactionaries know better than to just explicitly state live on the air. From there, he was spotted numerous times touring the country with card-carrying neo-nazi Nick Fuentes, while they visited podcast rooms hosted by some of the most ideologically far-right people in Fuentes's circle, as Kanye was probably convinced at this point that far-right loser podcast rooms were the most adequate place to air out his problems with Jews as a whole.
In doing all this, Kanye learned an interesting lesson. Well, he probably learned nothing, but we all learned an interesting lesson: If you're going to be openly bigoted, you have to at least disguise it a little bit. You can't just openly say you believe the Nazis were right. The most insane public figures who actually believe that know better than to ever come right out and say it, because it wont make you any friends. You have to be nuanced about your bigotry.
Kanye West does not understand nuance. If he does, he doesn't care. This man is dead set on getting in front of every camera he can, to be as openly and unashamedly anti-semitic as a human being possibly could be. In listening to his most recent rant, it's obvious that he views his un-filtered takes on Jewish conspiracy theories as being oppressed by the cabal of people who truly own the world, the Jews.
This man, this actual real life African American man, speaks about Jewish conspiracy theories that were born out of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion some hundreds of years ago, rhetoric that was used as justification to mass murder Jews in the Holocaust, as if they were ideas that he invented himself.
Really. He speaks of having no friends, and not being able to trust anyone, as if the entire world is captured by Jews, and are actively using their super powers to make his life difficult.
I genuinely believe that his appearance on Drink Champs, where he stated he could be anti-semitic and get away with it, to then not be able to get away with it, gave life to a seed of self-victimization and conspiratorial thinking that only the worst kind of narcissistic mental olympian could justify as being at fault for their massive fall from grace. He genuinely believes, for real, that his success is being hampered by a conspiracy that is largely driven by Jews. For him, I would imagine it's an easier pill to swallow than accepting that he simply threw his entire career away to be a bigot.
So he lost his blue chip sponsorships, he lost a shit-load of cash, his reputation took a bit of a hit, but three things seems to stay focused on him: the cameras, the die-hards, and the features.
Which, I mean, I consider to be problematic, personally.
See, as much as the media and his fans want to pontificate about his victim-hood, and how he's just an innocent man whose beset by terrible circumstances that made him lose his mind (even though he was a billionaire living a lifestyle that his supporters would percieve as life on an alien planet), there's something that Kanye West himself just keeps repeating over and over again every single chance that he gets:
Kanye West is a self admitted Nazi sympathizer. Like, he just comes right out with it. He genuinely wants the world to know, that he knows the secret of how the world works, and that the secret is that the Nazis were right.
It's actually still mind-blowing to hear. After his initial tour of Hitler loving rhetoric in dusty incel basements, I figured that somebody, absoultey anybody, would have the ability to strap this man to a chair and help him to save him from himself. It does not seem that that has happened. And if it did, it didn't work.
Not only that, he just released a new album. An album called Vultures. An album that is covered in Nazi adjacent imagery, including the wish dot com version of the Iron Eagle.
Who's on this album, you ask? It's not just Kanye. You'd think an African American Nazi would have a hard time collecting A listers.
Nope.
Lil Baby, Offsett, Freddie Gibbs, Charlie Wilson, Chris Brown, Ty Dolla Sign, Nicky Minaj, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, Kid Cudi, Quavo, Future, Kodack Black, Young Thug, and more are on this album.
These guys, these absolute monoliths in the modern hip-hop and rap enviornment, are just happily jumping onto an album that is covered in Nazi imagery, being produced and recorded, as well as singing alongside, an open card carrying Nazi Sympathizer. They will be bringing their fanbase with them, to experience a brand new album, made by a guy who is a world renowned musician, but also a Nazi sympathizer.
Am I losing my fucking mind? What is happening?
I understand that modern rap is centered around being wealthy, and all these features could be nothing more than these guys going and making a couple bucks for a few minutes work, but at the same time.....
Really?
Future and Lil Baby are multi-millionaires. All of those artists are multi-platinum, multi-millionaire artists, that absolutely do not need their names attached to a project being produced by a guy who has spent the last couple years aligning himself with The National Socialist party.
A party which, for the record, absolutely would not allow these artists to flourish the way that they have in the modern day. A party that would throw every single one of those artists, including Kanye, into a gas chamber for the crime of being more artistic than Adolf Hitler, the guy famous for being cool with getting rejected from art school.
Am I losing my fucking mind? I must be. There isn't enough time in life to analyze how insane this is.
This is why this topic only gets two reactions out of me: existential horror and hysterical laughter.
I genuinely cannot decide which reaction is the right one.
In Summary:
Stop making excuses for this asshole. He's a grown man espousing rhetoric that was historically used to murder millions of people, and is currently used to further subjugate innocent people who want nothing more than to practice their faith in peace and be left alone. He has hundreds of millions of dollars and access to mental healthcare that the average person would kill for, and he simply refuses to use it, as he believes all doctors are Jews. He is a grown man that has made the conscious choice to tarnish his entire reputation as a legendary musician in order to expose himself as a neo-nazi. Defending Kanye West, at this point, is no different than excusing Richard Spencers nazi rhetoric by saying that Spencer is mentally ill.
Just cut the shit. The guy made good music once. He's a nazi now. You don't have to seperate the art from the artist on this one. Kanye Wests reputation is destroyed, and the only person that can change that is Kanye West, and I'm not so sure he can save himself.
"If I had a quote that could even remotely fit the context of a black hip hop legend turning into a neo-nazi in a matter of months, this is where that quote would go"