White Supremacists Are Doing Backflips Over Kanye West’s Antisemitism
Online white supremacist forums and prominent reactionary figures are lauding rapper Kanye West’s turn to antisemitic conspiracy mongering with a barrage of memes, praise, and calls for escalation. Across Telegram, 4chan, and neo-Nazi forums, posts reviewed by Rolling Stone show that West’s statements have been received with nothing short of utter glee by the far-right’s most vitriolic figures.
On Telegram, white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes celebrated the comments and even forwarded posts from a Nazi-affinity channel attacking a Jewish critic of West’s antisemitic ranting, captioning the post “the Jew cries out as it strikes you,” an antisemitic trope that cast Jews as oppressors pretending to be victims. Fuentes also forwarded a post describing the mainstreaming of concepts like “White Lives Matter” and “anti-white racism” as “unambiguous wins.”
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On message boards like 4chan, users celebrated West “going nuclear” and “declaring war against jews.” One user morphed the name West’s fashion line “Yeezy” with “Zyklon” a reference to Zyklon B, the chemical used to murder millions of Jews in gas chambers during the Holocaust. The list, sadly, goes on, with scores of content applauding West and decrying his temporary removal from platforms dominating message boards.
Nick Fuentes and his nazi groyper followers are celebrating Kanye's tweet. They see this as an opportunity to mainstream horrible antisemitic views. pic.twitter.com/JTkI6GXUeb
— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) October 9, 2022
What began as a controversy over West wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt at Paris Fashion Week devolved into a torrent of antisemitic statements across social media and, as leaked footage published by Vice on Tuesday demonstrated, to Tucker Carlson during an interview last week.
Tucker Carlson Tonight is a friendly space for white nationalist ideology with a sordid history of hiring staff with an affinity for extremist forums. The leaked outtakes from the interview Vice published on Tuesday revealed that Carlson’s production team cut out various antisemitic comments from the aired version of the interview, including West saying he would rather have his children know Hanukkah before Kwanzaa because “it will come with some financial engineering.”
Following his sit-down with Carlson, West had his accounts frozen on both Twitter and Instagram after he posted attacks against Jewish people, including accusing rapper Diddy of being controlled by Jews, and claiming in a tweet that he would go “death con 3,” on the Jewish people. West also alluded to the claim that Black people are the true descendants of the original Jewish race, a complex ideology associated with Radical Hebrew Israelite movement that often veers into its own subset of antisemitic tropes.
Kanye’s attacks on Jewish people run along several veins, primarily the antisemitic belief that Jews secretly control the media and major financial institutions to support some sort of hidden, globalist agenda. These allusions were echoed in the responses from reactionary figures. Following West’s social media bans far right activist and conspiracy theorist Ali Alexander wrote on Telegram that platforms like Truth Social and Gettr “won’t be releasing statements on Ye being censored because they too fear or align with Jewish Power.”
Far right streamer Tim Gionet, known by his moniker “Baked Alaska,” claimed vindication for his own beliefs. Gionet was banned from the alt-right “Deploraball” celebration after he tweeted that Jews controlled the media, and was ultimately banned from Twitter after he posted an image of Jewish far-right activist Laura Loomer inside a gas chamber. He would eventually be charged by Arizona prosecutors with misdemeanor criminal damage after he streamed himself tearing down a Hanuukah display while singing “No more ‘Happy Hanukkah,’ only ‘Merry Christmas.’”
“Funny all the people that canceled me on the right wing for saying ‘Jews control the news’ on Twitter now championing Kanye for saying much worse years later lmao,” Gionet wrote on Telegram. “YOBAS BEEN TOLD YA! VINDICATION NATION!”
The neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer also cheered West’s comments. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin published a cartoon on the site of West grabbing a Jewish man by the nose, advising West to continue or else “they’ll Jew you to death.” Anglin dedicated an entire post to aggregating memes and social media posts extolling West’s “death con 3” threat, including one image that scaled the phrase “crimes of the jews” to be larger than the known universe.
Many mainstream conservatives hedged their condemnation of West’s statements with appeals to his overarching conservative beliefs and assertions that deplatforming West or forcing him to remove the statements was potentially more damaging than the statements themselves. The hesitation to outright condemn is the space where violent actors find their footholds. Conservatives see an asset whose transgressions they’re willing to forgive in order to forward their own goals, while white nationalists and far-right reactionaries will seize on the opportunity to legitimize their own beliefs.
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