You Know, It's Kinda Crazy That Kanye Went on the Alex Jones Show to Praise Hitler and Nazis
I have had six VERY long years to come to terms with the inconvenient truth that Kanye West, an artist I once considered my favorite rapper AND producer and someone I have spent hundreds of dollars to see in concert multiple times, both as a solo act and with Jay-Z, was a Republican and a Trump supporter.
That in itself was a deal-breaker. I understand and accept that some of the artists that I adore are Conservatives. I love country music, for example, and if I limited my country music consumption to people who agreed with me politically I’d have a lot less to listen to.
But there is a HUGE difference between being a garden variety Conservative and being a loud and proud Donald Trump supporter.
I tried to convince myself back in the ugly days of 2016 that Kanye wasn’t really a Conservative. I told myself that Kanye treasures image and spectacle and impact above all else and that he had simply fallen in love with Trump’s flashiness.
I wrote a poorly read, universally ignored novella in which I posited Kanye’s rightward swing as the product of a manic episode and not as a radical and seemingly permanent shift in his thinking and how he sees the world.
From the vantage point of 2022, there’s a weird innocence to that time, when it seemed like the worst that Kanye could possibly do would be to show up at Trump Tower and hug Donald Trump.
Kanye has fallen so far that I look back with nostalgia to just a few months ago, when Kanye was using social media to terrorize his estranged wife and her new boyfriend but had NOT publicly come out as a Hitler-lover, white supremacist, Nazi apologist and White Lives Matter proponent.
Kanye’s extremely, excessively public downfall and vigorous attempts at career suicide are like the proverbial car wreck that you can’t turn away from except that I CAN and HAVE chosen not to subject myself to atrocities like Kanye’s notorious three hour long interview with Alex Jones.
Kanye West has confusingly been on an extended press tour. But he’s not promoting a new album or a new clothing line so much as he’s promoting white supremacy, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I suppose you could say that what Kanye has been subjecting the world to over the last month represents a uniquely disastrous roll out of his 2024 Presidential campaign.
But Kanye did not seem to be promoting his political future so much as he was promoting hate, ignorance and old school Fascism. It’s horrifying enough that Kanye CHOSE to spend HOURS of his life taking to Alex Jones as a peer and someone who should be listened to and respected.
It’s mind-boggling and seemingly inconceivable, even at this late date, that in this meeting of warped minds, Alex Jones, who is infamous for pretending that school shootings are false flag operations involving crisis actors, would emerge as the voice of reason and restraint.
Though I have only seen and read short excerpts from the interview in question, it seemed like Jones was giving Kanye the easiest out in the history of easy outs by telling him that he OBVIOUSLY was not a Nazi or a Hitler fan and it was consequently unfair that he was being treated as such.
Instead of taking that out Kanye instead doubled down by saying that there were all sorts of fabulous things he liked about Hitler and the Nazis and pleaded with the public to stop dissing them.
Up until that moment it was unprecedented that a celebrity of Kanye’s former stature and fame, an artist with TWENTY-FOUR GRAMMYS and SEVENTY-FIVE NOMINATIONS who at one point was worth five billion dollars, would go a reviled extremist’s reviled show alongside two similarly reviled extremists in Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulous to praise Hitler.
It’s not unprecedented anymore. Thanks to Kanye, there is now a precedent for one of the most famous living Americans to extol the virtues of Hitler and stand up for Nazis.
Kanye has single-handedly moved the goalposts for expressing abhorrent political views. That is horrifying. He’s too extreme for Donald Trump. He’s too extreme for Alex Jones. He’s too extreme for Elon Musk.
Once upon a time I defended Kanye on the basis that he was a creative genius and the rules are different for geniuses.
One rule that applies to EVERYONE in the entire world is that you don’t praise Adolf Hitler. You don’t say that the Nazis were cool and misunderstood and did a lot of awesome shit they never got credit for.
That is OBJECTIVELY wrong. It’s transparently insane. No amount of moral relativism can turn monsters who killed six million Jews in concentration camps into heroes or misunderstood free thinkers.
Has Kanye hit rock bottom? Is it possible to go lower than he has? At this point all that’s left is beat up a Holocaust survivor while shouting Nazi slogans. I would be surprised if Kanye broke into my dad’s nursing home and Jew-bashed him but I wouldn’t be that surprised.
It’s surreal and insane but it’s also deeply sad. It’s sad that someone with so much power and so much influence could go so horribly astray. I’d love to be able to laugh about it but I just can’t.
Kanye is just too far gone at this point. He’s seemingly beyond help. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad but my god is it ever a tragedy in slow motion that just keeps going and going and going like some kind of Fascist Energizer Bunny.
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