Mainstream Media wants to Blame Kanye West for the Rise in Anti-Semitism but is he just their Right-Wing Scapegoat?
MSM wants to cancel the 'crazy' rapper-turned-fashion-mogul for offensive comments made about Jewish people but is he simply a distraction from their own promotion of Ukrainian Neo-Nazi militias?
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What to Expect in this Post:
- Quick-Take:
Why is the Media so hard on Kanye West but soft on Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias?
- What Happened?:
A full summary of the events surrounding Kanye West.
- A Word on Anti-Semitism:
A deep dive into the possible motivations for Kanye West’s offensive comments.
- Infographics, Social Media & Culture Wars:
An analysis of Instagram activism through the lens of Kanye West.
- Russia, Ukraine & neo-Nazis:
An analysis of Ukraine’s Nazi history and the media’s role in keeping it quiet.
- Elon, Kanye & Trump:
An analysis of the social media landscape heading into the 2022 U.S. Midterms.
Quick-Take
I know that you’re tired of reading about Kanye West and at this point, who could blame you, but Ye is making headlines for all the wrong reasons again.
This time, as is often the case, the criticism has arisen from those offended by his controversial comments across a range of sensitive subjects including multiple anti-semitic outbursts that he has since apologised for.
With this latest stunt, Ye has quite literally ‘broken the internet’.
He called Black Lives Matter a “scam”; said that he believed George Floyd was killed by Fentanyl, drew comparisons to Nazis for his “DEFCON 3 on Jewish People” comment; called Joe Biden “retarded”; alleged that Adidas raped and stole his designs; suggested GAP had prior knowledge about the Uvalde school shooting and compared himself to Alex Jones, whom he will be following into court after George Floyd’s family sued him for $250 million, which, hilariously, or terrifyingly, is only about 25% of what Jones is paying for allegedly starting the conspiracy that the Sandy Hook school shooting was an inside job or something.
Infographics are, of course, doing the rounds on social media calling for the self-proclaimed “genius” to be cancelled. And by all accounts he has been.
In response to his offensive comments about Jewish people, brands like Adidas and Balenciaga have cut ties with Ye insisting that he used his platform to promote dangerous hate speech and misinformation.
Meanwhile, the same social media platforms that changed their content moderation policies to allow for the praise of a neo-nazi militia, have restricted Kanye’s access to his personal accounts in an attempt to censor and silence him.
The whole ordeal seems like a re-enactment of Big Tech’s censorship of Donald Trump, after he allegedly incited the riot at the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021.
So, is Kanye West really the menace to society that they say he is or does he represent the greatest threat to the mainstream media narrative since Joe Rogan?
What Happened?
It all started during Paris Fashion Week when Ye launched YEEZY Season 9 and debuted a ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirt worn by Selah Marley, the daughter of Lauryn Hill and Rohan Marley. Kanye West himself and special guest, Candace Owens, a controversial political commentator for the Daily Wire and activist, also donned the now infamous T-shirt.
The stunt drew the ire of Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a fashion critic and supporter of Black Lives Matter, who was in attendance. Post-show, she took to Instagram to vent her frustrations stating that the stunt was “bullshit” and “dangerous”.
Kanye West did not take kindly to her criticism and responded by posting on his Instagram in since-deleted-posts that Karefa-Johnson was not a “fashion person” and followed that up by ridiculing one of her outfits in another now-deleted-post.
Later, Kanye West apologised to Gabriella Karefa-Johnson in an Instagram post and revealed to his followers that they had, in fact, had a face-to-face chat filmed by Anna Wintour that was going to be released by Vogue at a later date.
At the time of writing, the conversation has not yet been uploaded and I suspect it never will.
As this spat unfolded in real-time, it seemed to me that Kanye West was very much an internet troll but mainstream media outlets accused him of being fat-phobic for his personal attacks on Gabriella Karefa-Johnson; racist for calling the Black Lives Matter organisation a “scam” and a purveyor of misinformation for questioning the cause of George Floyd’s death.
Despite the entire world piling onto him, Ye continued his Instagram rant by posting and then deleting screenshots of his personal text messages with a number of celebrities including P-Diddy and Tremaine Emory.
Among the more viral posts, Ye accused LVMH co-founder, Bernard Arnault of killing Virgil Abloh, accused P-Diddy of working on behalf of “Jewish People” to kill him and later, in the most viral post at that point, threatened to go “DEFCON 3 on Jewish People”.
Ye has since clarified during an interview with Piers Morgan that he did not mean to threaten all Jews, merely the Jewish business men whom he claims have exploited him “and [his] people” through music contracts and the likes. Ye later apologised to the Jewish community as a whole for any confusion or offence he caused.
As if all this was not enough, Ye was also interviewed by N.O.R.E. for Revolt.tv’s ‘Drink Champs’ where he doubled down on his anti-semitic comments and bragged that he could “say anti-semitic shit and Adidas cannot drop [him]”.
These bewildering comments resulted in the interview being censored and removed from the internet and climaxed with Adidas inevitably cutting ties. Adidas have since declared that they will continue with the Yeezy sneaker under a different name, which is sure to cause more Kanye headlines in the near future.
In response to his social media time-out, Ye purchased the right-leaning, Twitter competitor, Parler, which was similarly removed from Google and Apple’s app-stores for not complying with content moderation requirements. Amazon later removed the app from it’s servers and essentially deleted the app from the internet.
Ye claimed that his Parler deal was a victory for free speech and would make him un-cancellable. It remains to be seen if that is the case.
So, what should we expect to see in the coming weeks and months?
Well, for starters Ye has a court date with George Floyd’s family to look forward to as well as a back and forth legal battle with Adidas over the alleged theft of Yeezy designs and there’s also the small matter of Parler, which is sure to be in the headlines before the November 8th Midterms.
A Word on Anti-Semitism
What’s clear from all of the interviews and cryptic posts Kanye West has spewed across the internet over the past few weeks is that he knew that he was being anti-semitic and continued anyway.
The questions that I’m left wondering is: Did Kanye West want to get cancelled, and if so, why?
The first thing to consider is that since 2020, at least, Ye has been extremely vocal about wanting to change the way that music contracts are drawn up.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he compared the music industry to the #MeToo movement, asserting that “contracts are made to rape the artist” and that “people…[see] things that are wrong inside of [those] contracts and [turn] a blind eye.”
The “entertainment industry” he claims “[tries] to tear down anybody that’s not going with the flow.” Ye pushed this claim further by suggesting that the ‘deep state’ murdered JFK and MLK because they tried to “innovate” in the same way that Kayne claims he is trying to do with music contracts.
It’s possible that Ye’s songs hold clues as to the motivations of his recent outbursts.
In ‘Saint Pablo’, a bonus song that was added to his 2016 album ‘The Life of Pablo’ after an initial leak on Apple Music, there are many lyrics that have renewed significance. In the first verse of the song, Kanye raps “the media said it was outlandish spendin', the media said he's way out of control, I just feel like I'm the only one not pretendin’, I'm not out of control, I'm just not in their control.”
Continuing along the same vein, in his 2020 single, Nah Nah Nah, Ye raps, “If I put myself in harm's way to get my own masters, they'll put theyself in harm's way to stay the master.” In this context, the ‘masters’ that Ye is trying to reclaim are the master versions of his songs and the harm that his alleged ‘masters’ put themselves in the way of is Kanye’s public opinions about them.
The gist of Ye’s argument, from what I understand, is that there is a “parallel [between] the way that the music industry works and the way that the world currently works”. He says that it’s comparable to the way America is able to influence other countries. This thought seems to point at globalism; the ultimate goal of which is to have a ‘one world government’.
The conventional wisdom is that globalism is good and nationalism is bad—and that’s the crux of the Brexit debate; the United Kingdom wanted to reclaim it’s national sovereignty from the European Union just as Kanye West wants to reclaim his personal and creative sovereignty from record companies that he claims have exploited him.
It’s no wonder, then, that Kanye West, alongside Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum, aligned himself with Blexit, a not-for-profit organisation encouraging black and ethnic minorities in the United States to take back control of their lives, stop blindly voting for welfare policies and start voting for policies that actually empower them.
A similar movement, Walk Away, which was censored by Facebook, encouraged Democrats to share the story of why they chose to ‘walk away’ from the Democratic party.
To bring this back to anti-semitism, the term ‘globalist’ has, in recent years been the favoured slur for anti-establishment, right-leaning politicians from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage and critics have decried the term for alleged anti-semitic connotations dating back to WWII.
They argue that it references a conspiracy called ‘The Khazaria Hypothesis’. A conspiracy that argues that Ashkenazi Jews are not the descendants of the biblical Israelites and are instead descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic-speaking people who are thought to have converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.
This argument, however, is rejected by Israeli political philosopher, Yoram Hazony, who maintains that globalism seeks “to establish a single worldwide market governed by a single worldwide legal system established by international bodies rather than by independent national states” and has “no anti-semitic valence.”
He concludes his thoughts on the subject by stating that “the woke neo-Marxist cultural revolution is not only interested in ‘canceling’ individuals. They want to ‘cancel’ and prohibit the use of any word or expression that is useful in advancing a conservative worldview.”
Ultimately, whether Ye’s allegations are true or not is irrelevant. For a gifted songwriter, whose own lyrics could have been used to build a sensible argument as to why he’s so upset, Kanye instead conflated all Jews with the specific Jewish businessmen that he has a problem with and essentially painted the entire Jewish community as ‘penny-pinchers’—an undoubtedly anti-semitic belief.
The way that he has spoken about Jewish people has been inappropriate and offensive and he should know better than anyone that insults do not help to prove or advance a point, whatever Kanye’s point was.
It is difficult to see how Ye will bounce back from all of this and yet I’m certain that he’ll try. But, what I will say is that Kanye West calling attention to George Soros’ political activities is not anti-semitic.
This is a Jewish man, who survived the holocaust and made a fortune shorting the Pound; later founding the Open Society Foundation, which is the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.
Soros’ organisation has been accused by many on the right of funding election fraudsters across the world and the campaigns of progressive politicians who push for open boarder policies, which has culminated in the not-for-profit being banned in Hungary and Russia for being an alleged threat to ‘state security’ but that’s a story for another time.
Infographics, Social Media & Culture Wars
The anti-Kanye posts that populate our timelines today were first popularised during the ‘Summer of Love’ riots in 2020 immediately following George Floyd’s death. The posting of a black square (in what became known as ‘Blackout Tuesday’) during the pandemic was the first iteration of the kind of virtue-signalling that is so prevalent in our culture today.
Though ‘Blackout Tuesday’ was not the beginning of the Culture Wars, it was a landmark in the fight to support ‘the current thing’, which now also includes putting your pronouns or a flag in your bio.
Come to think of it, Billy McFarland, the Fyre Festival fraudster may yet be the true mastermind behind the blank square post. Remember this?
These infographic-type posts perpetuate the initial, breaking news narrative pushed by mainstream media outlets and help to spread it across social platforms through a broad coalition of associated media.
In this way, users are unwittingly ushered into an echo chamber where almost every account that they follow sources quotes from the same or similar news outlets. It is no surprise then, when large swaths of users are coaxed into believing that narrative before all of the facts of the incident are known.
An example of this coaxing can be found during the initial outbreak of conflict between Russia and Ukraine in February, 2022, when mainstream media reported on several stories including the Ghost of Kyiv and Snake Island, which were later reported to be fake news.
Even today, most people don’t have a clue that the stories that broke during the initial outbreak of the conflict were fake. It could be the result of news outlets not correcting their own reports and mistakes (if we can call them that) or that people simply believed the news as it was presented but I think people have a hard time accepting the truth when they prefer the lie.
It’s easier to believe the lie.
In marketing, the first mover advantage is when a company gains a competitive advantage by being the first to bring a new product to market, or in this case, by being the first to break the news. First movers typically garner strong brand recognition and loyalty thus by virtue of getting their narrative out first, mainstream media is able to build public support for their version of events before the subject of the news is able to counter, leading to a pile-on that tends to silence those without a platform.
As a consequence, people too afraid to express their honestly held opinions rally around celebrities like J.K. Rowling, Kanye West and Rob Schneider, who dare to speak out.
Donald Trump, for all his faults, continually screamed about fake news defaming and turning people against him. He actually sued CNN for almost $500 million on the same day that Kanye West debuted his ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirt. Some of his claims, for example that the Christopher Steele Dossier central to the Russia-gate conspiracy was paid for by his 2016 Presidential nemesis, Hilary Clinton, have been proven correct despite the media’s consistent denial of her involvement.
What has become clear over the course of the last few years is that we are in an information war and it’s becoming harder and harder to discern the truth from fiction.
Russia, Ukraine & neo-Nazis
Mainstream media would like us to believe that Kanye West should take sole responsibility for using his platform to empower white supremacists and neo-Nazis across the world following his anti-semitic outbursts this week.
Embolden by Ye’s remarks, the Goyim Defense League decided to hang banners over the 405 in Los Angeles on October 23, 2022, asking commuters to honk in support of Kanye West’s comments.
This is, of course, abhorrent and Kanye West has since apologised. However, do not let him distract you from the fact that the mainstream media has been legitimising neo-Nazis for years and has yet to take responsibility.
Instead, MSM has sought to obfuscate their connections and the very idea of neo-nazis in Ukraine.
I started looking into Ukrainian neo-Nazis when Russian President, Vladimir Putin, declared that the “denazification” of Ukraine was one of his primary objectives for the invasion. People laughed off the accusation of neo-nazis in Ukraine as the absurd fantasies of a dying dictator but I was curious and concerned.
The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division or the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army was formed by the Governor of the Galicia district, Otto Gustav von Wächter (an Austrian lawyer and high-ranking Nazi politician who fled to Rome post-WWII, living under a false name in order to avoid the Nuremberg Trials), to fight on the Eastern Front against the Red Army in 1943.
Ukrainians and citizens of the West alike had mixed view of the militia, allegedly comprised of about 8,000 ethnic Ukrainians, though some 80,000 allegedly applied, after the WWII. Some saw the militia as a nationalist army that cooperated with Nazi Germany as a means to defeat their historic Russian enemy (often the justification used by sympathisers) but others saw them simply as Nazi collaborators.
Indeed, many Ukrainians who were not members of the militia were labeled Nazi collaborators by association and this, allegedly, caused a general feeling of ill will towards the militia.
Many within the ranks of the SS Galicia were thought to have been complicit in war crimes and though the SS Galicia collectively was cleared of those allegations, if there were war criminals within their ranks, those individuals were not punished.
Many former members of the SS Galicia were given asylum in the United Kingdom and Canada post-WWII but this went largely unpublicised at the time, which is no surprise given that the Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and Mirror was an early supporter of Mussolini and Hitler. There are still allegedly around 1,500 former members of the SS Galicia living in the U.K. to date.
If you can believe it, Canada has the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside of Russia and there is actually a cenotaph in Toronto dedicated to the SS Galicia (which was probably worth tearing down when that was the rage in 2020). Stranger still, the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, is the grand daughter of a Nazi collaborator, who wrote for Krakivski Visti, which was a Jewish paper before it was seized and turned into a Nazi propaganda rag.
In late 2017, BBC Kiev correspondent Jonah Fisher went on patrol with the ultranationalist, National Militia, who have close ties to the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia that the U.S Congress banned from receiving U.S. aid, to document their story. The short documentary shows multiple clashes between the police and National Militia as well as several vigilante actions on allegedly Russian-linked gambling shops. The documentary also highlights the influence that these militias can have on politics as was the case when hooded militia members turned up at a municipal council meeting in Cherkasy and purportedly refused to allow officials to leave until they had approved a long-delayed budget.
Fast forward to February 2022, and the same BBC was bending over backwards trying to obfuscate the Nazi connection to the men that they were filming and as journalist, Peter Hitchens, said in his Mail on Sunday column, the BBC have tried to “[minimised] the importance of neo-Nazis in Ukraine.”
On January 7th, 2021, days before Trump was banned from all social media for allegedly inciting a riot, Time Magazine released an article called ‘Like, Share, Recruit: How a White-Supremacist Militia Uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New Members’, in which it was detailed how people were being recruited and radicalised on Facebook.
The Intercept later reported that Facebook, now Meta, had changed it’s ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organisations policy’ to allow their billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion “when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.”
These articles serve to highlight the hypocrisy of, not only Meta’s position, but also that of the establishment media through their legitimisation of Nazism in contemporary society.
As a response to the debasement of our social and ethical ideals, artist, Michael Pybus, painted ‘Likeable Nazi Man (I Know Martin, I Am Too Political Too) 2022’ which is an homage to prolific, German Artist, Martin Kippenberger’s ‘I Am Too Political 1995’.
In the comment section of Pybus’ Instagram post about the now-controversial painting, the Jewish, outspoken and often tongue-in-cheek, art writer and critic, Kenny Schachter, criticised Pybus for “cuteifying” and profiting from Nazi iconography. Pybus rightly responded that Schachter’s point was moot considering, for example, that Quintin Tarantino had profited from Nazi iconography in his 2009 epic ‘Inglorious Bastards’.
He continued that it was ironic that Schachter, himself a Jewish man, was defending Ukrainian Nazis for fighting against Russia and argued, furthermore, that it stands to reason that when Nazis are legitimised during times of war that they will continue to be legitimised during times of peace.
This exchange exemplifies the mental gymnastics that people are willing to attempt in order to justify and validate the media narrative that they have chosen to believe.
Elon, Kanye & Trump
In the last year, we have seen Donald Trump launch his own social media company, Truth Social, watched the world’s media melt down over Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, and now, as a response to being cancelled, Kanye West has agreed a deal to buy Parler.
In the eyes of the liberal elite, these three men represent, not as Elon Musk suggests ‘Three Musketeers’ but instead the ‘Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse’—I know there are supposed to be four horse but at least for now we’ll have to wait for Jordan Peterson to launch a social media platform.
With the November 8th Midterms around the corner, it remains to be seen what effect, if any, these new social media platforms will have but what is clear is that a New Social Media Age is upon us and as these new platforms rise, the old ones will fall.