From Rapper to Alt-Right Activist: The Curious Case of Kanye West
Kanye (Ye) West, 2011 I Photo courtesy of Kim Erlandsen
For the past month, Kanye (Ye) West, the highly influential American rapper, has become increasingly vocal with his opinions regarding pressing social issues, prompting various right-wing and radical groups to come to his support.
October may even go down as Ye’s most consistently-publicized controversy-filled month of his career.
On Oct. 3, Ye was photographed standing next to the far-right conservative political commentator, Candace Owens, star of the recent Daily Wire exposé documentary on the Black Lives Matter organization. On the back of both of their shirts was the phrase: WHITE LIVES MATTER.
Three days later, on Oct. 6, Tucker Carlson of Fox News unveiled an exclusive interview with Ye to explain, among other topics, the shirts. The interview lasted over 50 minutes and discussed Ye’s affinity for former President Trump, his strongly held pro-life views and his reasoning behind the shirt itself.
According to Ye, “I thought the shirt was a funny shirt, I thought the idea of me wearing it was funny.”
Additionally, when Ye discussed the shirt’s messaging with his father, he allegedly said Ye was “just a Black man stating the obvious.”
Ye also reminded Carlson throughout the interview that, despite the public backlash for the shirt, “the number one thing is: we have God on our side.”
Rev. Dr. Dru Johnson, Director of the Center of Hebraic Thought at The King’s College, argues that “if you're a Christian who believes in the wisdom of scripture, which says that basically that you should look out for the vulnerable, you should welcome the foreigner in. There is really this kind of open-hand rather than closed-fist mentality towards outsiders and insiders.”
Up until this point, it seemed that Ye’s views could simply be classified as right-wing or even alt-right. That is until Vice News leaked supposedly unaired portions of the interview.
In those clips, Ye made claims along the ideology of the Black Hebrew Israelite Movement, whose fringe groups tend towards black supremacy. “When I say Jew, I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, the people known as the race Black really are,” Ye explained. “This, as a Christian, is my belief.”
Just before midnight on Oct. 8, Ye said in a tweet that has since been deleted, “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
On the following Wednesday, Oct. 12, Ye created an account on Parler, the app typically associated with alt-right conservative social media, and began to once again post on Twitter. The switch, according to Ye, was because he “got kicked off Instagram for 30 days.”
By Oct. 15, Ye appeared on the Drink Champs Podcast to discuss his ideas on the last month of controversy. In the interview, Ye continued to claim a theory of widespread Jewish control over the media, saying that “the Jewish community especially in the music industry, in entertainment period, they’ll take one of us, the brightest of us, one that can really feed a whole village, and they’ll milk us till we die.”
According to Rev. Dr. Johnson, Ye’s comments are not only at the very least, “extremely irresponsible and out of touch with the Jewish community, at the most, intentionally inflammatory,” but they also are “amplifying already rising anti-semitic violence.”
In fact, based on the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks racial-hatred-motivated violence in the United States, there has been a “34% increase from the 2,026 incidents tabulated in 2020…the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.”
As Rev. Dr. Johnson puts it, in such a heated political climate, one fraught with distrust and riddled with a tendency towards violence, Ye’s comments are “just like throwing gasoline on a fire, and so I think its just incredibly foolish if nothing else.”
Ye and his supporters justify each of these claims as inherently from God. In his interview with Carlson, Ye goes as far as to say that “God builds warriors in a different way. I don’t know if it's because of me being born in Atlanta, and growing up in the southside of Chicago, that he made me for such a time like this.”
Yet, for Rev. Dr. Johnson, being a Christian means just the opposite of these claims. A true Christian, “would clearly know that what [Ye is] doing is dividing the world between them and us.”
A multitude of global fashion brands have already cut ties with Ye. Among those parting ways are Balenciaga, Adidas, GAP, TJ Maxx and Skechers. Time will tell just how damaging these beliefs will actually be to his public image.
“If you just knew these people, you wouldn’t be saying these things,” Rev. Dr. Johnson said. “It just shows that he is hyper-insulated, and he doesn't seem to care that he's hyper-insulated.”
Colby McCaskill is a freshman at The King’s College majoring in Journalism, Culture and Society. He loves to write and enjoys long runs in the rain.
Mattie Townson is the Editor-in-Chief of the Empire State Tribune. She currently interns with Penguin Random House within the Crown and Convergent imprints.