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In "holy shit" culture war moments, Kanye has lashed out at (((us))) on Twitter. He came out of the gate swinging by stating that:
Please note that Kanye is using double-spaces instead of periods for some reason.
This comes shortly after he was pictured wearing a White Lives Matter shirt, and shortly before he asked rhetorically
As always, the reaction is worse than the action, and causes the story to explode. In response to accusations that Jews control the media and invented cancel culture, Jewish organizations have loudly declared that such accusations are anti-semitic and inherently untrue, and then demanded Kanye be cancelled. The irony appears lost on them. To the surprise of I'm sure absolutely no one, Kanye was quickly locked out of his twitter account.
Social media reactions have been mixed, to say the least. /pol/ has apparently decided that Kanye is one step removed from goose stepping his way down the isle at the Grammys, and is almost /theirguy/. Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam n****r so I'm going to stop short of saying that Kanye has struck a blow for unity within the racist community.
/r/Kanye, which is dedicated to exactly what you think, is in full melt-down mode understandably.
I really don't have anything else to add to this monumental pile of flaming garbage. There is no redeeming anything buried here. Only more decay and hatred seeping into public spaces. I leave you with only this thought that has been said by far smarter men than I. Twitter delenda est.
Right now my model of Kanye's antics is that he's Bipolar (which helps explain his tendency to spit out tons of new artistic works at once then go silent for a while) and is very inconsistent in taking medications, so he will have these periodic times where he's manic and just spewing absolute insane rhetoric which he only half-believes at best, but nobody is going to actually stop him from spewing it, and who can tell if its just part of an act anyway?
Nothing in the current kerfuffle contradicts this model, so I'm not updating on this.
My only note is that if Kanye is dealing with mental illness then it might be best if social media companies were openly showing some compassion here and couched things as trying to protect his mental health rather than silence him on behalf of any group.
I can throw in another data point.
Which is that the...flirting with antisemitism and antisemitic figures that is well-known in the rap world and, arguably, beyond just that part of African-American culture.
Ice Cube used to hang out with antisemitic Nation of Islam types. Nick Cannon had a kerfuffle not too long ago where -notably- his anti-white racism was given a pass but he got in trouble for his statements about Jews*. IIRC black Women's March leaders had trouble with Jewish women and supported Farrakhan of the NOI. Other prominent figures like Kendrick also had links to black Hebrew Israelites in their music despite Hebrew Israelites being antisemitic appropriators.
Kanye himself has associated himself with Farrakhan, who pops up throughout hip hop and these stories like a bad penny.. Seriously, he seems to have links to everyone and gets defended by huge rappers more than any comparable white figure.
So we probably still should err a bit on the side of "Kanye is kind of unstable and has a track record of stirring shit up so who knows?" but I'm also more inclined to believe that Kanye actually believes this shit and is also unstable and surrounded by enough sycophants to not understand that this is the one rail you don't touch.
* A lot of these situations seem to be shocking only insofar as liberal Jews expect to not be treated like other white people in anti-white rhetoric. Another reason to not believe that it's just impossible for Kanye to believe: they already believe it about most other white folk, why not Jews?
My experience is that bizarre(in the truly strange sense, not in the ‘why are the Nazis black now’ sense) antisemitic conspiracy theories are widespread in the black community and Kanye has a pretty good chance of hearing these things from respected community figures.
Yeah, I'm mostly a spectator but I remember growing up there were endless Illuminati conspiracy theories around rappers.
Which prompted Cyhi the Prynce's concise rebuttal: "what makes you think Illuminati would ever let some niggas in?"
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