“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” he wrote. It was on Twitter where, early Sunday morning, West posted the unambiguous message heard around the world. ![]() RELATED: ‘Black people are actually Jew’: The historical origins of Kanye West’s inflammatory comments West first tweeted criticism of Meta’s Jewish founder, Mark Zuckerberg, then followed up by saying, “Who do you think created cancel culture?” Yair Rosenberg, in The Atlantic, in a newsletter devoted to analyzing West’s antisemitism, wrote “He presumably did not mean the Mormons.” Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur and self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist who is in the process of buying the social media platform, welcomed him publicly. West switched to Twitter, where he had been less active. After Combs urged West to stop promoting the shirt, West responded, “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.” Shortly afterward, the post - which West had captioned “Jesus is Jew” and which harkened to antisemitic conspiracy theories about invisible Jewish control - was deleted, and Meta, Instagram’s parent company, said it had removed content that violated its policies. Then, on Friday, West posted snapshots of a text conversation he said he had with Sean Combs, the rapper also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy. Kanye West sat for an extended interview with Tucker Carlson in which he made several antisemitic comments. “I just think it was to make money,” he said, in a comment that echoed antisemitic tropes about Jewish greed. When their wide-ranging conversation touched on the Abraham Accords, which the Trump administration brokered between Israel and Arab countries, West said he thought Jared Kushner was motivated only by profit. ![]() On Thursday, Carlson brought West onto his show, where he praised West as advancing “obviously true” ideas. (The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group, says “White Lives Matter” is “a white supremacist phrase.”) The shirt elicited revulsion by many in the fashion world - and embrace from political conservatives who cherish West as an authentic Black voice who shares their values. In Paris last week to showcase a fashion collection he designed, West wore a “White Lives Matter” jacket, a dig at the Black Lives Matter movement and a reflection of his long-standing conservative politics. (He has also said it is “ dismissive” to question whether he has stopped taking his medication whenever he “speaks up.”) But the current moment began with a shirt. West has a long track record of provocations, as well as a history of bipolar disorder that he has said causes him to become paranoid. A string of provocations culminated in West’s vow to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” “As usual, two things can be true at once: Kanye’s moves toward pro-life, faith, and family conservatism are encouraging his ‘death con 3’ posts and Black Hebrew Israelite language are clearly anti-Semitic and disturbing.”įor Jews emerging from their sukkahs, or who just want to understand this fast-moving saga, here’s a recap of YeGate, so far. “Back from the Jewish holiday now,” right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, wrote early Wednesday morning on Twitter. The last question has only grown more pointed in the last 24 hours, as footage leaked showing that West had made other antisemitic comments on Carlson’s show that did not air and as Orthodox Jews, who are more likely to be politically conservative, began re-engaging after the two-day Sukkot holiday that overlapped with the peak controversy. Is antisemitism tolerated or sufficiently condemned? Has the vaunted historical relationship between Blacks and Jews frayed beyond repair? And why are Carlson and other prominent conservatives standing by West? ![]() The response has become something of a Rorschach test for American Jewish anxieties. Twitter removed that post, saying it violated the company’s policies, but not before it was shared widely by Jews and others alarmed by West’s behavior.
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