Editor’s note, February 7, 2025, 12:30 pm ET: On February 7, Kanye referred to himself openly as a Nazi in a post on X, along with a number of other antisemitic sentiments. Read this story, first published in October 2022, to understand how we got here.

Fake children, lost Black tribes of Israel, and vast conspiracies, all leading to an incendiary Thanksgiving-week dinner with Donald Trump and a hard-line white nationalist and public praise of Hitler’s Nazi regime: This is not the Kanye West we used to know.

Ye, né Kanye, habitually draws headlines for more than just his music, whether it’s for his outspoken comments on race and politics, his beefs with other artists, or his contentious relationship and divorce from Kim Kardashian. Ye is so much, all the time, that it might be easy to skim past the last several months of non-stop Ye controversy.

But even for Ye, his abrupt public embrace of antisemitism and counterintuitive right-wing political rhetoric, resulting in his bringing avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes to dine with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, has been disturbing. He’s since followed that up with a swift tour of right-wing media, including an appearance on Infowars in which even the famously incendiary Alex Jones had to counter Ye’s blatant antisemitism.

The controversy following the November 22 dinner has led to multiple defenses from Trump, in which he consistently claimed to have no idea who Fuentes was but reportedly chose not to distance himself from the ideologies espoused by West or Fuentes. In one of his more recent attempts at disavowing the incident, issued on Truth Social on November 26, Trump framed the entire event as a backfiring attempt to “help a seriously troubled man” — that is, West himself.

Trump claimed Ye had asked him for “advice” on whether or not to launch another run for president; three days after the dinner, West officially announced his candidacy. In a since-deleted tweet accompanying the announcement, Ye shaded Trump, bragging that he’d asked the former president to be his running mate, and praised Fuentes, describing him as a loyalist. He also indicated he’d invited disgraced right-wing reactionary Milo Yiannopoulos, whose controversial career flamed out in 2017 after old remarks surfaced in which he defended pedophilic relationships, to be his campaign manager. Meanwhile, the backlash against Trump has been so severe that it’s caused even formerly loyal Trump advisors to distance themselves.

Kanye, however, has seemed completely unfazed — and unfortunately, his bizarre antisemitic outbursts have only escalated. Following the Mar-a-Lago scandal, he appeared on right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool’s podcast on November 28, accompanied by Fuentes and Yiannopoulos. However, after a 20-minute rant against various individuals, in which he repeatedly alleged a Jewish conspiracy to suppress him, Kanye abruptly ended the interview when it seemed as though Pool might push back against his antisemitism by resisting his guests’ use of “they” and “them.”

On December 1, the situation, somehow, worsened when Kanye appeared on The Alex Jones Show. Over the course of the broadcast, he repeatedly praised Hitler and the Nazi party, insisting that he “loves” Nazis and “likes” Hitler, and at one point blatantly declaring, “The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world.” His remarks placed Jones in the rare position of attempting to help Kanye walk back his extremism by reminding him that Nazis “did a lot of very bad things.”

“But they did good things, too,” Ye responded. “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all of the time.”

That was in the morning. By evening, Ye had been indefinitely suspended from Twitter for posting an image of a Nazi swastika inside of a Star of David.

It might be hard to understand how West, in no time at all, has become a poster child for antisemitism and white nationalism — but that’s partly because so much has happened so quickly. Beginning with an October 3 appearance at Paris Fashion Week, through a controversial Fox News interview — and unaired footage from it that was even more controversial — and then on social media, Ye has revealed the latest phase of his bizarre political evolution: A growing embrace of antisemitic conspiracy rhetoric, a turn toward white supremacist rhetoric concerning the death of George Floyd, and the surprise purchase of a controversial right-wing social platform.

On October 25, amid growing pressure, sportswear powerhouse Adidas announced it was ending its longtime partnership with the rapper amid the controversy. Kanye’s relationship with the company spanned almost a decade and included multiple collaborations with Kanye’s billion-dollar clothing line, Yeezy.

Overall, Ye’s behavior and statements have raised public concern and debate over his politics, the nature of his growing extremism, the state of his well-known mental health issues, and whether anyone in his position should be given a platform at all.

Even more alarmingly, his recent hateful rhetoric has begun to embolden white supremacists who’ve recently been spreading bigoted hate speech — and using West’s name to bolster their arguments.

Ye has been careening through extremist conspiracy tentpoles

The hip-hop legend made headlines for all the wrong reasons when he showed up at Paris Fashion Week to stage a guerrilla fashion show related to his own YZY clothing line. Ye invited his friend of some years, controversial conservative pundit Candace Owens, to attend the event, which the New York Times characterized as a messy “experience” that was more about celebrating the aura of Ye than the clothes on the runway.

Ye and Owens used up every bit of media attention on themselves by wearing matching “white lives matter” shirts, which she proudly shared on social media. The phrase originated with extremist white supremacist groups in response to the Black........

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