The UK government should not ban Kanye West from entering Britain. Nor should our state broadcaster promote the racist and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson. While we protect freedom of speech, we must prevent our institutions from sliding into what Saul Bellow called the “moronic inferno”.
The hierarchy of values means that we extend different licences to different professions. We give the entertainer the “fool’s pardon”. In the modern West, we have extended that privilege to its limits, and sometimes beyond. We cannot afford to be so generous to politicians and institutions.
West has repeatedly degraded himself in the cycles of mental illness. His bipolar breaks do not excuse his anti-Jewish racism and his moronic praise of Adolf Hitler. But his illness should influence our response – especially because West has apologised and now seeks to make amends.
West can plead diminished responsibility for his actions, but his celebrity confers extra responsibility for their effects. By banning West, we prevent him from taking that responsibility and impart quasi-magical powers to him. We also set a precedent that, in our increasingly censorious time, will be exploited to stifle political debate.
The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood excluded West because she considers him “not conducive for the public good”: likely to cause serious disorder or serious offence. For decades, the Home Office granted visas to Islamist “hate preachers” who gave serious offences while fulminating in perfect sobriety. Meanwhile, the Home Office banned elected politicians such as Geert Wilders in a tacit surrender to the threat of civil disorder among British Muslims.
It is commendable that under Mahmood, the Home Office is now refusing entry to Islamist extremists, unless they arrive by dinghy. But Kanye West does not intend to cause offence or riot. He wants to build bridges with the Jewish people. As he told the Israeli-Moroccan rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto in New York last November, he is “taking accountability”.
West is not the first entertainer to disgrace himself while under the influence, then sober up and face the responsibility for the harm he had caused.
In 1976, Eric Clapton told an audience at a Birmingham concert that there were too many “wogs” and “coons” in Britain, and quoted the National Front’s slogan “Keep Britain White”. Clapton’s tedious career trundled on down the middle of the road regardless. No one pickets a Clapton concert, though music critics probably should.
Similar indulgence was shown to David Bowie when he called Hitler “the first rock star” and adopted the British Union of Fascists lightning-bolt-in-a-circle logo as a backdrop. Bowie later apologised with a Nazi-style excuse: temporary insanity due to occultism and cocaine. He too sashayed into the 1980s as a national treasure.
Like Clapton and Bowie, West lost his mind on drugs, then recovered enough of his senses to realise the harm he had caused. Now compare West’s penitent sobriety to Carlson’s impenitent incitement.
Since leaving Fox News in 2023, Carlson has reinvented himself as an anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist.
The liberties of the First Amendment permit this kind of liberty-taking. British law does not.
And while the frivolities of America’s media market incentivise Carlson’s clowning, the BBC’s privileges rest, at least in theory, on a commitment to the truth.
A democracy can survive admitting a clown like Kanye into the circus at Finsbury Park for a few nights. But it loses its moral compass when its chief broadcaster leaps into the gutter and airs a hateful fake like Carlson on one of its main political shows.
In February 2024, after Carlson’s emollient interview with Vladimir Putin, the BBC website accurately described Carlson as the voice of the Republican “nativist wing”. After leaving Fox, the Beeb explained, Carlson’s “content and guests” had become “increasingly fringe”, and included Andrew Tate, an influencer charged with rape and human trafficking who denies these allegations.
Since then, Donald Trump has disowned Carlson as “kooky” and one of a gang of podcast “NUT JOBS”. As Carlson has decayed into an anti-American and anti-Jewish conspiracist, his standing among Republican voters has collapsed. Yet the BBC promoted Carlson despite his descent into irrelevance.
Only two explanations come to mind. Both reflect poorly and suggest that the BBC no longer deserves its privileges and our licence fees. One is the desperation for clicks that has driven the BBC’s online strategy towards the freakish and trivial. The other is that the BBC now agrees with Carlson and seeks to kosher him because its enemies are his enemies: the Trump administration, Israel and the Jews.
Since the October 7 attacks, Western audiences have been subject to an information war of unprecedented severity. Massive resources have been directed to misleading public opinion and scapegoating the Jewish people as the enemies of humanity. Some of the lies come from illiberal and hostile states such as Russia, China and Qatar. Digital mountebanks such as Carlson and Candace Owens have profited by amplifying these lies.
While broadcasters in liberal states, notably Sky News and the BBC, chased after the clown car in search of audiences, diaspora Jews faced the worst wave of violence and delegitimisation in recent history. While Kanye West is doing what he can to take accountability for his part in this, Tucker Carlson continues to spread lies and incitement. So does the BBC.
It is easy to despise those who, like West and Carlson, become hateful clowns. Far worse, however, are the enablers who profit from staging spectacles of incitement.
Instead of stigmatising West for wanting to play a pop concert, the UK government should be demanding accountability from a BBC that has corrupted its mission and repeatedly breached its commitments as a public broadcaster.
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