The ‘Goyim defence league’, a tiny collective of attention-seeking provocateurs, has co-opted Kanye’s message, turning it into a new campaign on a freeway in LA, Covering a concrete bridge with signs proclaiming that ‘Kanye West is right”.
This is an unambiguous attempt to threaten and harass Jews in America's second-biggest city. It’s racist, it’s hateful, and the sort of thing that many will see as a canary in the coal mine amidst a backdrop of rising antisemitic incidents across the world.
There’s a pretty good chance that this group, not ones to particularly need a rationale to go on a big anti-Jewish campaign, would have done something like this without Kanye’s ranting over the last month - indeed they pulled the same stunt in 2020. But when someone with a profile as big as West is given breathless wall-to-wall coverage of every hateful thing he chooses to spit out into the world, regardless of how ill he is, then it gives racists like this cover.
It allows them to use Kanye’s cultural capital, earned over a remarkable 20-year career, and utilise it for hating Jews. It appeals to anyone that’s ever heard of Kanye, potentially offering someone a new route into the oldest hate.
It’s no longer about Kanye West, It’s no longer about his circus of enablers in the media and Twitter. The only way this ends is if enough people with the same clout as Kanye start speaking out. As he slowly burns his professional bridges and fizzles into irrelevance, the messages he espouses must be condemned, even if you have the patience and understanding to realise that the ramblings of the mentally ill sometimes do not reflect the real person.
If celebrities don’t have the balls to come for Kanye directly, they should be comfortable condemning the virulent ideas that are taking hold because of him.
