YE GADS: Kanye West Canceled Himself.
That brings us to this week’s outrage: On Tuesday, Kanye dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and brought along as his guest the notorious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who showered Trump with flattery. Trump now says that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, which is entirely plausible but (if true) suggests the complete breakdown of competent staffing around the former president as he ramps up a 2024 campaign. In fact, during his presidency and prior campaigns, Trump often seemed to prefer not to know who his supporters were, so long as they supported him. Fuentes is not exactly a household name and mostly known only to people who are Too Online, but it would not take a very long Google search to figure out what he is. Even Breitbart News published an appalled item by Jerome Hudson and Matthew Boyle on the dinner under the headline “Trump Dined at Mar-a-Lago with White Nationalist, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes Alongside Kanye West,” in which Hudson and Boyle observed that Trump “seems to have met with an open white nationalist, antisemite, and Holocaust denier in Fuentes. Fuentes’ now-shut-down YouTube page is shot-through with racist and antisemitic rants that date as far back as 2014.”
Trump aside, however, Kanye clearly knew who he was there with; indeed, it is entirely possible that listening to Fuentes has fed a lot of West’s current enthusiasm for antisemitism. This is a dark place, from which there is no returning.
Fuentes, and possibly another: Kanye West’s antisemitism inspired by Louis Farrakhan. “Unbeknownst to many, West and Farrakhan have been publicly connected for years. In July 2005, West accepted the ‘Million Man March Image Award’ at the NOI headquarters in Chicago. In 2013, when West first drew attention for antisemitism when he lamented that ‘Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people,’ Farrakhan defended him and told him not to ‘bow to pressure to apologize.’ Two years later, West took his family to meet Farrakhan, and his song All Day, released that same year, boasted: ‘Just talked to Farrakhan, that’s sensei.’”