Ye West & The Fascists Who Love Him

Intro

The temptation here is to talk about the cult of celebrity, and I do want to do that, but I really don’t think I can point at it like it’s the issue here, when we’re looking at this entangled wretched rat-king of issues. This entire question feels like lifting up a knot of tails in the hopes of untangling them only to find writhing, terrified rodents screaming and tearing at each other in real time beneath your busy fingers; we should therefore spend some considering our attention economy and how it interplays with everything happening here, as well as the continued role it will inevitably play in what happens next, but this is neither a chapter in the growth of fascist ideas in our cultural mainstream, nor is it the secret at the heart of it all. It is however, a vital piece in understanding what is happening, because what IS happening here, is very, very important.

Timeline

On October 6th 2022, white supremacist bow-tie dipshit Tucker Carlson, released an interview with rapper Kanye West, now going by “Ye” in which the artist explained his motivation for promoting the white supremacist slogan “white lives matter” on merch at a show.

In unreleased clips from the Carlson interview, Ye made a series of extreme comments about jewish people, including promoting the central black israelite idea that black people are the true descendants of the lost tribes of israel, and more disturbingly that jewish people promote Planned Parenthood to control the growth and behaviour of the black population. The decision to remove these more extreme statements but still air the rest of the interview brought Carlson enormous criticism from a variety of political commentators.

On October 8th Ye tweeted “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

On October 17th it was announced that Ye was in talks to purchase Parler, the far-right social media platform belonging to the husband of Candace Owens, professional fascist liar and occasional friend to Ye during his years-long spiral into conservative conspiracism. Free speech warrior, associate of Ghislaine Maxwell and dangerously irresponsible blood-money fortune inheritor Elon Musk shared a meme in a now deleted tweet suggesting that this purchase would somehow result in a fusion between Twitter and Parler.

On October 22nd, antisemites unfurled a banner on an overpass in Los Angeles that said “Kanye was right about the jews”, while Beverly Hills residents that same weekend received antisemitic literature promoting conspiracy theories broadly in line with statements that West has made both before and since.

On October 25th amid growing public pressure, sportswear company Adidas cancelled their long-running partnership with Ye costing both the brand and the rapper figures somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars.

On November 22nd, Ye reportedly had dinner with former president Donald Trump and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, where according to Ye he asked Trump to be his running mate in a presidential campaign that he formally announced on November 25th.

On November 28th Ye appeared on Tim Pool’s podcast with Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos, where Pool, a far-right slug masquerading as a liberal centrist provided light questioning of Ye’s antisemitism, prompting the rapper to storm out of the interview.

On December 1st, West appeared on Alex Jones’ network InfoWars where he said that he loves Hitler, and repeated various nazi talking points, for instance that Hitler “invented highways” (he did not).

Following the interview and the enormous social media backlash, Ye posted a picture of a swastika inside a Star of David, for which Elon Musk publicly deliberated over banning West, as Musk’s proclaimed new free speech policies on twitter came into conflict with his personal friend inciting violence on a platform with 31 million followers. After seeing that Musk was talking about banning him, Ye posted a picture of Musk looking pale and out of shape with his shirt off next to Ari Emannuel, a jewish businessman with whom Ye seems to have developed a deep obsession. Following this tweet, West was banned from twitter.

Piers Morgan, professional spineless little worm whose bones are composed of the sands of fallen empires, said that he had been texting with Ye and that the rapper is just trying to be as offensive as possible.

On December 5th Gavin McInnes released a trailer for a series titled Saving Ye in which he claimed to have flown out to talk to West two days after the InfoWars interview. Two days later McInnes released a 40 minute interview on his site censored dot tv where he mostly lets West rant on unopposed with occasional questions and an interlude where he talks to Fuentes for a few minutes.

The Players

Alex Jones is a far-right conspiracy theory grifter and conscious pork medallion, notorious for involvement in the Obama birther movement, 9/11 trutherism, propping up Trump’s election campaigns, the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol Building and the dishonest reporting that instigated the harassment of the parents of children killed at the mass shooting at Sandy Hook. One woman, who had already lost her child in a school shooting, was harassed so constantly that she had to move home 7 times and couldn’t visit the grave of her dead son, making her experience along with the other parents harassed because of Jones, one of the most incomprehensible stochastic horrors of our modern age. Jones, despite discomfort, shock and disbelief in some of the clips shared virally on social media where he is reacting to Ye’s antisemitism, is not deserving of your sympathy. In order to deserve sympathy ever again, he would have to change so completely as to effectively annihilate the Alex Jones currently existing in the world.

Gavin McInnes founded the Proud Boys, a widespread and extremely violent fascist street gang operating across America. The Proud Boys’ membership have produced Proud Boys merch that says “6MWE” - that stands for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough”, to be clear, and is a popular neo-Nazi slogan. McInnes, for his part, tried limply to distance himself from the gang when he realised that having founded a violent fascist street gang might have legal repercussions for him personally, but has never meaningfully distanced himself from the politics they practice and antisemitism is readily apparent throughout his work even today, and even in this interview.

McInnes’ Saving Ye is at absolute best a naive attempt to course correct Ye’s meltdown into something that people with politics more like McInnes’ can profit from instead of Fuentes, and at worst a deliberate coordinated media opportunity for Fuentes’ nazi ideas in which McInnes sits down with Ye and asks “what would you do” about the jews. Frankly, the question of whether McInnes is just stupid or just racist can only lead us back to the fact that he founded the Proud Boys, so not really any closer to an answer, and I see no particular reason to give the washed up hack turned fascist scumbag the benefit of the doubt.

Milo Yiannopoulos is an opportunistic grifter and insufferable bottom in the far-right politics sphere who first came to prominence through the rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump in 2016 while he was working for fascist media site Breitbart. Yiannopoulos’ career of trolling in the media and baiting university students into time-wasting arguments for content was cut short by a concerted campaign to deplatform him, after which Milo declared bankruptcy in 2018. Since then, trying to regain a foothold in the far-right media and politics world, Milo has pulled a series of petty stunts including using the mystique of his deteriorating brand to auction off his set pieces and personal effects. His most recent attempt at clawing back clout by joining Ye’s campaign ended on December 5th when Yiannopoulos confirmed on Telegram that he and Ye were parting ways. Milo claims the decision is mutual, though many in his social circle have suggested that it is the result of a failed power-play against Fuentes, with whom Ye has recently become inseparable.

Nick Fuentes is an antisemite and fascist and spooky ghost made out of sad, short children who frequently expresses support for a complete authoritarian dictatorship with laws based on biblical literalism. He identifies as a Catholic, which isnt a real gender, and says that this is what informs his politics first and foremost, but a more educated study of Fuentes would suggest that his time on neo-nazi child porn enthusiast messaging board 4chan slash b has informed his beliefs and central ideology far more.

He goes to great lengths to explain that he doesn’t identify as a Nazi, which should probably explain a great deal, and not to leave it unsaid, he is a Holocaust denier, and in-keeping with the Sartre quote about antisemites, we can’t meaningfully determine the depth of his hatred for jewish people because in Fuentes’ own words he never actually tells the truth about how extreme his beliefs really are. In fact, Fuentes says he doesn’t call himself a Nazi or a white nationalist for “tactical” reasons

Discussion

At this point Ye's I Love Hitler shirt is raising a lot of questions that should be answered by his shirt, but I want to explore a few sides of this in a little more depth. Maybe we can all just take a second to breathe and collectively say “What the fuck is going on?”

We need to clear out some cobwebs before we can get down to an analysis of the full-court press that the far-right media organism is performing around Ye West right now.

Lots of people are talking about Ye’s mental health, and in particular his Bipolar diagnosis. It is worth stating clearly, as many have already done, that Bipolar disorder and poor mental health more broadly, does not cause antisemitism. There is important nuance to observe here, because we live in a society [LONG PAUSE] rife with bigotry including antisemitism, and anti-blackness Ye has experienced firsthand, and the conspiratorial thinking which is frequently central to antisemitism, relies on emotional reasoning and associative blending. Therefore someone who is experiencing extremely poor mental health who already holds antisemitic beliefs will be much harder to appeal to based on evidence that contradicts their motivated reasoning. It is important to strike a balance between acknowledging the ways in which Ye’s apparent extended and evolving mental health crisis has exacerbated this situation and maintaining his culpability for his own beliefs and actions.

What a lot of people are doing when they talk about West’s mental health is effectively imagining an alternate Kanye West who never did any of the things that they find upsetting, or evoke someone who had not fallen into his current psychodramatic malaise; West himself recognises the almost teleological split taking place within observers’ cultural perceptions of him as multiple instantiated persons over his career, especially in his track “I miss the old Kanye”. This is an exercise in trying to understand why people do bad things, and it could be compared to how people discuss school shooters, but ultimately we have the Ye West we have in real life, and it is his actions and their consequences that matter.

One place it is worthwhile to consider Ye’s mental health is in the discussion of the ways in which white supremacists are taking advantage of him and his still enormous platform. While maintaining that he is authentically an antisemite and his agency as an entire person, we can clearly observe that a few fascists puppeteering a mentally ill celebrity across their media platforms for attention can do a lot of damage very quickly.

Another place it is worthwhile is in reflexively understanding what it is that Ye believes - what does he say that actually aligns with what he thinks is true, since so much of this entire debacle has been widespread bafflement and confusion helped in no small part by the fact that some of what West is doing is clearly deliberate absurdist trolling - but which parts? We can use an analytical approach to suggest what he is saying sincerely and what is willful gibberish.

As for Piers Morgan’s claim that Ye is just trying to be offensive, we should probably start with Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous quote about antisemites:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

This is true. We, the left, the people who should stand up for jews against antisemitism, are obliged to use words responsibly. So, let’s put some responsible words in order to explain why it is apparent that West believes the antisemitic things he is saying.

Throughout the recent wave of interviews, Ye has repeatedly diverted the conversation to ramble about pornography, which he says is both a cancerous presence in society inflicted upon the world by the jews in order to control everyone and also responsible for the dissolution of his marriage. Although unclear on the exact details, he refers to himself as having had a porn addiction and his ex-wife Kim Kardashian as having been somehow involved in the culture of pornography that he came to despise. This reads as a kind of resentful trauma response. He repeatedly states that “instagram is pornography” and all of this ties into a larger conspiracy theory which is a historic and commonplace antisemitic belief that jews control the media and control everyone involved in the media through control of their images.

Okay: so Ye doesn’t want his image controlled by the jews, hence the Zodiac Killer drip. Part of this motivation, understood through the lens of a public meltdown, is understandable, or at least I can understand it.

Earlier this year I didn’t release any new videos for several months and a part of the reason why was that I knew I was soon going to be having Facial Feminisation Surgery, and the idea of putting out new images of myself that didn’t match up with my mental image of me became very painful. Putting a pin in his racist interpretation of the world around him for one second, what we can say here is that it’s very clear Ye is feeling an acute dissonance between himself and the person people see when they look at him. I say all of this to refute the Piers Morgan interpretation: no, he is not simply trying to offend as many people as possible. His outfit is evidence of that: what he says about jews controlling people through their images is an authentically held belief.

On the other hand, when Ye says for instance that he “loves everyone” as an explanation for why he is saying that he loves Hitler, this is straight-forward trolling. He is going from interview to interview denying the Holocaust, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, refusing to criticise the Nazis in any way and repeatedly criticising both individual jews and what he sees as the crimes of a global jewish conspiracy. Okay, we’ll get into all this more later, so perhaps a better example of out-and-out absurdist trolling would be West’s comments about Elon Musk. Complaining on his instagram account about his being banned from twitter, Ye wrote:

“Am I the only one who thinks Elon could be half-Chinese? Have you ever seen his pics as a child? Take a Chinese genius and mate them with a South African super model and we have an Elon. I say an Elon because they probably made 10 to 30 Elon’s and he’s the first genetic hybrid that stuck… Well, let’s not forget about Obama.”

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.

Pool Interview

Scumbag grifters!

So here we’ll look at a little bit of the interview with Tim Pool, where Ye is accompanied by Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes. Tim Pool made over $5,000 from this stream from donations and superchats, where chatter messages read, for example “At the end of every conspiracy is a Jew. Movies, music, finance, gov, NGOs, military contractors, sports etc. You refuse to even consider it. THEY don’t do it. THEY fund and coordinate it. Every time.” And not to leave it unsaid, YouTube made over $2,000 from these same chat donations.

Addressing the dinner with former President Trump, Ye says early in the interview “Trump had no idea who Nick Fuentes was” which may well be true - Donald Trump has frequently demonstrated caring very little about the simpering cronies who adore him and prop up his fascist political power, but if it is true it demonstrates one of the biggest leaps forward for Nick’s openly fascist agenda. His association with Ye got him a seat at the table with the most famous fascist in the world today, where he got to explicitly request that they work together on future political endeavours. It is undeniable that Fuentes sees Ye as a free ride to spread nazi talking points to Trump, to Trump’s cult-like political following, and a broader mainstream, and to build on that, Tim Pool is a facilitator of that project by allowing them a space to discuss it publicly. Pool has 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube.

@9:53 “I was just ‘gerrymandering’ the lawyers and the hollywood executives and the people at the bank who de-banked me” so something that makes all of this harder is that Ye is politically illiterate to the point of farce, which is not exactly a novelty, I’m not trying to paint your typical antisemite as particularly well-informed or cogent, but when he says things like “i’m gerrymandering” all the jews together, creating a political metaphor with the way that minority groups are legislated into voting districts that reduce the influence of their voting power to represent what he’s doing by associating the actions of some individual jewish people with an innate quality of all jews… that makes no fucking sense. I sat with this one for a while to try and write a bit more eloquently, a bit more descriptively, in a way that would unpack why it doesn’t make sense, but it’s just gibberish, and it primarily communicates that he simply doesn’t understand gerrymandering as a term or a process.

Anyway the interview chugs along like this for about 20 minutes until Pool says that he doesn’t want to say that the “they” West keeps referring to are the jews, and Ye storms out the room to sulk, like a child. That’s nearly all there is to really say about this interview, but I do want to comment that if Pool represents any sense of the liberal mainstream, of what centrist pushback against fascism and antisemitism is, then the mainstream “resistance” to antisemitism is just antisemitism itself. Inviting Yiannopoulos and Fuentes on your show so that Yiannopoulos can tell your audience that Fuentes is the greatest political commentator of his generation is doing absolutely phenomenal harm to the safety of the jewish community and actively streaming your audience towards the talking points of a Holocaust-denying white supremacist.

Pool’s discomfort with what West is desperate to say about Jews is anaesthetised by the opioid effects of the profits he knows he will make from hosting this desperate clown show on his platform and that makes him at best a spineless bystander to the violence that he knows will result from this and at worst a fascist pretending very poorly to be a liberal.

InfoWars Interview

Ye cannot stop talking about his personal grievances - porn, Ari Emmanuel, Phil Knight - across any of his interviews.  [CLIP:“I was thinking about Satan”] In the InfoWars interview he is clearly getting bored very quickly and reverting the topic back to whatever he wanted it to be about. It has been said that this is in line with him suffering a prolonged egocentric manic episode, but whether this is true or not, it’s equally true that this is in line with a very famous but not very intelligent and frankly infantile personality surrounded by Yes-Men who find it politically and professionally expedient to strike a balance between tolerating his gibberish and using him to have the racist discussion to which they are trying to give oxygen. The conversation is interesting to Ye for as long as it is about him and his life, which means that people willing to pander to those needs can keep benefitting from his antisemitism and his platform, and using him to further spread nazi ideas and talking points.

It seems that Ye was in touch with Alex Jones for quite a while, and it was Jones who introduced him to Yiannopoulos, who then introduced him to Fuentes. This is something they explained in the Pool interview explicitly, but we’ll talk about it in the context of InfoWars. Jones, having hosted Fuentes on his show multiple times in the past, appears to be scrambling to understand his new relationship to his younger colleague. In a livestream, Fuentes described the InfoWars appearance with West as “the best day of his life” and made a point to say that the first time he had appeared on Alex Jones’ show, Jones told him to downplay “the jew thing” because it would be harmful to the brand.

A few days after the interview with Ye and Fuentes together, Jones had Fuentes back on the show on his own via video call, supposedly to “debate” Nick on his antisemitic views.

[clips from “debate” here]

It has been observed multiple times before that Fuentes possesses what some call “enormous yaoi hands”, which are incredibly distracting when he speaks because he makes a conscious effort to imitate the hand gestures of Donald Trump.

The purpose of this discussion, it is flagrantly obvious, is not a debate or an attempt at refuting antisemitic beliefs. Jones is trying to triangulate his new position in relation to Fuentes, since Fuentes is now so close to Ye, whose platform Jones and the other far-right grifters covet, and Fuentes’ influence over Ye lies somewhere between feeding the rapper nazi talking points and controlling which media appearances he accepts or declines.

To reinforce this point, in the InfoWars interview West says that he hadn’t heard of Benjamin Netanyahu until two weeks prior.

[clip: Ye hasn’t heard of Bibi]

Despite having not heard of Netanyahu until two weeks ago, West apparently found him important enough to bring a whole prop comedy bit into the interview, where he displays a net for cleaning a fishtank, and a bottle of Yoohoo, which together makes, apparently Net-and-Yahoo, which Ye uses as a hand puppet to make jokes about the Israeli conservative.

Much of the interview follows a pattern of Ye going on a rant about his personal grievances and his warped views of sexuality and social media while relating it back to his bigoted conspiracy theories, and then Jones and Fuentes trying to interpret it through the lens of the talking points with which their respective audiences will already be familiar, the driving tension being that Jones wants Fuentes and West to use some kind of coded language like “the globalists” or “international bankers” but both of them are determined to make their antisemitism as explicit as possible, and then after some of this back and forth, Ye gets bored again and drags the conversation back to either his grievances, or some asinine shit he’s reading off his phone, or more of the net and yahoo puppet show.

One of West’s prepared bits for the interview is a list of jokes about Ben Shapiro that he attributes to impressively unfunny hack Owen Benjamin.

[clip:owen benjamin jokes]

In actuality, these are very old antisemitic jokes where Benjamin has simply swapped in Ben Shapiro in place of “jews” or “a jew”. As has been pointed out on InfoWars monitoring and analysis podcast Knowledge Fight, Jones and Benjamin are on extremely poor terms and the flagrance with which West can talk about Benjamin and tell his jokes here does speak to Jones’ desperation to host the rapper on the show. As an aside, listening to Knowledge Fight is an objectively good decision and makes you a sexier and more charismatic person.

Lots of people reacting to clips of the InfoWars interview have said something along the lines of “I never thought I’d feel sorry for Alex Jones” or “you can tell Ye has really fucked when even Alex Jones is saying damn not sure about that one chief”, and on top of what I’ve already said about Jones not deserving this kind of sympathy I’d really like to warn against interpreting any of the clips this way. This entire thing is a negotiation. If Alex’ audience are into it, he’ll lean into it more, but in the mean time he has to protect his brand and his legal liability. Alex Jones is a profit-seeking algorithm represented by a cartoon red-faced man stolen from a PSA about alcohol and cocaine abuse: he doesn’t care on a moral level about the things West is saying or the violence it will inspire. He created a platform that he has shared with people like Nick Fuentes for years and he introduced Ye to his social circle, and is now hosting them on his platform again, and he is delighted about how much attention and money it is getting him.

[clip: millions of listeners]

McInnes Interview

-00:45 McInnes calls the InfoWars interview “the craziest most punk rock thing since the Sex Pistols” but then says it will be bad for a presidential campaign, framing what Ye has done not in terms of morality or connection to reality or to the tangible violence he is causing in the real world against jewish people right now, but in terms of hampering his own ambitions [batya interview clip here “what would you say if”]

-03:20 Gavin says he’s going to “do an intervention” on Ye and Nick. Fuentes is a committed nazi whose entire platform is built on explicitly promoting nazism and white supremacy. You can’t do an intervention on him any more than you can explain the moral problem with fossil fuels to the Exxon Mobil Corporation. In both cases the only form of intervention that would make a meaningful difference to the world, is the kind of intervention that simply stops them from operating by any means.

-01:30 Ye says jewish people created Hitler’s bad reputation and also the Holocaust is “not the only Holocaust” (yes it is) and that abortion is also a genocide. So this ties in to Ye’s bizarre claims about Planned Parenthood being a jewish conspiracy to control the black population, which it shouldn’t need stating but we’ll say anyway, is just based on his antisemitism. There’s nothing more to get to the bottom of there, he just hates jews.

This claim that Hitler’s “bad reputation” came from jews is one of Ye’s most extreme expressions of Holocaust denial so far, and it’s quite telling that McInnes - who says he recorded with Ye for 5 hours - puts this so early in the edit of the final interview. It seems to be marking out who the audience for this is meant to be. The far-right pundits around West want to keep a white supremacist base invested in what he’s saying and this blatant a level of basic denial of reality creates a self-selecting filter between people who will be offended enough to immediately switch off when someone says that jews slandered Hitler, and the people who will be open to hearing the rest of the discussion, which is compounded by Ye deftly tying this directly to his anti-abortion rhetoric. The American far-right has been pushing to recriminalise abortion for decades, and if there are people watching this interview who are firmly anti-abortion and significantly pigeonholed into a weaponised unreality - for instance QAnon adherents - they may be, in their minds at least, so far undecided on “the jewish question” but starting with this kind of epistemic wedge statement will isolate them from people who might be able to keep them from further antisemitic radicalisation.

-03:27 McInnes says “80 to 90 per cent of Hollywood is jewish”. It would have been comment-worthy on its own a month earlier for McInnes to make a statement like this, but Ye provides an umbrella for all of the fascists he is talking to. They only have to be less extreme than him in order to not technically be doing anything wrong. McInnes gets to frame what he is doing as “Saving Ye” because he is opposing the statement “I love Hitler”. My dad once told me if you’re on a hike and you meet a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear to survive, you only have to be faster than your hiking buddy, and I think we can see the same logic at play here: McInnes brand is built entirely on pretending to be too stupid to understand why everything he does promotes fascism. Tim Pool’s brand is built on pretending that what he cares about is preserving the centrist liberal mainstream realm of fair-minded debate. Alex Jones’s brand is built on pretending that he is going to expose the authoritarian new world order globalist elites. All of these people and more importantly the characters they all play on their TV Shows don’t need to be in any more meaningful conflict with Ye than you could see in pro wrestling. None of this is about stopping him - in fact, quite the reverse.

-05:21 McInnes asks Ye if he tries not to meet new jewish people with prejudice and Ye says “nope” to which McInnes and Fuentes burst out laughing and McInnes says “this intervention isn’t going very well”. This really puts the lie to the entire notion of the intervention if anyone at all was even slightly fooled. Gavin is not here to deradicalise Ye, he’s brought Ye and Nick in to laugh with them about how outrageously open they are being about the views that they all share. The next natural step here, provided that they get the base they are aiming for and the popular approval from racists who have been crypto up until this point but are grateful for the cover with which they can open up about being racists, is for McInnes, probably Alex Jones, possibly even Tim Pool to publicly ponder “what if Ye was right about some things”, as if they ever meaningfully disagreed.

Tactically, that is the next move and the only two ways that it won’t be the move these far right figures take is if the popular response is lacking and the base doesn’t materialise or if they hesitate too long and new far right figures with smaller platforms seize the opportunity to take their place, because all of this is dictated by a free market logic of attention. The reason it was never a question whether these people would host Ye on their shows is that he gets eyes on their channels. He makes them money. If they don’t get with his program it will only be because either the attention (and therefore profit) isn’t there, or because someone else beats them to it.

-29:14 how would president ye and vp Fuentes go about “fixing the jew problem” - Fuentes is less bothered about medicine and says “communication” is the real problem + 16:14 Ye starts insisting that jews shouldn’t be in charge of “media, technology, politics, farming, prisons”, easily comparable to the Nuremberg laws and arguably promoting a boycott on any jewish business. McInnes replies by asking “what would you do about the jews” if elected president, to which Ye says that jews should work for christians and that he would hire a jewish person as long as he could completely surveil them to make sure that they weren’t “a spy”. Normally conversations about “what you would do if you were in power” are navel gazing and fairly futile exercises for people who will never actually have that kind of political power, but in the context of Ye’s enormous media presence, let alone his presidential campaign and his “proposition for Trump” this is a much more real discussion about policies that could actually be enacted by, if not West himself, any dedicated antisemites able to take power in American electoral politics

-23:54 Fuentes finally speaks. McInnes has just finished a ramble about how Scotland is “ethno-masochistic” because it is the most woke country on earth and has open border policies and this is all evidence of “whites wanting to sabotage themselves”. Fuentes says “I don’t think that the jews are particularly ethno-masochistic” He says he doesn’t think white people hate themselves because “when I was a kid, kids loved Hitler” - he means on 4chan where the users were in fact adult nazis pretending to be kids to indoctrinate and groom children to become nazis, because this is precisely what has happened to Nick. His argument is that jewish manipulation is the cause of white self-hatred. In McInnes’ statement jews are white people and jewish people are not to blame for the white “ethno-masochism” but in Fuentes’ statement jews are an outside group who teach the “ethno-masochism” to white people in order to sabotage them. This might be the first clear ideological conflict in any of the Ye interviews, although McInnes seems extremely passe about antisemitism and has been frequently antisemitic himself, and again, is the founder of the Proud Boys, so I return our attention to the question of whether McInnes is “just stupid” or “just racist” [much more to dig into here]

-25:03 Evidencing the real lack of any meaningful conflict, Fuentes says that Hitler kicked the “cultural marxists” “who were jewish” out of Germany, which he is clearly arguing was a good thing for the protection of the white race, and Gavin does not oppose any level of that statement, but rather “yes and”s it with “and atheist”. This is because Fuentes’ real point here is that concerns about “cultural marxism” wouldn’t be as widespread in the right wing today if not for their origin as a crucial point of Nazi propaganda and McInnes - splitting hairs about jews vs liberal elites aside - agrees with that point, because he knows where the concerns about cultural marxism come from. McInnes’ whole point here boils down to an almost spiritual negotiation over the meaning and purpose of this particular antisemitic talking point, whether it’s about judaism the religion or merely about the sinister effects of cultural judaism as demonstrated by atheist jews.

-From this point it becomes a back and forth between McInnes and Fuentes almost entirely.

Conclusion

Less than a month since the interview with Ye, Tim Pool found himself being questioned over antisemitism again, when his co-host went on an antisemitic rant on the show, suggesting that Ye was right and calling jews not real believers.

Oh would you look at that, if it isn’t the consequences of my actions.

Pool represents an interesting element at play here, because I really think weighing up his ideological commitments fails to get us very far. Just like everyone else in his sphere he is doing what he is doing because it gets him attention, and attention can be converted into money. So much of everything that we’re looking at here is the natural conclusion of introducing an ego driven bigot with a massive platform into a space where attention and profit go hand-in-hand and the profit motive dictates so many major decisions that people make about how they conduct themselves.

This is a coordinated manoeuvre by the far right white supremacist media sphere and while the damage it is causing may not be immediately preventable or reversible, the motion itself gives away the shape and function of the entire team and serves as a perfect opportunity for us to examine and explain how these fascists do what they do.

The right wing media sphere is not a monolith; it is full of backstabbing divas, grifters and opportunists with no ideological cohesiveness, but all of them can see the neon flashing dollar signs inherent to hosting Ye’s meltdown on their platforms, which is why after watching Fuentes out the corner of their eye for years and keeping him at arms length they are all scrambling to triangulate their politics and more importantly their platforms around a campaign organised by Fuentes. They all watched Yiannopoulos circle the drain and fade into obscurity over the course of half a decade but suddenly he got to go on Tim Pool.

[need to get “Ben Shapiro says I’ll kill myself” timestamp] The ways that Ye is pressing to remove Ben Shapiro specifically from the right-wing media sphere also speaks strongly to the underlying purpose of what’s going on here. For the last 20 years, in the islamophobic climate of American patriotism and xenophobia after 9/11 the conservative media has worn the phrase “judeo-christian values” absolutely ragged. It was a nonsense phrase to begin with, but as a floating signifier it served as a way to unite christian identity conservatives with conservative jews who supported Israel and more importantly to reinforce the paternalistic philosemitism that defines the relationship between evangelical Christians and Israel.

For the uninformed, radical evangelicals in America trying to enact or bring about biblical prophecy have supported Israel largely based on the belief that relocating all Jews in the world to Israel would be one of the criteria necessary to initiate the rapture. I know it sounds silly that they are trying to speedrun the end of the world, trying to initiate a level-skip that will take us all to the final boss cutscene, but firstly George Bush invaded Iraq using rhetoric about Gog and Magog from this kind of biblical prophecy to appeal to this very evangelical base and all of the Christian Identity movement’s politics functions on this kind of illogic. Either the prophecy is going to be fulfilled and they should build up their militaristic strength to fight the army of the antichrist, or the prophecy will not be fulfilled without them building up their militaristic strength - they have to make God’s Kingdom on Earth themselves, that’s the basic idea here.

To not leave it unsaid, “judeo-christian values” has also been a white supremacist in-group signifier. Jews, Christians, that’s “us”, white people, “westerners” - then there’s “them”, people who don’t adhere to the “judeo-christian values”.

So the purpose in trying to push Shapiro out is part of a far-right realignment, trying to take the existing structures of the Christian Identity movement that can currently uncomfortably tolerate conservative Jews, and bring out their most explicitly antisemitic tendencies. It’s not enough for them to be palatable to neo-Nazis any more, Fuentes and his ilk have decided it’s time for the cult to expressly embrace Nazism, and to do that all marriages of convenience to any conservative Jews have to be called off.

As I commented earlier, Ye’s antisemitism and conspiracy beliefs align closely with a school of thought known as black israelism, a set of conspiracy beliefs inherited from the christian identity movement that paints the group that the conspiracy believer belongs to as the true “lost tribe of Judah” and Jews as the original chosen people who lost God’s favour after they rejected Jesus Christ. This conspiracy cult and its ideas are central to the beliefs that drive American Christian fundamentalism, using syncretic interpretations of history and archaeology to glue together narratives about history that paint the current moment right now, from when the conspiracy theory started back in the 1800s all the way to 2023, as the tipping point of biblical prophecy, the crucial moment when everything will be decided, and the Black Israelite talking points that Ye has brought up several times is just one version of it all. In this version black people are the lost tribe of judah, the chosen people who have to drive prophecy to be fulfilled, in British Israelism the lost tribe of Judah were the anglo-saxons, and in the big tent conspiracy theory QAnon which unites most modern conservative conspiracism into one esoteric nightmare collaboration of bullshit, the chosen people who will bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth are Trump supporters

However

QAnon is a cult of self-justifying power, and their figureheads being sympathetic to their alternate reality isn’t necessarily enough on its own for it to keep them in their revered position within the conspiracy narrative, they also have to have power. Therefore ever since Trump left office there have been conspiracy theorists casting around for alternatives to lead their conspiracy cult. People call into InfoWars surprisingly often to ask Alex Jones if he thinks that Trump has become part of the cabal, or has been compromised, or was ever really on their side at all. See, a sizeable part of the cult does listen to Jones who, being a money-driven weathervane, has been flirting with the possibility of supporting other candidates besides Trump if his audience seems amenable to it.

Despite the uncertainty inherent to all these far-right personalities and their audiences waiting to see who starts getting the base’s support before they all jump ship, the climate exists for them to pick a new leader. There is a considerable question to be asked about whether they would be able to form consensus in making a black man that figurehead, but whether it’s Ye or someone else, the prospect of someone new replacing Trump opens up the possibility of a new agenda.

Donald Trump panders to QAnon conspiracy theorists because he’s flattered by attention, because he’s a rampant narcissist whose moral reality contains one person, but he doesn’t understand how to deftly use or control the social capital that he wields as the messiah figure of a religious cult. People like Nick Fuentes, on the other hand, people like Gavin McInnes, I think have very clear ideas about what they would do if they had that kind of power.

Either they can install Ye or they can just use the leverage that he gives them to bring more explicit antisemitism into the collective consciousness of the cultic milieu, and doing that will set the agenda for the cult, because when the reality the cult exists in defines membership to it, the figurehead has to adhere to that reality and the politics dictated by it no matter what their personal beliefs are. They’ve already succeeded at bringing antisemitism to the table here, but so far everything has been a pilot study - they want to see if the base responds to it, and if they do the people who appeal to that base will continue to sell it back to them just as they do with everything else they believe.

We have to watch closely from here on to the antisemitic currents in American conservatism, because what happens now could affect the safety of jewish people very negatively. Antifascist activists need to make protecting jewish communities a high priority because the feedback loop that fascists engender when they succeed in attacking a minority group is pernicious. Belief frequently follows action in the human mind and for fascists, the process of constructing justifications for their attacks on marginalised communities is a process of strengthening their in-group identity. Reasons for why the victims deserved it, narratives idolising the attackers, even conspiracy theories that paint the attacks as false-flags or media hoaxes all build a picture of a world where their cult is being attacked for hating this marginalised group because that marginalised group is on the side of power, and the people behind it all, the shadowy puppeteers masterminding it want to call you antisemitic! They want to call you a Nazi! They hate the Nazis but we love everyone.

More than that, we need a leftism that is more than reactive. I know that this whole video is reacting to and analysing the actions of the far-right but I have to accept that doing this is engaging in politics on the back foot. Anticapitalist politics need to be accessible to ordinary people who can see how much capitalism is harming them in real life in a way that leaves absolutely no room for bigotry, because fascists can easily incorporate anticapitalist politics into the way they sell their ideas, and the only ideological defence to that is to give people ways to criticise capitalism that refuses to blame it on anyone other than the ruling class. If the people responding to antisemitism distance themselves from anticapitalist politics, then the politically ignorant can be told that the problems in their lives that stem from capitalism come the control of capital by a jewish conspiracy.

If the far-right is going to consolidate power around attacking jews, they’re going to do it using misappropriated anticapitalist rhetoric, just like fascists have done from the very beginning, and the only two ways to fight it are going to be by standing with jewish communities in defence and solidarity, and by giving people another way out of capitalism that doesn’t use a scapegoat.