Unless you live under a rock, there’s no way you haven’t heard at least a little something about Kanye West, who is also known by Ye, in the past few weeks.
However, we realise that you might be a bit overwhelmed by the constant news flow, each day revealing a new controversy about Ye, so we decided to summarise the Chicago rapper and designer’s shortcomings in recent weeks and hopefully explain the situation better.
In this article, we’ll cover the most important bits and pieces of Kanye’s latest tirades that saw him lose a good portion of his fortune overnight. This isn’t the first time that Ye has found himself in hot water, but we think it might be one of the worst ones. We’ll try to give you some background as well, but we’ll concentrate on recent events.
The Paris Fashion Week Show
Kanye might have started off his career in music, but lately, he’s been a much more prolific fashion designer. At the most recent Paris Fashion Week (24/09/22-04/10/22), Ye had prepared a surprise catwalk, which did indeed surprise a lot of people, including the festival’s organisers.
His daughter North West performed with a child choir at the show, which was a sweet surprise. It’s not the most talked about surprise, though. When the models came out, some of them wore a T-shirt with Pope John Paul II on the front and “White Lives Matter” on the back.
Ye then struck a picture with the controversial right-wing commentator Candace Owens who also sported the shirt. The Internet was immediately set ablaze as the phrase “White Lives Matter” is seen as a racist dog whistle against the BLM movement and black civil rights as a whole. Owens recently made a documentary against BLM, which further fueled the fire.
Some noted that Owens and West cannot be racist against their own race and that they were simply expressing their opinion that both black lives and white lives matter. In addition, Ye spoke about his ex-wife’s Paris robbery and he spoke against his former manager Scooter Braun.
West parted ways with Braun in 2018, which at the time was called an amicable “divorce”. West then said that he can’t be managed. Braun is a somewhat hated figure by both fans of West and Taylor Swift (Braun bought Swift’s previous music label and restricted her access to her first six albums).
Antisemitic Remarks
Just two days later after the Paris show, Ye was invited on the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News. The two-hour-long conversation included some pretty bizarre statements, some of which made the producers, and probably even Carlson, question their decision to invite the rapper.
First, West said: “I prefer my kids knew Hannukah from Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering.” Although this remark was cut from the show, people found out about it and they decried it as antisemitic because it espouses the trope that Jews control the world’s finances and/or that Jews only care about money.
Kanye further upheld these beliefs when he said: “I just think that’s what they’re about, is making money” in an apparent reference to Jared Kushner, who’s Jewish, and his role in the Abraham Accords (a peace treaty in the Middle East).
Finally, West also said that Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Senger, who’s now a controversial figure due to her views on eugenics, created the health service, which is mostly infamous for providing abortions, to control “the Jew population”.
Ye didn’t mean Jews, however, but black people, which is another antisemitic trope espoused by black supremacists, such as the Black Israelites, who believe they are the real Jews and that those Jews of fair complexion are fake.
If that wasn’t enough, Kanye shared his DM’s with the rapper Diddy in which he blamed him of being controlled by Jews. When his Instagram was locked for this post, he jumped to Twitter where he wrote the-now-infamous tweet promising “death con 3 on Jewish people”. Death con likely stands for “DEFCON”, a military term for heightened threat alert.
Kanye later said that he was referring to his producers and managers, who are Jewish, not to all Jewish people, but the apology was hardly an apology. Kanye would later also claim that a Jewish doctor deliberately misdiagnosed him as bipolar, along with the racist idea that Jews control the media.
Outcry
As you can imagine, the outcry was imminent, but perhaps not even Ye could imagine the consequences. Piers Morgan tried to make him apologise, while condemning his rhetoric, but Kanye refused, saying that black people have endured worse than Jews have for his comments.
In the meantime, almost every big company associated with West has dropped him. ACC, the talent agency, said they would no longer have him as a client. Def Records, the music label, noted that his contract expired. JP Morgan and a law firm have also ended their contracts with him.
Most significantly, Adidas officially cut ties with Kanye, which is a big deal considering that their collaboration brought Adidas more than 10% of their annual profits. Balenciaga has also cut out Kanye. It’s believed that Ye is no longer a billionaire, with his assets now around $400 million.
These events, however, only seemed to have proven him right in his eyes. We don’t know if Ye will ever apologise or how his career can recover, but he has recently said that he already planned to have his own social media platform, along with his own brands and stores.