During a Thursday (Dec. 1) interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Kanye West expressed his admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Ye appeared on InfoWars alongside his campaign aide Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist leader.
“Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” Ye said. “Also Hitler was born Christian.”
“I see good things about Hitler also,” Ye continued. “I love everyone. Jewish people are not going to tell me you can love us, and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography. But this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that.”
He seems to be insinuating that all unfair contracts are the work of Jewish people. And also that Jewish people also are the forces behind the pornography industry. The former is an age-old trope. The latter is a trope that has circulated recently in white supremecist circles, as The New York Times reported in 2019.
Kanye also seems to be conflating Hitler with all German people. According to My New Micorophone, a website focused on every aspect of microphones, the first mic was invented by a German man named Johann Philipp Reis in 1861. That was more than twenty years before Hitler’s birth. Germany’s autobahn is considered to be the first highway, and it was completed in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power.
“I don’t like Nazis,” Jones responded to Ye as the show was leading to a commercial break. Ye interjected. “I like Hitler,” he said.
“You’ve got a little bit of a Hitler fetish going on,” said Jones, who seemed uncomfortable about Ye’s racist remarks. “I’m not on the whole ‘Jew thing.'”
“We got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time,” Ye said after the show returned from break.
This is not the first time that Kanye has been linked to the Nazi leader. Four sources told CNN that he once wanted to name an album after the Nazi leader. An exec who worked for West said “He would praise Hitler by saying how incredible it was that he was able to accumulate so much power and would talk about all the great things he and the Nazi Party achieved for the German people.”
It’s worth noting that under Hitler’s rule, Nazis detained Black people in concentration camps, just as they did Jewish people, gay people, physically and mentally disabled people, along with other marginalized groups.
Ye has been under fire due to his antisemitic remarks for several weeks leading to this recent interview. When Ye made an antisemitic tweet back in October, his Twitter was restricted along with his Instagram where he shared a text thread with Diddy that included an antisemitic remark. His Twitter account was reinstated last month.
The controversial musician’s 2 billion dollar empire began crumbling as multiple partners dropped the rapper after his antisemitic remarks.
The Donda rapper recently announced that he will be running for president in 2024. This will be Kanye West’s second time running for President. He ran in 2020 under the “Birthday Party” and collected just 60,000 votes out of an estimated total of 160 million.