Fox News hosts conceded that Kanye West’s post directed at Jewish people was “ugly” and “condemnable”, making a swift on-air U-turn shortly after supporting the rapper.
Fox News hosts Will Cain and Pete Hegseth along with co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy defended West on Sunday after he was suspended from Instagram for posts that were condemned as anti-Semitic.
While Cain and Hegseth said they did not see the posts because they were censored, Campos-Duffy who saw the posts said it was “totalitarian” and “anti-American” for Instagram to delete them.
“There is no question that Kanye or Ye was going to have to be taken down after what happened in the Tucker Carlson interview,” Campos-Duffy said. “They had to cut him down.”
“We’re in this weird era where people can’t just say what they want to say,” she added. “This idea you have to just shut down his account is just, it’s totally totalitarian, totally anti-American. It’s just wrong.”
Hegseth said the rapper would not have been suspended had he not appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show earlier this week.
West made an appearance wearing a lanyard connected to a photo of a baby’s ultrasound to declare that he’s pro-life. He claimed that Jared Kushner, the Jewish son-in-law of Donald Trump, made peace deals in the Middle East, including a $110bn arms deal to Saudi Arabia and the Abraham Accords, for personal profit.
After speaking in his defence, the Fox & Friends Weekend hosts returned to the television screens with a very different perspective after coming to know what he had actually posted.
“Ye West threatening to go to war with Jewish people on Twitter,” Hegseth said.
“These shocking remarks come after he appears to imply Diddy, a fellow rapper, was controlled by the Jews on Instagram,” Cain noted.
Hegseth said it is “unfortunate” and Cain described it as “pretty ugly”.
“We talked about it earlier without knowing about these tweets and saying of course they’re going to put a target, after what he said with Tucker, there’s going to be a target, no doubt,” Hegseth said. “But in this particular case, he brought the target.”
However, Campos-Duffy did not condemn the posts and asked: “The question is should he be removed from Instagram and who gets to decide that?”
The rapper shared a since-deleted post that showed a screenshot of his purpoted text conversation with Sean “Diddy” Combs. It suggested that Combs was being controlled by Jewish people. The post was quickly condemned by the American Jewish Committee, an anti-hate group, who slammed West for his “dangerous” and anti-Semitic comments on their Instagram page.
His Twitter account was then locked by the micro-blogging site for his tweet targeting the Jewish community, violating the company’s policies.
“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,” the rapper wrote in the now-deleted post.
Sharing his picture with, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he lashed out at him for restricting his account. “Look at this Mark How you gone kick me off Instagram,” he wrote.
According to the policies, West’s Twitter account is still active but he can’t post until the suspension ends, after an unspecified period.
