If there has been a single enjoyable aspect to the initially sad, latterly alarming downfall of Ye, the rapper and mogul formerly known as Kanye West, it has been the sound of screeching tyres this week as successive associates understood – finally – that supporting him wasn’t in their interests, and slammed on the brakes.
Without Ye and his frothing antisemitism, we might have been denied a trot around the little known origins of Adidas, official sports shoe of the German Olympics team in 1936, and, until Tuesday, one of Ye’s many lucrative sponsors.
And it has been a pleasure, as ever, to be reminded of the venality of the Kardashians. “Hate speech is never OK or excusable,” tweeted Kim Kardashian on Monday, arriving fashionably late to a position on her bigoted ex-husband. At an earlier stage of her life journey, after Kanye had backed Donald Trump, she was able to settle on the less costly, “I let him have his own views.”
Now the risk analysis has changed. When Ye supported Donald Trump in 2018, wearing a Make America Great Again hat and doing the kind of under-the-radar antisemitism he’d been engaged in since at least 2013, that was one thing; who knows how many of his associates discreetly agreed with him? But by turning up in a “white lives matter” sweater, implying Diddy was controlled by Jews, then doubling down to threaten “death con 3” on Jewish people, he – sadly for Ye’s fellow travellers – said the quiet part out loud, sending his brand-partners’ share prices plummeting and ruining the party for everyone.
Not even appeals for sympathy based on Ye’s disintegrating mental health could keep him in the air; as well as Adidas cutting ties, Balenciaga, Foot Locker and a range of other brands did, too. His agents at CAA dropped him. Twitter, finally, kicked him out.
The damage, in material terms, was already done, and no amount of belated scrambling could change it. Ye’s statements took place online, but as we know from the incitements of other far-right fanatics, there are real-world consequences. When your wealth, celebrity and influence are sufficiently large, hate speech has the power to make people log off after posting a poisonous rant and leave the house to actually do something. For reasons difficult to fathom, the most popular real-world medium for Ye’s followers seems to be the overpass network of greater Los Angeles, from which banners declaiming “Kanye is right about the Jews” and expressing other, similar sentiments have been unfurling for weeks.
It is perhaps an obvious point, but when Britney Spears shaved her head and told the paparazzi to do one, she was placed under an involuntary conservatorship for 13 years. Ye’s spiral, by contrast, despite featuring uncoded incitements to race hate, and being enabled entirely by online culture, hasn’t – and presumably won’t – result in any such sanction. This is a man who should, for his own sake as well as others’, at the very least have his phone taken away from him.
The question is how Ye was permitted to launder his far-right views as the clownish eccentricities of a colourful billionaire for so long. This is the Trump playbook (minus the billions), an anti-strategy for which chaos is the delivery system and ultimate goal. If fear and instability drive people to the right, cynicism keeps them there. Ye setting up a private school while saying he’s never read a book – as he did in September – would appear like a piece of satirical performance art if we hadn’t already seen it in Trump’s “university”. The theatrical philistinism, of a piece with Trump’s, draws down into deep chambers of inferiority that, apparently, money never mends.
Offenders with only slightly less reach than Ye have been rehabilitated, meanwhile. Witness Mel Gibson: if not entirely back, then at least hireable again – in the last year, he has made two movies and a miniseries. Ditto men kicked out during the height of #MeToo quietly creeping back to their former positions. We are all suckers for a meltdown story, and the culture has infinitely more patience for men suffering breakdowns than women; plus remember how Ye lost his mother, poor guy. The fact remains that, whatever health issue triggered the dissolution of filters that allowed Ye’s antisemitism to flow out, it all had to be there inside in the first place.
• This article was amended on 26 October 2022 to correct a brakes/breaks homophone.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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