Kayne West: "I Do Love Hitler. . . . I See Him As A Cool Guy. . . . There Are A Lot Of Things I Love About Hitler. . . . I Also Love Nazis. . . . I'm A Nazi."
Seth Abramson (Proof): "Twitter is being explicitly, deliberately, and carefully Nazified . . . targeted attacks on Blacks and Jews in particular . . . It’s not happening in secret, but in public."
UPDATED!
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but . . .
Kayne West is making headlines after some impossible-to-take-out-of-context statements in blatant praise (“love”, really) of Hitler and the Nazis. On Thursday, West was on Alex Jones’s InfoWars show and his simple comments — “I like Hitler” and “I love Nazis” — actually seemed to make Jones, who had West on his show to whitewash his previous anti-Semetic comments, uncomfortable.
Will Sommer, The Daily Beast (my emphasis):
Ye, whose face was entirely hidden behind a black mask, began praising the genocidal German dictator soon after the broadcast began. Ye began to commend Hitler after InfoWars host Alex Jones tried to defend the rapper’s recent streak of antisemitic statements.
“You’re not Hitler,” Jones said. “You're not a Nazi.”
“Well, I see good things about Hitler,” Ye said, later adding: “Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
Jones repeatedly tried to steer Ye away from supporting Hitler. But Ye, who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump last week, insisted on complimenting the murderous regime behind the Holocaust.
“They did good things too,” Ye said. “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.” . . .
Ye held up an orange net and a bottle of Yoo-hoo chocolate drink, which he claimed represented Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
The longtime prime minister, along with Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency, want to take Ye’s children away, the rapper bizarrely claimed.
Ye appeared on InfoWars alongside his campaign aide Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist . . . Ye repeatedly prompted Fuentes to launch antisemitic attacks, asking the avowed white supremacist whether Jews support pedophilia. . . .
Jones appeared to be caught off-guard by the vitriol of Ye’s antisemitic remarks, at one point questioning whether Ye was even behind the mask.
“I don't like Nazis,” Jones said.
“I like Hitler,” Ye replied.
West said he loves Hitler because he “invented highways, invented the very microphone that I used as a musician”.
And: “The Jewish media has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world.”
And: “There's a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things. . . . The Holocaust is not what happened, let's look at the facts of that, and Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities. . . . I see him as, like, a cool guy.”
A few tweets in reaction:
I think Kanye is the first person that has ever gotten Alex Jones to do a double take.
When Alex Jones thinks you’ve gone too far…
You know when you get Alex Jones stumbling and shocked it’s bad.
I half-expected Jones to say “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
This is at least the 3rd time today I’ve seen a tweet and assumed it was a skit based on his appearance, only to realize it’s another transcript.
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair:
He also claimed the Holocaust never happened; said, “I don’t like the word evil next to Nazis”; complimented Hitler’s uniform and called him a “really good architect”; and did a bizarre little puppet show in which he pretended to have a conversation with Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he had “Netanyahu” say, “We have to control the history books, we have to control the banks, and we have to go and kill people.” Oh, and he flatly declared, “I’m a Nazi.”
West also said he was pro-Putin and has practiced “Chinese water torture” on himself. He is also apparently considering a second career as a prop comic. He brought along an orange net and a bottle of Yoo-hoo to make a joke [sic] about Netanyahu.
Hooooooo-kay.
You’re no Gallagher, Ye(esh).
Seth Abramson (Proof) has an illuminating thread about the shit going on with Twitter. In short: Elon Musk is orchestrating “the first ever premeditated, coordinated, politically motivated attack on users by Twitter”.
[Musk] initiated a targeted clandestine attack on specific high-traffic progressive feeds that *auto-unfollowed* thousands—even tens of thousands—from those feeds, and he’s now covering up what he did. . . .
Not only have there been no sudden drops in high-traffic far-right feed follower numbers—quite the opposite; they’re gaining thousands or tens of thousands of followers—but high-traffic left-leaning feeds now have *thousands* of testimonials from auto-unfollowed followers. . . .
[Musk] has now begun mass-suspending/banning targeted *left-wing* feeds on the explicit, public demand of a list of 5,000 proposed accounts provided by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. But now we know that is just the tip of the iceberg. . . .
Twitter is being explicitly, deliberately, and carefully Nazified. It’s *also* starting to explicitly, deliberately, and carefully target minorities. It’s not happening in secret, but in public. . . .
Even as he was doing the neo-Nazis’ bidding via their list of left-wing accounts they want banned; and un-suspending/banning known neo-Nazis; and daily corresponding with Ian Miles Cheong, who’s praised Adolf Hitler in the past; and using the “88” neo-Nazi code on Twitter and using the antisemitic “puppeteer” trope against decorated Jewish veteran Alexander Vindman, Musk has been spreading the most vile conspiracy theories . . .
But lest we forget that the neo-Nazi target list publicly provided to Musk *also* targeted high-traffic Black American–run feeds and women-run feeds . . .
And in the midst of all this the media has remained almost entirely silent. . . .
I mean Jesus H. Christ, in the midst of the FBI *just announcing* a *nationwide increase in threats* against American Jews, this is what @ElonMusk is doing on the most high-traffic politics-oriented website in America? How is this not front-page news?
We are seeing the Nazification of Twitter in real time—targeted attacks on Blacks and Jews in particular—and I have Christian users in my feed daily (even followers) accusing me of whining over nothing? Have we learned nothing from history? Seriously? . . .
I left out so much in this thread because there’s just too much content to share. I didn’t mention that Musk is now openly using the neo-Nazi-heralded Pepe the Frog image; openly posting “dumb fake” photos (habitually used by the far right to target vulnerable minorities)...
...echoing precisely, in advocating the GOP cause, the MAGA rhetoric we heard from insurrectionists Alex Jones and Roger Stone (“This is a battle for the future of civilization” Elon said on November 28, almost exactly the words Jones/Stone thundered on Insurrection Eve)...
...published a picture of his bedside table that had not one but *two* guns on it, one of them functional (a stunning allusion to violence at a time when the FBI is warning about premeditated, domestic-terror gun crimes against minority populations and particularly Jews)...
...alleged a clandestine left-wing conspiracy to control Twitter via what he called “professional psy ops”; disguised a quote by Carl Jung—whose ideas informed the Third Reich—as a quote from DUNE, to the point “Community Notes” had to correct him...
...reversed by 180 degrees—as any good would-be far-right authoritarian would—his view on those who criticize him (from urging them to stay on Twitter 8 months ago to urging them to leave immediately about 8 days ago; and no, I am not referring to the employees he fired)...
...spreading both homophobic and rape memes, using rigged polls to justify reinstating Trump (who just dined in his home with *two* infamous and influential antisemites, and is known for his own antisemitism), winnowed down Twitter’s workforce to the point that...
...a disproportionate percentage of those left at Twitter are nonwhite foreign nationals on work visas that make it near-impossible for them to quit and *then* ordered them to sign a pledge promising to work under extreme conditions or they would all be *summarily fired*...
...been caught lying repeatedly about his relationship and communication with Jewish entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried in a way that not only allowed him to repeatedly publicly villainize Bankman-Friend but win the favor of the neo-Nazis on Twitter who despise Bankman-Fried...
...and I’m not even getting into his obscene comments about the “culture war,” all of which are at best neo-Nazi adjacent. What does the man have to do, wear an armband? Change Twitter’s brand colors to red, white, and black? We should all be making our way off Twitter—now.
Robert Mackey and Micah Lee, The Intercept:
Elon Musk claims to be “fighting for free speech in America” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform.
Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations. . . .
[T]he suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.
Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.
All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him. . . .
Last Friday, Twitter also suspended the account of CrimethInc, an anarchist collective and publisher. The group takes its name from “thoughtcrime,” a term coined by George Orwell in the dystopian novel “1984.”
In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.
Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.
After the CrimethInc suspension, Ngo claimed, with typically wild and incorrect hyperbole, that the “group operates like ISIS: makes propaganda & training material to radicalize militants toward violence.” He also complained that a dozen affiliated accounts had not yet been suspended. Three days later, almost all of the additional accounts Ngo pointed to had also been suspended by Twitter.
Mastadon and Post seem to be the most popular sites to which many now-former Twitter users are migrating.