If conservatives walk with Kanye West, they're on a gilded road to hell

Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this column misspelled the name of journalist Bari Weiss. 

Kanye West has been a global success as a rapper, record producer, fashion designer, businessman. His genius in the arts is well established. But put him at a microphone to freeform on culture, politics or anything else and he’s a stumbling drunk.

As much as Tucker Carlson tried to convince his Fox News audience otherwise, West is an incoherent mess who will pass up any rational path, any linear argument, to leap down the nearest rabbit hole.

Recently West gave an extended, rambling interview with Carlson in which Fox editors teased out from all the nonsense a few conservative viewpoints. What they left on the cutting room floor was more interesting.

“These include numerous antisemitic sentiments from Ye, a strange and lengthy digression about ‘fake children’ he claimed were planted in his house to manipulate his own children, and a statement that he’s vaccinated against COVID-19,” reported Vice.com, which obtained portions of the unedited interview.

Kanye West erased all doubt about his antisemitism

One of the unaired clips shows West annoyed that his children attend a school that promotes the Africa-inspired holiday Kwanzaa. “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa,” he said. “At least it will come with some financial engineering.”

Given his vapid world view, one might give West the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t know he was employing an antisemitic trope used to drive Jewish people out of Asia, Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East – a tool of ethnic cleansers.

Another view: If Mark Finchem is antisemitic, isn't Katie Hobbs a racist?

But Kanye West removed all doubt that he is an anti-Jewish bigot. His comments beyond Fox News told us he’s a river of antisemitism.

He told us that when he tweeted his plans to go “death con 3” on all “JEWISH PEOPLE.”

Or accused “Jewish Zionists” of putting out news stories about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian making love to her then-boyfriend Pete Davidson in front of a fireplace.

Or that “Jewish people have owned the Black voice. Whether it’s through us wearing the Ralph Lauren shirt, or it’s all of us being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”

Why did Fox News interview Ye in the first place?

Antisemitism has wreaked enough destruction in the past 2,000 years that its casual use anywhere should raise alarms. It‘s a recurring symptom of cultural rot.

If Fox News found itself cutting out the antisemitic parts of the Kanye West interview with Tucker Carlson, maybe it should ask itself why it interviewed Kanye West at all. Presumably Tucker Carlson isn’t lining up exclusives with David Duke or Richard Spencer.

I don’t like cancel culture, I believe there is too little forgiveness and redemption for those who err and work to atone. But there are some things so vile that Americans broadly agree we won’t tolerate. One is antisemitism. Or at least it was.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis, a writer for the conservative news magazine The Spectator, tweeted out, “Anti Semitism is accepted at all levels and in all silos of American life. The political right, the political left. The cultural right (Kanye) and the cultural left (hadids). Where the f--- does that leave Jews?”

Her reference to “hadids” is Gigi Hadid, an American model and Palestinian who has been accused of antisemitism.

Conservatives will lose if they lock arms with him

So where does that leave the Jews?

It leaves them in a precarious place in which the standard rules of culture don’t protect them.

Antisemitism is a disease of the mind and found in pockets of both the left and right. Those of us who are conservatives have a responsibility to police our own, so this is a warning to conservatives who would lock arms with Kanye West.

You’re walking a gilded road to hell.

I understand the temptation to embrace Kanye West. He is a Black man who breaks from today’s identity politics and intersectionality that poisons so much of American life. Civil rights leaders who once stood stoic against the brickbats of Southern governors and sheriffs now see their successors straining at gnats, looking for “safe spaces” from microaggressions.

When Kanye West and his compadre Candace Owens, both African American conservatives, show up at Paris Fashion Week in “White Lives Matter” shirts, white conservatives are understandably charmed.

They’re more accustomed to Black leaders telling them they live off the spoils of a racist system created by their uniquely evil white ancestors. There’s no balance, no discussion on how the United States became a magnet for millions of people of color the world over.

So, yes, white conservatives see a Black cultural icon who doesn’t hate them and in turn they celebrate him in their media ecosphere.

We must show Jews that we have their backs

But Kanye West has a serious problem. He sees Jewish conspiracies everywhere.

In the early 1960s, similar conspiracy theories were creeping into the conservative universe through the John Birch Society and the American Mercury magazine. William F. Buckley used his own magazine, National Review, as a stick to drive them away.

He called out the antisemitism of columnist Patrick J. Buchanan during the buildup to the first Gulf War, when Buchanan wrote there are “only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East – the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

Later Buchanan named four people in Israel’s supposed “amen corner” – Henry Kissinger, columnists A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, and former defense official Richard Perle, reported the Washington Post.

“They have in common many things,” Buckley said of the four. “The most conspicuous of these is that they are Jewish.” Buchanan might have named many non-Jewish hawks, but chose instead to self-reveal his distaste for Jews.

Many of the best minds of American conservatism are Jewish. Bret Stephens, John Podhoretz, Bari Weiss, Noah Rothman, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro, Mona Charen, to name a few.

There is not room in any house for both the Jewish people and the people who hate them.

American conservatives need to speak up now for Jewish people, to let them know we have their backs.

We can start by condemning the antisemitism of Kanye West.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kanye West's hatred for Jews will poison conservatism