New report shows real-world impact of Ye's antisemitic rants

More than two months after Kanye West’s last public antisemitic tirade, the rapper and fashion designer has largely disappeared from the headlines. But a new report from the Anti-Defamation League illustrates the lingering impact of his hateful comments, which continued to inspire real-world acts of harassment well after the mainstream news cycle had moved on.

According to the report, which was released Monday, the ADL has documented “at least 30 antisemitic incidents that directly reference Ye” since October 2022, when the Grammy-winning hip-hop artist first made headlines for a series of antisemitic social media posts.

The incidents listed in the report include several reports of graffiti featuring messages like “Kanye is right,” sometimes accompanied by swastikas, scrawled across headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Illinois, the welcome sign at an orthodox synagogue in the Bronx, and a bridge in Massachusetts, among other locations.

The report also cites several reported incidents of harassment, such as the influx of hateful calls and social media messages that the Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles said it received after offering Ye a private tour in late October, which he turned down. Other examples include the case of a man who was charged with two counts of ethnic intimidation in December after he was heard saying “Kanye was right” while hurling antisemitic slurs at parents and children outside a synagogue in Michigan; as well as that of the man accused of yelling “F*** you, Jew!” and “Kanye 2024” before physically assaulting a man in New York City’s Central Park that same month.

“What Ye did has essentially opened up the floodgates for people to normalize antisemitism,” Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told Yahoo News. “The Jewish community is still dealing with the consequences of what he said and how he said it.”

Ye’s recent history of antisemitism

The artist formerly known as Kanye West has a long history of erratic behavior and controversial statements, often at the expense of the Black community. But in early October 2022, he began using his massive public platform to launch a conspiratorial tirade against Jewish people. In a series of posts on his Twitter and Instagram accounts starting on Oct. 7, Ye suggested that Jews were using their supposed control over the entertainment industry — a popular antisemitic canard — to sabotage him, and vowed to go “death con [sic] 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”

The posts got Ye temporarily blocked from the social media platforms, but he doubled down the on hateful remarks in a number of interviews, with TalkTV’s Piers Morgan and NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. Meanwhile, leaked clips from an interview that had aired on Fox News days earlier revealed additional conspiratorial comments about Jews that had been cut from the official broadcast of Ye’s sit-down with Tucker Carlson.

Outrage over the antisemitic outbursts prompted a litany of other companies to cut ties with Ye, including the talent agency CAA and Adidas, which had partnered with the rapper on his Yeezy shoe collection.

But by late November, Ye was back on Twitter, and in the news, digging his heels in even further with a series of public appearances with well-known white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, including at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump.

Following an hours-long appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show “InfoWars,” where he praised Hitler and the Nazis, and a series of tweets, which included a Photoshopped image of a swastika inside a Star of David, he was once again suspended from the site.

Ye’s comments followed a larger wave of antisemitism, which has been on the rise in the U.S. in recent years.

A rising tide of antisemitism

According to the FBI, 63% of religious hate crimes in the U.S. are motivated by antisemitism. In 2021, the ADL recorded 2,717 incidents of antisemitism nationwide, 34% more than the year before and the highest number on record since the organization began tracking such incidents, in 1979.

But while Ye is hardly the only person in America to promote age-old stereotypes and conspiracy theories about Jews, he’s certainly one of the most famous people in recent history to do so, at least publicly.

Before his most recent suspension from Twitter, West’s account had more followers than there are Jewish people in the world.

At the time, Yahoo News interviewed experts on extremism who expressed concerns about the broader potential impact of someone like Ye using his massive platform to broadcast these kinds of ideas.

The findings of the ADL’s new report suggest those concerns were warranted.

“There’s a different type of impact when somebody in a position like his promotes that hatred,” said the ADL’s Segal. “What we’re showing is that it has had a real impact on the ground.”

The center’s researchers found more than 9,400 Twitter mentions using or referencing hashtags related to the slogan “Ye is Right” since Oct. 1, 2022. Such posts have been viewed by at least 5 million Twitter users, received more than 19,300 likes and more than 5,000 retweets, according to the report.

The report notes that “Ye’s antisemitic comments coincided with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in late October 2022, at which time the ADL noted an increase in both antisemitic content on the platform and a decrease in the moderation of antisemitic posts.”

But the impact of Ye’s comments goes beyond social media, as illustrated by the more than two dozen examples of real-world harassment, vandalism and assault cited in the report.

The report also points to specific examples that highlight how known extremist groups have seized on Ye’s comments, using them to further their own antisemitic agendas.

Back in October, a network of antisemitic conspiracists known as the Goyim Defense League was reportedly responsible for hanging banners with messages like “Kanye is right about the Jews” over a busy Los Angeles interstate.

More recently, followers of Nick Fuentes’s America First movement, known as Groypers, have been involved in events on the campuses of the University of Florida and Florida Atlantic University, where they defended West’s rants from tables draped with banners reading “#YeisRight” and “Change my mind.”

“Extremists will never miss an opportunity to leverage the attention that is put on their hatred, no matter where it’s coming from,” said Segal.