OPINION: Opinion: Ye, Kyrie and their Jewish question

Dec. 12—Imagine if Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, had complained that white people have too much control over the banks, media and other American institutions. He most assuredly would've been widely praised. Fortune 500 companies now routinely hire race grifters like Ibram X. Kendi for seminars telling white employees how bad they are. American universities are rife with drivel about the insidious evils of pasty white folks like myself. For example, in March 2022 UC Berkeley Professor

Zeus Leonardo

gained attention for advocating the abolition of whiteness to his students.

"[M]y recent understanding is that to abolish whiteness is to abolish white people... White bodies will still exist, but we will no longer consider them white people," Leonardo said.

That last part is difficult to decipher, as I am not fluent in commie word salad. But I have to assume he doesn't want me around.

In 2005 Kanye was widely praised on the left for slandering George W. Bush as a racist. But this time he directed his ire at white people of a certain religion, who apparently must be vigilantly sheltered from anything they deem offensive. There's an old adage that if you want to know who has a disproportionate level of power in your society, ask yourself who you're not allowed to criticize. So when he said Jews have too much control over the banks, and JPMorgan Chase shut down his account, that didn't exactly disprove his argument.

Then we have the curious case of Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving, a man known for his high minded intellect — such as his now retracted 2017 flat earth claims. Last month he was raked over the coals with a long suspension for tweeting the link to an absurd film called "Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America" on Oct. 27, perpetuating the widely rebuked conspiracy that blacks are the real Jews.

"It was a lot of hurt that needed to be healed, a lot of conversations that needed to be had. And a lot of reflection," Irving said in part during a mid-November press conference on the controversy he spurned.

Despite that, Nike axed Irving's purportedly $11 million branding deal on Dec. 5. These forced Maoist struggle session apologias make me nauseous. If the guy wants to spew crazy ideas that should be his prerogative. Anyone who legitimately believes they've been harmed or threatened by Irving's tweet is wildly over-sensitive or more likely, a vindictive cynic hellbent on suppressing views they find distasteful. What's funny is how media figures created a Streisand effect toward the film, driving far more publicity than it would've possibly gotten had they simply ignored the nothing burger tweet.

I miss the America of the 1990s and 2000s. Bigoted and racist remarks weren't considered acceptable, but people generally weren't losing jobs over them. It was more like, "Hey man, that's not cool. Stop saying that crap." Then everyone moved on with their lives, instead of demanding the offender be exiled to the desert and treated like a leper.

That was a more Christian approach.

Those who sin, or do things we perceive as such, should be treated with grace and forgiveness. It was also a time when more people had a sense of humor about these matters, before the ubiquity of social media faux-outrage. The response of Ye's harshest detractors show they don't care about changing hearts and minds, they only want to punish and silence.

The supposedly tolerant are gaslighters, intolerant of anyone who does not share their narrow worldview. If we are to continue as a free society, Americans must be allowed to critically analyze group dynamics, be clumsy with our words and say things others find offensive. We need to slide the Overton window back open and to the right.

I'm Catholic. So I have great respect for the Jewish faith, as much of it is at the core of my own. But people chide the Vatican all the time, occasionally for good reason, and make jokes about priests. They often make me laugh because I'm not a smug prude.

After a month-long

hiatus,

I got back on Twitter to dig into this controversy. I noticed Ben Shapiro, the sometimes conservative but usually annoying and pretentious Daily Wire guy, tweeted that Ye is a, "Jew-hater of the highest order." Like most things Shapiro says about politics, this is an exaggeration. He's been playing this cute Motte & Bailey game, insisting the rapper, "canceled himself." But Ye didn't call GAP or Foot Locker telling them to cancel his licensing deals.

So what Shapiro, the dude who in 2010 smeared Palestinians for their fondness of "bombing crap and living in open sewage" (just pointing out the hypocrisy of feigning piety), really meant is that Kanye should've known that most powerful c-suite executives would cancel him for saying unorthodox things. To his credit, Shapiro acknowledged that Ye did not incite violence with his weird anti-Semitic tweet of an image containing a Star of David intertwined with a swastika, which was Elon Musk's dubious justification for re-suspending Ye's Twitter account shortly after he lifting a previous suspension. Ye is not Al Sharpton. But it's hard to blame Musk for wavering in his commitment to "free speech absolutism." He's already struggling to keep advertisers on his newly acquired platform.

Remember that Ye apologized for his comments about going defcon 3...or in his words "death con 3 on Jewish people." During a bizarre Alex Jones interview he stated repeatedly that he loves Jews, but also Nazis and Hitler; erroneously praising the Furher for inventing highways and the microphone. I won't attempt to defend his Nazi related comments, or his hilariously stupid Instagram post suggesting Elon Musk could be a half Chinese cyborg.

But I will note that, at least to my knowledge, he has never advocated treating anyone differently based on their religion or ethnicity, unlike The New York Times. In 2017 they printed an

opinion

by University Michigan Law Professor Ekow Yankah, explaining why he'll teach sons not to be friends with whites, but so much for blind justice.

"I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust," Yankah wrote of an entire race of people.

Exactly one year ago Sunday the NYT published a

guest essay

by Aubry Kaplan, who was "flooded with resentment" watching white people borrow books from the little library box in her front yard. A 2021 Times feature story

celebrated

a Princeton professor for "saving the classics from whiteness."

Once again, I have a hunch they don't like me because of my skin color.

Ye also claimed every time he was screwed over by a music producer, it happened to be a Jewish guy. In 1991 Ice Cube released a vulgar diss track called "No Vasoline" about his allegedly similar experience of getting hosed by Jerry Heller and fellow bandmate Eazy-E.

If Ye had simply molested children or raped women, he probably would've been more readily welcomed back into polite society by the corporate snobs, Hollywood A-listers and other elites who are so angry with him at the moment. In 1977 filmaker Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 15-year-old girl, and has eluded prosecution since by hiding out in select European countries. For no apparent reason, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences waited until 2018 to remove Polanski from their prestigious organization. In true narcissist fashion, Polanski blamed fellow sex pest Harvey Weinstein for the reignited scrutiny against him.

Mark Levin is a Jewish conservative commentator for whom I have tremendous respect. His book "Liberty and Tyranny" was foundational to my intellectual political development when I first read it at 17. So I was disappointed when I recently heard Levin's critique of Donald Trump for meeting with Ye.

"(For Kanye) to be an unconscionable, disgusting Jew-hater, you (Trump) cut him off. There's nothing to celebrate there. There's nothing to redeem," Levin said on his Nov. 28 radio show.

I don't know who Levin thinks he is, pontificating to Trump that Kanye is irredeemable. It's so uncharitable. Ye hasn't hurt anyone, he's not a violent criminal. Troubled as he may be, Kanye West is a Christian man who cares deeply about his ex-wife and their children. Trump is the compassionate person in this saga. His friend was enduring tough times, so he accepted a meeting request because "Kanye had been good to me," knowing it would probably make him look bad.

I believe Trump that he was blindsided by the presence of Nick Fuentes, which was apparently orchestrated by Milo Yiannopolos who has a weird vendetta against the former President. It's sad Ye has gotten himself mixed up with these hateful punks, but how was Trump supposed to know? Fuentes only spews his anti-Semitic trash on livestreams that probably get less than a few thousand views each. So don't expect people who aren't obsessively scouring the internet six hours a day to know his life story. I'm open to criticism that he should have staff vetting his meetings, Trump isn't a man known for his prudence.

That said, I wish Democrat media hacks would quit feeding this bad faith notion that by merely sitting down at the same table as some unsavory individual you are by proxy endorsing everything they've ever said. On a different note, I've heard criticism of Israel and George Soros frequently conflated with anti-Semitism. If everything is anti-Semitic, nothing is anti-Semitic.

President Biden is no stranger to grossly insensitive bigotry. He spent much of his early Senate career cozying up to Dixiecrat segregationists. In 2012 he told a black crowd that Mitt Romney "wants to put y'all back in chains!" Eight years later during his own presidential campaign he claimed that blacks who don't vote for him aren't being true to their skin color.

In 2013, the soon to be but barely functioning U.S. Sen. John Fetterman

tackled

an innocent black jogger and held him at gunpoint. Trump's predecessor Barack Obama was notorious for his associations with Weather Underground domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, hate mongering pastor Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan — who routinely denigrates Jews as "termites." Obama has spent far more than an hour with all three of those men, and knew very well who was in his company.

Leftists conspicuously ignore all of this, and anti-communist academic (sounds oxymoronic these days, I know)

James Lindsay

explained why quite eloquently in a recent tweet.

"The Left does not have double standards. If it's good for the revolution, it's good. If it's bad for the revolution, it's bad. That's a single standard, and it's pretty easy to understand," Lindsay stated.

In light of all this, I have to commend my Bismarck colleague Jeremy Turley regarding a recent Menorah mishap at the State Capitol and his response, which consisted of humor and good-natured sarcasm.