Kanye West is now all aboard the Nazi train. Even by his standards, it’s been a nightmarish week. Over on X, he posted “IM A NAZI” and “I LOVE HITLER,” which came on the heels of appearing uninvited at the Grammy Awards to parade around his naked wife, Bianca Censori, who he claims to have “dominion over.”
Not content with scraping the bottom of the barrel, West took a sledgehammer to it during last night’s Super Bowl with a disturbing commercial. Apparently shot in the back seat of his car on his phone, the 30-second spot (which cost him around $8 million) sees him mumbling with a lisp about his website yeezy.com. Here he promises that you’ll be able to buy shoes and “uhmm… that’s it.”
In another universe, an eccentric celebrity blowing $8 million to ramble into his phone camera would be fairly amusing. But, unless you haven’t noticed, we have entered the nightmare timeline, where nothing good can happen. So let’s pop over to yeezy.com and see what West has on offer for us:
Oh, Kanye, no… Yup, this swastika t-shirt is currently the only item available to buy on his website, with the product code “HH-01” directly referencing to “Heil Hitler.” Unusually for a piece of yeezy clothing this is being sold at a discount rate, indicating that he’s serious about getting people to wear this in public. Although we can only hope that the threat of near-instant beatings will rapidly dissuade anyone dumb enough to buy this from going out in public in it.
As a former Kanye fan, all this is crushingly depressing stuff, not just because whatever talent he once had has melted away in a fog of nitrous abuse, but because his attempt at being provocative isn’t even clever. This is the kind of thing a not-particularly-bright teenager would do in the name of being the ultimate edge lord rather than someone responsible for several of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. The alternative — and far worse — option is that Kanye really isn’t doing this to get a rise out of people and he really is committed to Nazism.
If that’s the case then we suspect he’s about to find himself an unwilling member of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, as both historic and modern-day Nazis don’t tend to have particularly positive views of African-Americans. Y’know, what with the whole “white power” thing.
Regardless, one of the world’s biggest musicians openly embracing Nazism and hawking swastika t-shirts is a terrible omen for the future. After all, we already have Elon Musk — the world’s richest man — throwing up Nazi salutes and dismantling large parts of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is busy tossing out executive orders like they’re going out of style, openly discriminating and terrorizing the most vulnerable people in society.
We are living in dark times. But the world has stood up and rejected Nazism before and will do it again. But, at least for today, I’m going to wash this particular bad taste out of my mouth and load up a Wolfenstein game.
Published: Feb 10, 2025 06:55 am