Front Burner - Kanye West and the mainstreaming of antisemitism

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Kanye West’s recent comments praising Hitler and the Nazis are just the latest examples of a wave of antisemitism that appears to be penetrating further and further into mainstream U.S. society. Today on Front Burner, Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp on the long roots of American antisemitism and the threats Jewish people are currently facing in the U.S. and Canada.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and a warning, we're going to be talking about anti-Semitism today, which includes discussing some hateful and threatening language about Jewish people. I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis. Oh, man. Well, I have to disagree with that. But listen, we're going to go to break.

So that was Kanye West on Thursday speaking from behind a black ski mask on the show InfoWars, hosted by infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It's not that often that Jones seems to find someone else's extremist opinion too extreme. But this interview appeared to be one of those times. I don't think Hitler was a good guy. I get the Hugo Boss uniforms, amazing. But, I mean, just because you're in love with the design, you're a designer, can we just kind of say, like, you like the uniforms, but that's about it. No, we, no, there's a lot of things that I love about Hitler.

A lot of things. Further down the desk was Kanye's new friend, Nick Fuentes, who's a hardcore white supremacist leader and a Holocaust denier. That's what globalization is. They want to globalize the government, the economy, and the population. They want a global government. They want to globalize the economy through free trade. There's no culture.

Exactly. And the population through immigration. And they want to make it so that in 50, 100 years, there are no distinct nations. There's no distinct people. Just over a week before this, Kanye and Fuentes had dinner with former U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump said he didn't know Fuentes, which a lot of people find real hard to believe. But he didn't denounce his views or Kanye's. So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes. And Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign,

he's actually a loyalist. And while Kanye's comments may seem like a shocking flare up of anti-Semitism, they're also part of a years long wave of mainstream hate against Jewish people. Violence too. To explain, I'm joined by Zach Beecham. He's a senior correspondent at Vox and was the longtime host of Worldly, Vox's excellent foreign policy podcast. He's been tracing the long roots of anti-Semitism in the U.S. to this current surge. Hey, Zach, thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Oh, hey, I'm happy to be here.

It's really great to have you. So I cannot believe that I am saying this out loud, but Alex Jones, who has absolutely peddled anti-Semitic tropes himself, actually seemed a bit uncomfortable with Kanye West's anti-Semitic comments, which, as we mentioned in the intro, culminated in the admiration of Hitler and the Nazis. So what was going through your mind as you watched Kanye in that InfoWars interview? I mean, I want to back up by talking a little bit about exactly what Alex Jones believes to situate how weird this is. Alex Jones is the guy who has been sued into oblivion for saying that the Sandy Hook shooting victims were actually crisis actors who were attempting to push gun control in the United States. Like he was saying, literal murdered children were crisis actors. Don't ever think the globalists that have hijacked this country wouldn't stage something like this. They kill little kids all day, every day.

And it's not our government. It's the globalists. He once famously posited a conspiracy theory that they were putting chemicals in the water to turn frogs gay. Actual quote. Look it up. I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay. Do you understand that? Serious crap. I'm sick of being social engineered. It's not funny. And has claimed that there exists a Jewish mafia that is behind a variety of different nefarious

things. The Emanuels are Jewish mafia. So there you go. But I mean, it's not the Jews are bad. It's just they are the head of the Jewish mafia in the United States. They run Uber. They run the health care. They're going to scam you. They're going to hurt you. He also believes in mafias that are associated with all sorts of different other ethnic groups. But the Jewish one comes up a lot because it's a way of tapping into the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that are at the heart of modern conspiracy theorizing, for reasons we can get into and probably will in a little bit. But he really tries to do this

wink-wink, nudge-nudge thing where he says something that everyone knows is a really thinly-veiled antisemitic conspiracy theory, but then says, oh, no, I don't hate Jewish people. So what he's doing in this interview is he's trying to launder the reputation of Kanye West, right, by giving him an out, basically, an opportunity to explain himself because Kanye had said a number of anti-Semitic things in the weeks running up to this. And so what Jones says, and this is where, like, my brain really went on fire. Jones is like, you're not a Nazi. It's not fair for people to label you as such. Yeah. Right?

And Kanye says, actually, I like him. Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. It's just like Jones is trying to help you. He's trying to save you here. So what's running through my mind is this is the most genuine, frank expression of unapologetic anti-Semitism from a major American celebrity. And Kanye West is, I mean, he is one of the biggest rappers in the world.

At one point, I would say he was the biggest, the most famous, the most prominent, incredibly influential, widely regarded as an astonishing musical talent. And here he is talking about how he admired the people who murdered most of my family. It's really it's it's really hard it's hard to grapple with yeah horrifying and to hear him like essentially say the quiet parts out loud like that uh i don't know it was i it was shocking to me even though you kind of saw it coming it was still shocking the other guy at the table was Nick Fuentes, who had dinner with Kanye and the former president. And Nick Fuentes is a prominent white supremacist podcaster in his own right. He is a Holocaust denier. And so just for people who might not be very familiar with him, I wonder if you could explain who he is and sort of where in the alt-right world did he rise out of? Sure. The alt-right is a good entry point here, right? So your listeners, I'm sure,

remember the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the way in which this movement of online sort of more quote-unquote respectable white nationalists came up at roughly the same time as Trump took control of the Republican Party, riding his coattails, basically, as extremism being mainstreamed. After Charlottesville, the alt-right got into a lot of trouble, basically because their strategy of trying to demonstrate publicly and stage speeches on college campuses was pretty effectively disrupted by Antifa and other mainstream actors. They faced serious lawsuits resulting from deaths and violence at Charlottesville. It was a real problem

for the movement, and it started to lose its appeal among extremists. And so you started to see a fracturing of the movement. And one of the tendencies was a turn towards outright violence. This is a school of thought called accelerationism that says the political system is useless. We need to start killing people to foment a revolution. But one of the other ones that emerged is Fuentes and what he represents. And these guys, they call themselves the Groypers. The explanation for that name is convoluted and uninteresting to most of you. They call themselves the Groypers. And their strategy is not to sort of act like a college campus conservative group and stage speeches and rallies, but to use their presence in the subterranean parts of the internet, private chat rooms, meetings with Republican politicians, conferences, to try to push their agenda into the mainstream. And Fuentes has built up quite a following with a radio show in which he says some of the most hateful things you can imagine somebody saying.

There's an extended conversation about how he doesn't believe that the Holocaust happened, basically, where he compares Jews to burnt cookies in ovens, which was a very popular meme among the online neo-Nazi set. It takes one hour to cook a batch of cookies and you have 15 ovens probably in four different kitchens right doing 24 hours a day every day for five years how long would it take you to make six million hmm i don't know it certainly wouldn't be five years right the math doesn't seem to add up there the math doesn't quite seem to add up there i don't think you'd result uh in six million maybe 200 to 300 000 there. I don't think you'd result in 6 million,

maybe 200 to 300,000. There's this line that he tiptoes. At one point, he's giving a speech at his America First conference, which is attended by two members of Congress. For our first speech, and we love to get to know her much better, I think this is going to be the beginning of something great. The representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. And he says something like. And now they're going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler. And they say that's not a good thing. And then he laughs and he says.

I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have said that. He knows. He, like Jones, walks a line, though it gets into much more explicit anti-Semitism in his case, I shouldn't have said that. threatening to go, quote unquote, death com three on Jewish people in a tweet, he lost mainstream support, hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsement deals. But the people who came out to support him were people like Nick Fuentes. And so they move into his orbit. And Kanye becomes the ultimate bridge builder for Fuentes, right? Helping his movement get exactly what it wanted, which is a connection to other more

influential parts of the Republican Party, which is why his dinner with Trump was so important. That's the ultimate vindication of what Fuentes has been doing for years, for his effort to make a place for white nationalist politics. Explain to me, though, the relationship between him and Kanye a little bit more, because Fuentes is also a white supremacist, right? And so how does that work? That's a great question. And understanding how a white supremacist and a Black man get together to hate Jews requires understanding a little bit about the logic of antisemitism, right? So antisemitism is not just a bigotry, right? Not just a racial or religious hatred. It's also an explanatory framework for the way that people understand the world. So it originated, right, out of the very early Christian church and trying to basically

delegitimize the Jewish religion by positing that Jews killed Jesus and positing Jews not only as a people to be disliked, but as the source of evil in the world, literally the killers of Christ, right? The people from which Jesus had to die in order to save the rest of the world. And so this theological move gave rise to a tendency that's been very amorphous throughout European history and has gradually been exported from Europe to the rest of the world, throughout European history and has gradually been exported from Europe to the rest of the world, but basically amounts to explaining every bad thing in the world by virtue of a Jewish plot or Jewish activity to make it happen. So you had some people explaining the Black Plague when it happened by saying, oh, this is because we're tolerating Jews, right? And in the modern era,

right, you've seen a variety of different ideological strands. You always have of antisemitism, right? It can exist on the left, on the right, and in all sorts of different spaces and can create these really weird alliances. So for Fuentes, right, the source of antisemitism is very obvious. He's functionally a neo-Nazi, right? But Kanye's antisemitism is influenced, as far as I can tell from his public statements, by this group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, who are primarily an African-American sect. And they believe that Black people are the true Jews and that what we understand conventionally to be Jews are imposters who stole their identity. When I say Jew, I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ. First of all, we are Semite. We Jew. So I can't be anti-Semite. You can't call me anti-Semitic

for saying I'm going DEFCON 3. That sounds pretty anti-Semitic for the fact that I am Jew. That logic basically creates a sort of enemy of my enemy dynamic with Kanye. And even then, Kanye has some not great things to say about Black people too, right? Like he wore a White Lives Matter t-shirt at a fashion show before all this started. It really was the event that kicked off the news cycle that led to Kanye expressing some of his anti-Semitic beliefs publicly. So how he thinks about his place in all of this, it's not really clear to me, or how he thinks about Fuentes' racist views. But for Fuentes' part, I think it's very self-conscious. I think he thinks it's a good thing if you can foment Black hatred towards Jews. It starts to create divisions inside enemy groups, and he's willing to work with a Black man, even though he has very negative views about Black people on the whole, in order to accomplish this goal.

Yeah. And just the Black Hebrew Israelite ideas, this also dovetails with the recent controversy around Kyrie Irving, right, who shared a documentary on Twitter that's known for many anti-Semitic tropes. So the claims of anti-Semitism and who are the original chosen people of God, and we go into these religious conversations and it's a big no-no. I don't live my way like that. I don't live my life that way. Excuse me, I grew up in a melting pot, and I say a melting pot of all races, white, black, red, yellow, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and you can see the way I live my life now. I'm not here to be divisive, so they could push their agenda. I don't want to say they,

because I'm not identifying any one group or race of people, but I'm in a unique... The chronology of it made it feel like there was this resurgence in anti-Semitism, really in October of this year, like something new was happening. Yeah, it feels like it's everywhere. But really what was happening is that we're still feeling the aftershocks of the 2016 election. It's not monocausal. It's not Trump ran for president, therefore anti-Semitism exists in

America. No, no, no, it's not that simple. But because Trump ran for president and because he did not disavow the fringe and did some things to encourage them, he created a climate where a lot of people felt more comfortable expressing anti-Semitic beliefs. And the more people do it, it creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy or sort of overall snowball effect, right? So right after Kanye went on Alex Jones's show, Stephen Crowder, who's a very popular right-wing American pundit on YouTube, he has like 2 2 million Twitter followers, roughly, said on his show, like, look, Kanye went too far. But... Look, is there a conversation to be had

about secular humanists with Jewish last names in Hollywood exploiting people in positions of, you know, the performance arts talent? Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, that happens in the conservative movement too, behind the scenes. People sign contracts where they don't know what they're signing. Yeah, it's true. Is there a disproportionate number of people with Jewish last names in higher banking? That's an argument that can be made.

Let's just gutter anti-Semitism. But because Kanye said something, you felt comfortable expressing what you thought was your more moderate anti-Semitism as compared to outright Nazism. It creates a permission structure for people like Stephen Crowder to start being more honest about it seems like what they've thought for a long time. I love you. Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. This idea that, you know, we've seen a rise in anti-Semitism since the 2016 election and this idea that Trump was essentially pushing on an open door. Just take me through some of what we've seen since then. So the easiest way to see this is in data from the Anti-Defamation League, which is a U.S.-based Jewish anti-hate group.

Now, this data is not perfect. I want to caveat it. They have a very broad definition of anti-Semitic incidents. But since their definitions are consistent over years, a change does really indicate to you that something different has happened. So in 2015, by their data, there was 942 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. In 2016, there was a spike of about a third up to 1,267. Then that increased massively in 2017 up to nearly 2,000 incidents. And it's remained at that level since, but spiking even higher in 2021 at 2,700 roughly.

It really is shocking when you look at the data. And just to note, I have the Canadian statistics in front of me here. So we got a report from advocacy group B'nai B'rith earlier this year that said anti-Semitic hate crimes were at record level highs in 2021. Its report counted almost 2,800 hate crimes in Canada. And then of of course, in the U.S., we've seen some horrific manifestations of this. The 2018 attack on the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, a gunman killed 11 Jewish worshipers. We've talked already about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

People will remember that horrible chant. Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not! So it's really manifested in, I don't know, horrors. Yeah, I mean, I'll never forget the 2018 shooting, not just because it's sort of, I mean, it is literally the worst anti-Semitic massacre

in American history, right, in all of American history. But it's also the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history, in all of American history. But it's also the day that I got married. And so my wife and I were getting ready separately, and the rabbi comes up to me and he says, I want you to know that there was something at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, something bad has happened. We turn on the news and I'm getting married in a few hours. And I'm just watching as there's footage from a synagogue that had been shot up. And it turns out that that was somebody who wanted to kill people like me just for being in synagogue. And not only that, but my wedding had actually been under threat from neo-Nazis who were very angry about my coverage of their movement. And so earlier in that year, they had gone to the website and had filled it up with hateful messages promising to bring ovens to the wedding,

which is a reference to the Holocaust. I had to get a security consultant who told me to not walk the same way to work every day to track them and make sure that this wasn't escalating into more sustained threats at the event. So on that day, they didn't ruin it. It was the best day of my life in a lot of ways, but it also was one that was under threat. And I tell this story not to make your listeners think, woe is me and to feel just bad for Zach personally, but to help you guys understand what it's been like to be Jewish in the United States since the rise of Trump and what it's done to the psyche of American Jews. I mean, I actually was in Canada. I was at a synagogue in Vancouver for the first Shabbat after the shooting. And I mean, I could feel the exact

same thing from Canadian Jews. I've never seen a synagogue so packed. They had to extend the room because so many people are there and all of us had the same anxieties and fears. How could this be happening to us again? The other sort of high tide moment of anti-Semitism in American history is the 1910s and 1920s in the lead up to World War II. Of course, you've looked at this time as a way to kind of try and understand what's happening today. One high profile person you looked at was automaker Henry Ford and the ideas that he was pushing at that time and how it influenced the spread of anti-Semitism. And just talk to me about the parallels that you see.

Yeah. So I knew that Ford was a very prominent anti-Semite, but when I was doing some reporting, some research into the history around here, what I didn't understand is just how incredibly influential he was on the rise of global anti-Semitism in the interwar period, especially in the United States, but also globally. It's really stunning. So what Ford did with his massive, massive amount of money and reach is buy a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent. And at first, the newspaper wasn't selling so well. But what Ford did was two things. First, he changed the coverage of the paper and attack Jews with hyperbolic headlines like the international Jew, the world's problem. Every week, the Dearborn Independent slandered Jews as being untrustworthy, greedy and treacherous, as controlling global politics and financial systems. He turned every Ford dealership into a distribution point for the paper.

So you would go in, you'd get a car or be shopping for a car, and you'd also come out with a copy of the Dearborn Independent or maybe a subscription. And that turned it into the second most widely read newspaper in the United States very quickly. The paper contained, among other things, excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a forgery that is typically traced back to Russia, but is allegedly the minutes or the records of a Jewish conspiracy, right, to run the world and take advantage of non-Jews everywhere. Ford is almost single-handedly responsible for turning this once obscure Russian document into what is even today one of the most widely distributed anti-semitic documents in the entire world

right and one of the most influential ones ford's books were huge successes translated into 12 languages and distributed worldwide in its first two years the international jews sold over 2 million copies ford refused to copyright the books to enable anyone to freely publish them the books remain in circulation today with no copyright limiting their dissemination. In 1923, when Hitler was just getting started, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune asked him what he thought of Henry Ford. And he said that Ford, he called him Heinrich Ford, to, I think, emphasize the connections here was very important.

Ford to, I think, emphasize the connections here was very important. And then he was distributing copies of his paper around Germany to try to get people attracted to Nazism. Then in 1931, with the Nazis on the rise and Hitler not so far away from taking over Germany's government, another American reporter asked him about Henry Ford. And Hitler said, quote unquote, I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration. And on his desk, there was a framed portrait of Ford, who then in 1938, went over to Germany to accept an award from Hitler's government. He played a material role in helping make the world more comfortable and Germany specifically, more comfortable with eliminationist antisemitism. more comfortable with eliminationist antisemitism. So with that history in mind, I think the lessons for today are that one person with a large platform can tap into the latent vein of antisemitism that exists basically around the world and make it much more prominent and influential and help play a role in stoking anti-Semitic fires and make the world a very scary place for a lot of Jews. And I worry that's what Trump is doing in a very different way today, right?

It's not that he's not like Ford. He's not just bankrolling an anti-Semitic publication. What he's doing is creating a permission structure for other people to express anti-Semitic beliefs and for outright anti-Semites to get a foothold in one of America's two major parties. As Pamela Nadel, who's a historian of anti-Semitism at American University, put it to me, is that Ford was greatly admired, but he wasn't the past president. The company founded by a man named Henry Ford, good bloodlines, good bloodlines. If you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.

And I think that's a really good way of summarizing just how scary it is that he plays footsie with people like Kanye and Nick Fuentes. You mentioned Pamela Nadal. You quote her in your last piece's quote has stuck with me. I've been thinking about it since I read your piece last week, that she thinks that this is the high tide of American antisemitism, not the period leading up to World War II now, which feels like an incredibly grim assessment. And I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Yeah. When she told it to me, I was like, that's horrible, but it's also kind of unsurprising, given what I've been observing. It's important to understand what exactly she's trying to express, right? Because there are really important ways in which American society has gotten a lot better for Jews, right? So in the 30s, employment discrimination against Jews was widespread. It was much more accepted in polite company to use anti-Semitic slurs to mistreat Jews. After World War II, that really went on to decline, right? It didn't end, but, they hated Catholics, they hated Blacks, they hated immigrants of all kinds. And so a climate of general intolerance tends to bring antisemitism back. And the victories of the civil rights movement and moves towards the United

States becoming a more egalitarian society on the whole helps tamp down on public antisemitism. I mean, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the debate among Jews wasn't, are we about to see a major resurgence of antisemitism? It was primarily whether Jews were white now, right? Did you have Jews just become another ethnic group like Irish Americans or Italian Americans who were once different and stigmatized, but now functionally exist with all the privileges of whiteness in the mainstream of American society. And that has changed. And so while we don't have quotas at universities that are blocking Jews from getting in, we have violence against Jews on a scale that I think really is unprecedented. It certainly is in the United States.

I know you've been pulling on this thread, but then, so talk to me a little bit more, final question today, about what you think needs to happen to try and tackle this. So look, the flip side of antisemitism being something that can be stoked by political leaders is that it's something that can be tamped down on by political leaders. So what you need really is concerted leadership, particularly on the political right of people working to stigmatize not only Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, but Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar and all of these people who don't say they're anti-Semitic and disavow anti-Semitism, but tolerate the people who are and work to normalize

them and bring them into the party's big tent. You need those people, the enablers, to be ostracized, isolated, and defeated. And that's a task for Republican elites. So to my mind, the biggest question right now is how whoever's left is the responsible adults in the Republican Party. How are they going to handle this? Right now, I don't expect things to go into like a sort of catastrophic situation where Jews feel fundamentally unsafe in the United States and are looking for the exits. But I do expect that things will stay the way that they are right now for a while. And I think that will, given the way the trends work cross-border in North America,

I would expect that to make both Jews in the United States and Canada feel worried about what's happening in their society and insecure in a way that we haven't been in quite some time. Yeah. Zach, I want to thank you so much for taking the time today. Thank you. Thanks. All right, that is all for today. Thanks for listening. Just a note to say that we did a whole episode on the rise and fall of Kanye West a few weeks ago that I think is definitely worth a listen. You can find that in our feed. Talk to you tomorrow.