In the end, it wasn’t CNN, the New York Times or The Washington Post that exposed Ye’s explicit antisemitism. It wasn’t even the traditional celebrity-media industrial complex, the Daily Mails and TMZs, that has previously uncovered troubling behavior of the rich and famous.
Media
Kanye West’s hate-spewing, career-tanking descent through the alt-media
The artist formerly known as Kanye West incinerated his career while on a two-month tour through the alt-media swamps, a collection of podcasts and streaming shows that tend to mimic the mainstream media’s aesthetics while disdaining its journalistic standards.
The gatekeepers of this universe — including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and media-bashing podcaster Tim Pool — invited Ye to their programs after his early remarks about Jews made him persona non grata to the general public two months ago. Many of these personalities broadcast his antisemitic rants with minimal pushback, or even encouragement, accelerating the 24-time Grammy-winner’s descent to pariah status.
Ye, who has spoken about struggling with bipolar disorder, had been slowly alienating his fans for years through his antics, rambling remarks and flirtations with racist ideologies. His recent bids for president have been mostly treated as a joke. He preluded his spree of antisemitism in early October, when he wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt at a Paris fashion show.
His last known interview with a major news outlet aired three days later, with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. Ye complained that Jared and Josh Kushner — both Jewish — were “businessmen” primarily concerned with making money, which to some viewers sounded like the centuries-old stereotype of greedy Jews.
When Ye asked if he was being too “heavy-handed” for Carlson’s show, Carlson assured him “we’re not in the censorship business,” and at another point praised Ye for speaking “so honestly and so movingly about what he believes.”Un-aired footage obtained by Motherboard, however, showed that Fox edited out several especially toxic comments by Ye, some explicitly about Jews.
“I just, I trust Latinos when I, you know, when I work with them,” Kanye West told Tucker Carlson in an unaired clip. “I trust them more than—” he paused. “I’ll be safe, certain other businessmen, you know.” https://t.co/p9PrKqp16S
— maxwell (@maxwellstrachan) October 11, 2022
Within days of the Carlson interview, Ye began posting antisemitic rants on social media, including a declaration to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” prompting Twitter and Instagram to suspend his accounts, and sponsors such as Adidas to cancel affiliations with him.
Some media outfits made similar calculations. A YouTube program produced by basketball superstar LeBron James announced it would not air a previously-taped interview with Ye, citing “hate speech and extremely dangerous stereotypes” he allegedly espoused while on camera.
That was hardly a surprise; open bigots are rarely invited to traditional news shows without a compelling reason, such as a run for public office or a criminal accusation.
“The largest broadcast and cable news brands have clearly settled on the argument that ‘platforming’ these people is the very opposite of journalism,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, dean of Hofstra University’s communication school. “It gives the imprimatur of the journalist’s brand or their outlet’s brand, to false, violent, hateful ideas, spreading them further whether or not they are effectively confronted.”
Representatives for ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC did not answer questions about whether they have tried to interview Ye since his first antisemitic outbursts. Regardless, he has not appeared on any major channels in that time — despite evidence that millions of people are willing to listen.
Instead, they found him on obscure cable shows or in the alt-media, where extremist views are less likely to be censored or even contested, and through which Ye has been delving ever deeper in his search for a platform.
One of his first stops was Revolt TV’s “Drink Champs,” a hip-hop focused streaming show that put a microphone in front of Ye for more than three hours on Oct. 16. A few minutes into the interview, he began explaining how “the Jewish people have owned the Black voice” throughout history. His hosts occasionally interjected with an “uh huh,” or a “right.”
The next day, Ye was interviewed by Chris Cuomo on NewsNation — the 72nd-ranked cable channel in prime time, according to an October Nielsen report. Cuomo sat on the left side of a split screen in a suit and tie, looking as polished as when he was a CNN prime time star, before the network fired him over alleged ethical violations last year. On the right side of the screen: grainy footage of Ye in the back of a vehicle.
More so than some interviewers who followed him, Cuomo challenged his subject’s assertions of a “Jewish underground media mafia” and other antisemitic tropes. But those rhetorical thrusts merely provoked Ye into crosstalk.
“I can’t give you unrestricted license to attack Jewish people,” the host exclaimed 14 minutes into the segment.
Ye shot back: “Are you going to give me a platform?”
“I am giving you a platform,” Cuomo observed, and continued the interview for another six minutes.
And on it went. Cuomo was followed by Piers Morgan, another former CNN host who in late October spent an hour and 40 minutes with Ye. His program, “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” carried on the Fox Nation streaming platform among other venues, had averaged a paltry 62,000 viewers per night earlier this year, according to Slate. But the Ye episode has been viewed more than 6.3 million times on YouTube.
After Morgan came Lex Fridman, a Jewish podcaster who politely challenged many of Ye’s claims during their two-and-a-half-hour interview, including that abortion is comparable to the Holocaust and that all African Americans are Jewish. With 4.3 million views, the episode is one of the most popular on Fridman’s YouTube channel.
Ye managed to make actual news in the middle of his alt-media tour, when he, Milo Yiannopoulos and the avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes flew to Florida in November and dined with former president Donald Trump.
A few days later, the three dinner guests were invited to the studio of Tim Pool — a one-time Vice news correspondent who has become a right-wing celebrity for his claims that journalists constantly lie. Pool suggested Ye was over-generalizing when he claimed that Jews control banking and the media, and provoked his guest to walk out of the interview when he insisted it was journalists, not Jews, who were being unfair to Ye.
When Ye sat down at Infowars’s glossy black news desk last week, host Alex Jones didn’t challenge the musician’s hateful comments so much as he tried to sanitize them.
“You’re not Hitler, you’re not a Nazi, you don’t deserve to be called that and demonized,” Jones told Ye, who wore a crown-to-chin face mask during the interview.
“Well, I see good things about Hitler also,” Ye replied, referring to the genocidally antisemitic leader of Nazi Germany.
Appearing on Infowars might have seemed like a low point for Ye. Jones declared bankruptcy this month after being ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the families of Sandy Hook school-shooting victims, whom he repeatedly defamed on his shows.
But the alt-media is bottomless. On Monday, Ye appeared on a live stream hosted by Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. McInnes listened as his guest spewed virulent anti-Jewish tropes for more than 40 minutes, occasionally counter-arguing that Jews weren’t reproducing fast enough to be a cultural threat, or that Ye’s praise for Hitler would complicate his latest presidential bid.
To state the obvious irony: Nearly every one of Ye’s remarks eventually surfaced in the mainstream news that shunned him (including in this article). They circulate across the entire digital media-scape. To even acknowledge the problem is to amplify it.
Words broadcast in the murky backwaters of the alt-media don’t stay there, noted Howard Bragman, a Los Angeles crisis communications specialist who has represented celebrity clients.
“I applaud the mainstream media for holding to their standards,” Bragman said. But: “The mainstream media is going to pick it up,” even if they don’t report it first.
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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