Digest 01/23/2023

Daniel Spielberger vents about Ye, antisemitism, and racism in the broader attention economy. His verdict? The vibes are off.

KEEPING UP WITH YE: REFLECTIONS ON A COLLECTIVE MEDIA MELTDOWN

When I first saw that Ye — formerly Kanye West —  tweeted his intention to go “Death Con 3 (sic) On JEWISH PEOPLE,” I was hunched over my iPhone, waiting in line for a drink at Akbar in Los Angeles, where David Bowie was crooning over the jukebox. Like on most weekend nights, the gay bar was swarming with people. 

Sipping a gin and tonic, I wandered back to my friends and tried to forget about the thousands of likes and retweets on Ye’s post, but my mind was racing. It seemed unreal that one of the world’s most popular African American celebrities, once memefied for saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” was trolling genocide to his more than 30 million followers. Part of the problem was that, while Ye has become infamous for his meltdowns, and the controversy surrounding his life is regularly in the news, the influence he holds over the broader, not-as-logged-on culture remains difficult to quantify. 

Though I could only vaguely sense that something was starting to go off the rails that night, over the next few weeks, public personalities and media across the political spectrum repackaged Ye’s hatred to their own ends. Antisemitism watchdogs at the Anti-Defamation League, reporters at The New York Times, and the sleazy, marginal figures like Alex Jones not only created an atmosphere of anxiety and anguish, but also set off a battle for control over who gets to clock antisemitism in mass media. Like many others, I found myself stuck in a cycle of reacting — and therefore extending — this unraveling pop culture catastrophe. 

At first, I assumed that Ye’s “Death Con 3” tweet was yet another random freakout, not the rapper mainlining Mein Kampf. Yet, in the days that followed his initial tirade, I watched as his history of bigotry — like his “White Lives Matter” fashion show last fall — was replayed in the news cycle, creating panic about what unhinged thing he might do next. 

A few days later, I watched some leaked footage from Ye’s highly edited October 6 interview with Tucker Carlson and listened as he told the Fox News host that he wants his kids to celebrate Hanukkah over Kwanza so they could learn “financial engineering.” And before it was deleted, I listened to the October 15 episode of the podcast and YouTube show “Drink Champs,” hosted by rapper N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN, where Ye bragged that, despite his flagrant antisemitism, Adidas wouldn’t terminate their nearly decade-long partnership with him. It didn’t take long for tabloids and click-baity outlets to regurgitate his downward spiral, relentlessly handing him a platform in the process.  

On October 24, as many of you are well aware, things took a turn for the absolute worse when a white supremacist group hung a banner stating, “Kanye Is Right About the Jews” above Los Angeles Interstate 405. Analogously to media figureheads, these emboldened white supremacists started capitalizing off Ye’s descent into far right infamy and leveraging it for their own ends. 

Seeing the white supremacist banner pop up dozens of times in Instagram stories, posted by people who were shocked and upset, I realized that Ye is uniquely positioned within entertainment media as an eccentric truthsayer. In his quest to accrue capital and brand himself as a purveyor of taste, he’s endorsed everything from the minimalist design philosophy of Wabi-Sabi to Shutter shades. Harkening back to him repurposing the Confederate flag as a fashion statement, his use of hateful symbols is a testament to his shapeshifting power — not a coherent political ideology. At least not his own.

As a writer on the culture beat, sifting through the content swamp in hopes of finding something pitch-worthy gets overwhelming. I tend to keep things fun and light, favoring Bethenny Frankel memes over Twitter threads about how “The White Lotus” speaks to the unique anxieties of the “Professional Managerial Class.” And so, when a prominent figure evoked the idea that Jewish people control the levers of the media, I started masking my discomfort with self-deprecating jokes. In a group chat, I told close friends that I wished that my people could do better than Jared Kushner, one of the subjects of Ye’s antisemitic ire on “Drink Champs,” and that next year, I will do a better job at attending my Zoom meetings with my frequent collaborator, Diddy.

But my experience as a culture journalist also tells me that the critical distance which separated Ye’s performance from Ye the person was already weak before his antisemitism rebrand — if it ever existed in the first place. 

And now, building off his past few years of unsavory comments, the distance had collapsed. Whether or not he was being sincere or willfully destroying his career or, as many speculated, experiencing a mental health crisis, seems moot. 

Sure, we’re used to tabloids hounding celebrities after they shamefully pose for DUI mugshots in the aftermath of a wild night out. But this was different. A public figure was using his easy access to media to spread disinformation far and wide and ripped the mea culpa playbook to shreds in the process. So, why did so many outlets and social media users play along? 

In a flood of virtue signaling righteousness, celebrities ranging from Khloé Kardashian to my BFF Meghan McCain shared the same infographic on Instagram proclaiming their support of “the Jewish people.” (For future reference, I prefer edible arrangements to #allyposts.) A family member sent me New York Times luminary Bret Stephens’ polemical essay, which links Ye’s comments to an increasingly hostile environment towards Jews that, according to Stephens, is partially due to the rise of anti-Zionism. In the same essay, Stephens thanks Ye for unintentionally spotlighting the pervasiveness of antisemitism in contemporary society. 

Stephens draws a vast web, contextualizing Ye’s comments with anti-Zionist activism at UC Berkeley Law School and how the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures didn’t give Jewish immigrants enough credit in their exhibition about the founding of Hollywood. I was enraged and baffled by this chutzpah. During this time of heightened anxiety, Stephens was seemingly relishing the opportunity to insert his own agenda.  

I then jumped on Twitter and saw that he was far from alone. That same day, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League added to the pile, tweeting, “When people with huge platforms spout hate, it gives a license to other haters. So, whether it’s white supremacists or anti-Zionists, we need to call it out — no matter where it comes from.” He shared the comment alongside a clip of his “Anderson Cooper 360” appearance in which he drew parallels between Ye’s antisemitism and anti-Zionism. 

In a matter of days, the general vibe shifted again. The consensus among liberal media outlets was that Ye’s antisemitism is an example of a larger wave of anti-Jewish bigotry that includes the rise of anti-Zionism, which they say is the real threat to the Jewish people. 

During my lunch break that afternoon, over chomps of packaged Caesar salad, I read on Twitter that Ye, now dropped by Adidas as well as Balenciaga and Creative Artists Agency (CAA), showed up to Skechers’ Manhattan Beach headquarters, demanding a meeting with executives. Though he was swiftly denied access to the building, his stunt invoked the specter of his inevitable return.

Later that day, I tried explaining how I felt to my partner, Brent, who is Black and not Jewish. In my desperation, I offered a whirlwind of criticisms. 

The idea of Ye working with a company like Skechers so soon would be upsetting and make the situation worse.

Ye clearly has no plans to apologize. If anything, he has doubled down. 

To have him come out of this situation unscathed would set a bad precedent. 

If you sift through the comments sections and replies to tweets about Ye’s turn toward antisemitism, you’d see that seemingly thousands of people agree with him.

After listening to me vent, Brent told me he believes Ye is frustrated, and in ways that many Black Americans identify with. Frustrated with how Black Americans can’t seem to assimilate. Frustrated with how Black Americans can’t empower themselves in their careers, especially in corporate spaces. Though he strongly disagreed with how Ye attacks Jews and uses us as scapegoat for his qualms, and believed that the star was being foolish by not seeking out trusted, respected resources on these topics, he reminded me that Ye arrived at this point due to his resentments towards working within a system that by and large doesn’t favor people like him. To Ye, Brent said, Jews are just white people. 

When I heard Brent say this, it was admittedly difficult to accept. Like many, I was reacting to the Ye content I was seeing being blasted all across the internet. Because it all happened in real time, I was struggling to articulate why I was so upset, even though I had an endless supply of proof. Trying to understand Ye’s perspective and how, when read with a specific lens, the situation could be understood more generously, was asking me to pause, reflect, and take critical distance. That’s hard to do when everything is unfolding rapidly and I go in and out of my social media feeds clogged with posts from people who are rightfully terrified, but perhaps of the wrong person. 

In the more amorphous world of social media, the more Ye was reprimanded for his comments (lucrative brand collaborations axed, social media profiles suspended), the more a frustratingly simplified narrative gained traction — that Ye’s swift cancellation was “proving his point” that the American Jewish community is uniquely powerful.

On “Saturday Night Live,” comedian Dave Chappelle did a fifteen-minute set that predictably mocked Ye’s apparent cancellation, characterizing the idea that Jewish people run Hollywood as a Sacred Cow, the Final Boss of PC taboos. After referencing how Brooklyn Nets player Kyrie Irving got into hot water for tweeting about an antisemitic documentary that denied the existence of the Holocaust, Chappelle struck a serious tone. “I know Jewish people have been through terrible things all over the world but you can’t just blame that on Black Americans,” the comedian told the camera, as if conveying wisdom. Who was he even saying that to? And why and how has condemning prejudice outright become so polarizing?

Perhaps, this was a backlash to the backlash: a response to how American Jewish institutions attempted to hammer in to Ye — and the general public — the urgency of stopping antisemitic narratives from taking off. In the lead up to the media chaos, the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles invited Ye to learn about genocide from their exhibitions. But that approach negates both the nature of the conspiratorial mind and that anti-Black discrimination — which is what Ye, Chappelle, and others like them are weaponizing to obfuscate from their own prejudice — doesn’t exist within the realm of the hypothetical. Rather, it’s part of the operating mechanisms of the State; it’s not a lesson about how it could happen here, it happened and it’s happening. Instead of bridging the gap, this can all come off as condescending and in turn, further feed the cynicism off of which charlatans like Chappelle thrive. 

Looking back, trying to educate and rehabilitate Ye was a fundamental flaw to mainstream institutions’ strategies of addressing and dispelling the impact of his comments. But in the absence of rehabilitation, what is there left to do? 

As the media’s faulty mechanisms for explaining and mitigating antisemitism were exposed, I began to see the fiasco for what it truly was — a full blown spectacle in which, cynically, many media figures played a part to their own benefit.

I wondered whether there were actually genuine attempts to untangle these complexities for a broader audience and if all the discourse was merely a parade of opportunists, spanning from Stephens to Chappelle, using Ye’s breakdown to prove their preconceived points. 

Nothing that I saw on Twitter, YouTube, or the op-ed symposiums of The New York Times emulated what it’s like to actually be in a room with a person and see one another as two separate individuals, experiencing the same phenomenon, but coming away with varying takes. Some schisms can’t be resolved instantaneously and neatly shoved into a glossy infographic titled, “How To Talk About Ye.” I didn’t want the nuances to be flattened. But admittedly, I became obsessive, wondering whether I was missing something entirely from my own interpretation of what was unfolding. 

I grew up going to Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp. My grandparents were all Holocaust survivors. My father’s parents suffered through Auschwitz and my maternal grandmother spent World War II in Ukraine’s forested countryside, where her family begged gentile farmers for raw potatoes. 

I remember being surprised to hear my paternal grandmother softly sing a tune between sips over coffee at breakfast when I was twelve, and asking her why she didn’t sing that often. As I drifted in and out of attention, my grandmother recounted how she and her twin sister used to perform for spare coins in the Ghetto. 

This, of course, makes me look in horror at this tragic spectacle of Ye relentlessly spouting nonsense. I viscerally understand the stakes of hateful disinformation spreading unchecked. But it shouldn’t be up to anyone who is qualified, due to education or experience of seeing the results of prejudice firsthand, to help illustrate why platforming Ye is wrong. 

American mass media is uniquely positioned as a global influencer — trends that happen here, tend to get adopted elsewhere. If this was a test, we failed spectacularly. What we saw unfold was essentially a mentally unwell, high profile man’s hateful tirades continuously getting spotlighted in service of various agendas: website traffic increased; a new cast of fringe figures that will make for sensational, monetizable fodder down the line suddenly became relevant; and conservative organizations like the ADL got another chance to leverage public hysteria so they could continue to silence Palestinian voices. The sense of decisiveness between two historically marginalized groups just added to the chatter while amplifying hatred. As long as the topic was relevant, Chappelle got to reheat his qualms about cancel culture and Greenblatt would get air time on CNN.  

Stepping back from my knee jerk reaction, I have come to view this as another case study of subjective perspectives fighting for the mantle of objectivity. There are clear, stark differences between how antisemitism manifests in the United States and the country’s systemic racism toward Black Americans. However, much of the backlash and attempts at rehabilitating Ye weren’t taking that nuance into account. 

A common refrain online suggests that attention is like oxygen. That the best way to stop something that makes us uncomfortable is to ignore it. The viral moment, this refrain holds, will die gasping for notoriety and recognition, pathetic and petulant — but crucially away from our collective sight. Throughout the last few weeks, the media repeatedly gave Ye the attention that he wanted, seemingly daring him to outdo himself and take the shtick way too far. In retrospect, Ye ending up next to Alex Jones, wearing a black mask, offering high praise for Adolf Hitler, and doing an odd bit about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu that involved a net and a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, was an inevitable outcome of our collective fixation. 

I remember months ago, driving back home with Brent and seeing the words “Fuck N-Words” sloppily graffitied onto a wall across the street from our neighborhood’s post office. Though we didn’t know the origins of the graffiti, that didn’t matter; we felt scared and uncomfortable and so whoever wrote it — in whatever state of mind — successfully changed the trajectory of our day. Within milliseconds, we were swept by an ominous calm. I turned the pop music playing from the speaker off, naively thinking that with silence I could make everything alright. Obviously, I couldn’t. 

Driving down the 405 freeway and being confronted with a hateful banner hanging from the bridge was likely jarring and unsettling to anyone who witnessed it. In retrospect, it’s understandable that many felt the need to post about it on social media, both to raise awareness and denounce it outright. People were using these platforms to process their emotions of worry and anxiety, unintentionally adding to the collective panic by inadvertently spreading Ye’s hate. But what was lost in the infographics, the op-eds, and the ping pong of discourse were the tangible stakes of the situation: who is actually vulnerable, who could get hurt, and how and why trolling and words can result in material violence. Our legitimate feelings were co-opted by media figures who were either advocating for their predetermined agendas or, to put it quite cynically, exploiting a star’s downfall for clicks. 

As Twitter continues to devolve into an immersive theater populated with trolls and reactionary pundits frothing at the mouth for spare crumbs of notoriety, we will hear that none of their dog whistles and irreverent mashing of signifiers actually matter, we should log off, and touch grass. But I don’t know what good touching grass would do when you’re living in constant fear of who and what will pop up in a public space. I could consume less of this content and set up time limits on social media apps and mute certain words. However, the desire to stay updated on what everyone is saying inevitably creeps back. Interfacing with more and more of this information becomes a coping mechanism, a bitter attempt at maintaining control over an ultimately unmanageable mess. The binary between what we see on our phones and what we see out in the world isn’t that clearcut. During that night at the bar, when I first looked at Twitter and saw Ye declare “Death Con 3” on the Jewish people, I proceeded to act like nothing was wrong. I got lost staring at the spinning disco lights and joked about my favorite “Housewives” franchises over round after round of cocktails and cheap beer. But when I went to the bathroom or had a moment alone on the couch in the corner, I couldn’t help but do the thing that you’re not supposed to do — take my iPhone out of my pocket and log back on to check what the little people on my screen were saying about this unfolding spectacle, assuming that soon, at this bar, everyone would also start reacting in real time.