On Kanye West, Part I
It is late August 2015. A few months before David Bowie will forever leave this earth. The year before Jordan Peterson rises to fame and Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Somewhere in America, a man steps into his bathroom. He strips off his clothes. Perhaps he looks at his body in the mirror. Certain thoughts might move through his mind. He turns the faucets in his shower. The room soon fills with steam. Water streams down his body, the heat relieving tension in his being. Maybe he closes his eyes. Maybe he breathes deeply. And at some point, the man has a revelation. An idea explodes like a sunburst, like an atomic bomb, in his mind. Truth, destiny, divine providence—whatever it may be, this thought remakes this man’s life. Possibilities for his future surge and recede; his ambitions rearrange themselves. He opens his eyes; he laughs ‘hysterically.’ Eventually the man turns off the water. The steam clears. Rivulets trickle along his skin. He knows his fate.
Two days later, this man takes the stage at MTV’s Video Music Awards. At the end of his speech he shares his revelation with the world. He will run for president. People worldwide are surprised, but recognise the logic. For this man, so driven to self-actualisation, so outspoken on issues both political and cultural, the decision makes some kind of sense.1
Now, return to 1977. This man is an unborn child. He is suspended in utero. His father, Ray, feels he is ‘too busy’ to raise a child; he begs his partner to abort the pregnancy.2 Meanwhile his mother, Donda, not only wants to keep the child; she prays to God every day that her child will be ‘brilliant.’ In June, the child arrives. Three years later his father leaves. Donda ‘trains’ her son ‘for greatness’ and eventually he achieves the genius she needs. The child will credit Donda for his successes. ‘[B]ecause of who she is, I am able to be who I am,’ he will write. Donda will agree. ‘Undoubtedly,’ she will reply, who her son ‘is today has a great deal to do with the way he was brought up.’ Her prayers answered, Donda concludes that ‘God had chosen him to do something very special in the world.’3
The child has a strange and difficult upbringing. Raised by Donda alone, this child discovers his mother may be a closeted lesbian. He engages in incestuous and underage sex acts with a male cousin.4
Decades pass. It’s November 10th, 2007. Donda lies dead in an L.A. hospital’s emergency room. Her son is distraught. Donda had become his manager. Her body needed to conform to celebrity standards. He pressured her to get elective plastic surgery. He financed the operation. Complications from the procedure ended her life. The loss shatters this man. Afterwards, he will feel suicidal, crazed by grief and guilt. In the following years he will start organisations and produce albums in Donda’s name. He will marry a woman who would act ‘like his foster mom.’5 And in his art and life he will write and rewrite the signs of a guilt that will not abate.
Move forward now to 2022. The man is a billionaire. He has 24 Grammy awards; he is one of the most famous people alive. From his place at the pinnacle of contemporary culture, he decides to make a post on that site then known as Twitter. When he wakes up, he writes, he will go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH people.’ Weeks later, he appears on Alex Jones’ right-wing talk show, InfoWars. ‘The Jewish media,’ he says, ‘has made us feel like the Nazis and Hitler have never offered anything of value to the world.’ ‘The Holocaust is not what happened,’ he continues, ‘we got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.’ ‘I do love Hitler,’ he eventually admits.6 The public outcry is immediate and overwhelming. With just a few words, the man destroys his reputation and loses over 80% of his wealth. Once brilliant as his mother had hoped, the man burns himself up in an act of spectacular self-immolation. By 2025, he has only grown more proud of his hatred. He now wears and sells T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas.7 Hitler is “so fresh,” he writes on X. “IM A NAZI.”8
Kanye West was once the ‘nucleus’ of popular culture, the hypocentre of the 21st century’s consumerist maelstrom. Now he is a Nazi. In 2008 and 2012, he supported Obama’s campaigns. Then in 2018 he expressed his love for Trump, and in 2019, he founded a Christian choir and released a religious rap record. By 2022, he publicly attacked the Jews and aired his pro-Hitler views. By 2025, he was an unrepentant Nazi and anti-Semite.
Throughout the 2010s, Kanye moved across the land of ante-fascism, gradually abandoning his Christian-inflected liberalism for theocratic, anti-Semitic fascism. His evolution once again shows that liberalism and fascism are linked—that, despite their differences, they are connected.
Like David Bowie, Jordan Peterson, and Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, Kanye’s life reveals something essential about liberal societies and individuals—they are vulnerable to fascism. To understand Kanye’s weakness is to understand our own. To grasp his history is to grasp how America was drawn towards fascism over the last decade.
Endnotes
Raising Kanye, ‘Foreword’ and ‘Introduction,’ and
See the lyrics of ‘KEYS TO MY LIFE’ on VULTURES I.