Kanye West’s overnight mega-meltdown has inadvertently exposed the hard-right grift at the heart of the current MAGA wave realigning U.S. culture.
The rapper, who now goes by Ye, set out to shock the world in an all-caps rant on Elon Musk’s X that was at once unhinged and yet totally calculated.
Like many of those seeking to glom onto Trump’s say-anything shtick, the cynical attention-seeking desperation could be seen leaking out between the verbal bomb throwing.
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West even came clean and admitted that he was jealous of Musk for stealing his tactics and riding them all the way to the top.
“GET YOUR OWN THIRD RALE,” he wrote, referring to the infamous Musk salute during the inauguration celebrations. Third rails are traditionally defined as a subjects too controversial for anyone to touch but, in Donald Trump’s America, powerful people are lining up to be the first to grab hold of them. “ELON STOLE MY NAZI SWAG AT THE INAUGURATION,” West howled.
And to be fair, West had been doing the prep work. Just over two years ago, the rapper sat down with conspiracy king Alex Jones after making a string of antisemitic public statements. Jones thought he was doing the rapper a favor by knocking down critics and saying that he was no Nazi, but he didn’t realize that was just messing with West’s bit.
The rapper had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago the week before and was fully invested in gripping that third rail.
“You’re not Hitler,” Jones insisted. “You’re not a Nazi.”
“Well, I see good things about Hitler,” West explained. “Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
Just in case anyone was missing the point, he then stated outright: “I like Hitler.”
Buoyed by the attention-grabbing success of his make-my-wife-go-to-the-Grammys-virtually-naked wheeze, West set out from Thursday night into Friday morning on X to prove that he got red-pilled way before Musk.
“IM A NAZI,” he wrote on the social media platform owned by Musk, who has used it to flirt with Nazi jokes and borderline racist posts but always maintained that any apparent overlap was purely coincidental.
While Musk has reveled in trolling on X and elsewhere, West is being even blunter, demanding people be outraged by his provocative statements. “I LOVE HITLER NOW WHAT B---HES,” he asked.
While you can imagine his publicists, lawyers, and managers banging on his bathroom door and trying to snatch the phone out of his hand, you can clearly see that West was hoping to provoke controversy; hoping to be saluted by MAGA and far-right thought leaders like Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist influencer, who duly obliged with a tweet that read “The Leader.”
Most importantly, he was hoping to be talked about. Once again, he let his calculations slip when talking about the Bianca Censori Grammys outfit. “MY WIFE IS THE MOST GOOGLED PERSON ON THE PLANET,” he wrote. Misogyny may well have been involved in his scheme, but ultimately, he was more concerned about search engine optimization.
Musk is most likely no Nazi—no matter how many Roman-adjacent salutes he throws—nor is West, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Matt Gaetz. These people are faking it, stoking outrage for outrage’s sake and basking in the attention that will get them into Trump’s wild orbit.
The only difference is that unlike Musk, or even Gaetz, West is not sneaky enough to hide it.
