Newly revealed footage shows that Kanye West made antisemitic comments and a series of other bizarre claims that were left out of his interview last week with Tucker Carlson.
The interview ran over two nights on Carlson’s top-rated Fox News show, and the host held West, now known as Ye, as a victim of left wing cancel culture and woke politics, first and foremost being the reaction to the rapper’s wearing of a White Lives Matter shirt at Paris fashion week.
In one of the clips, obtained and published by Vice News’s Motherboard, Ye complains about sending his kids to a school that celebrates Kwanzaa. “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering,” he said.
At another point, when Ye talked of Black people judging one another, he said, “Think about us judging each other on how white we could talk would be like, you know, a Jewish person judging another Jewish person on how good they danced or something. … I mean, that’s probably like a bad example and people are going to get mad at that shit.” He then said, “I probably want to edit that out.” “Done,” Carlson responded.
Over the weekend, Twitter removed a post and suspended him for a tweet in which he said that he would go “def con 3” on Jewish people. Instagram also removed Ye’s post from earlier in the week, in which he shared portions of a text conversation with Diddy. In the post, Ye uses an antisemitic trope about Jewish influence.
Carlson’s show did air a portion of the interview in which Ye suggested that Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, of seeking Israeli peace deals with Arab countries for financial gain. The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement on Friday saying that “the behavior exhibited this week by @kanyewest is deeply troubling, dangerous, and antisemitic, period. There is no excuse for his propagating of white supremacist slogans and classic #antisemitism about Jewish power, especially with the platform he has.”
In another clip left out of the interview, according to Motherboard, Ye claimed that “fake children” or “actors, professional actors,” were “placed into my house to sexualize my kids.”
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment. There has been considerable debate about how much exposure to give to Ye, given that he has struggled with bipolar disorder.
When he opened his interview with West on his Thursday show, Carlson acknowledged that “listening to West could be “jarring” and “it is often used as ammunition against him in the battle for influence over the minds of America’s young people and that battle is intense. But crazy? That was not our conclusion. In fact, we’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes, but again, you can judge for yourself.”
In 2020, a West was embarking on a presidential campaign, his then-wife Kim Kardashian called for “compassion and empathy” given his mental health issues.
In the interview portions that aired, Ye at one point talked of a conspiracy involving the Uvalde school shooting and told Carlson, “Have I reached Alex Jones territory yet?” Carlson responded, “No, I think you’re telling the truth.”
Ye then said that “they keep using the, oh, he’s crazy, he’s crazy thing. And it hurts my feelings when people say that. It hurts my feelings that people can ask me, ‘Hey, are you OK?’”