Abandon all hope, Ye who enter here
How should we feel about a famous person going off the rails?
I thought I’d seen everything, but then I saw Kanye West going on the Alex Jones Show and Alex Jones trying to get him to tone it down a bit.
You win, 2022.
This tweet was apparently the last straw for Elon Musk, who suspended Kanye. Again. Meet the new Twitter, same as the old Twitter.1
The symbol actually originated not with neo-Nazis nor 4chan but the Realians, a free-love UFO cult, and tweeting the symbol of a science-fiction sex cult seems downright normal compared to everything else Kanye’s been up to lately.
While gawking at this trainwreck of a story, I’ve felt quite a wide range of emotions. Outrage and anger at Kanye’s blatant antisemitism; contempt for his shocking ignorance and stupidity; disgust with his enablers; hopelessness about the fact that we're still forced to argue that, yes, the Holocaust did indeed happen. And, yes, I’ve laughed quite a bit at the sheer absurdity of it all.
I also feel some sympathy (or maybe pity) for this deeply troubled man. Either he’s suffering from a serious mental breakdown, or he’s doing a darned good job of convincing us he’s going through a serious mental breakdown.
There’s no contradiction between being a despicable hatemonger and conspiracy theorist and suffering from serious mental health issues. If anything, there’s a correlation. It’s not usually the healthy, well-adjusted people who gravitate toward this stuff, but the outcasts and weirdos.2
I know a little something about being an outcast and a weirdo - ask anyone who’s ever gone to school with, worked with, or been married to me - and I’d love nothing more than to come across some secret knowledgeᵀᴹ that the rest of you normie squares are too brainwashed and cowed to understand, and if that comes with a group of like-minded acolytes who guide me on this journey, so much the better. They just get me, you understand?
People are drawn to conspiracy theories because it makes them feel accepted and smart and good about themselves. And as Yair Rosenberg has argued, antisemitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory. It’s not just a form of hatred, but an entire way of viewing the world, with secret puppet masters controlling the sheeple.
So, does this mean we should treat Kanye as a sick person and not a bad person? Eh, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The last time we all gawked at a public figure going through a mental breakdown like this was with Britney Spears in the late 2000s. When she was shaving her head and stuff, I pointed and laughed along with everyone else, and in retrospect I feel kind of bad for having done so.
To the best of my knowledge, though, even when Spears’ meltdown as at its worst she wasn’t denying the Holocaust nor palling around with rancid hatemongers nor going on Alex Jones’ show. The 9/11 Troof movement was the cool new thing back then, and I don’t recall Britney opining on whether fire could melt steel, unlike some network TV hosts.
Britney was harming herself. Kanye is harming the rest of us by spreading this poison. There are some similarities in what they’re going through and how we’re reacting to it, but he’s spreading a virus.
We can feel sorry for Kanye and hope he gets the supportive help he needs, and feel anger and dismay at what he’s doing. It’s not a zero-sum game.
Elon has been behaving like a jackass, to put it mildly, and yet I find myself pushing back on some of the criticism against him for his platform being such a cesspool. Twitter was a toxic stew of hatred, conspiracy theories and online mobs long before he took over, and many of his critics (coughTaylorLorenzcough) seemed pretty cool with that until a Ron DeSantis-supporting shitposter became the new owner.
And yet, he seems to be realizing, far too late, that serious content moderation is needed just to make the site usable for everyone who’s not a neo-Nazi. It’s not a free-speech issue as much as a business decision.
As we’ve seen since 2015, “normal” people might go along with this stuff for cynical political reasons, but that’s another post.
RE: How should we feel about a famous person going off the rails?
Question: Are we *required* to feel anything about it? And do we genuinely care? Or is all this qualification to the criticism of West coming from every quarter nothing more than virtue signaling? Can't pick on the guy too much, you know, because he has mental issues, and that just wouldn't be right. Which, if that were the cause, would be correct, I suppose. But this guy was an asshole back when he wasn't seen as having significant mental issues, back when he was 'on his meds' and supposedly behaving rationally.
So, how about this...how about we drop West as a subject of such keen interest and let him go about his ugly business? If the hate junkies don't get their needed fix from him, they'll get it from someone, somewhere. There are plenty of dealers and pushers out there of all kinds, West being just one of them. That he is a celebrity is of no consequence beyond his visibility to an audience beyond the hate junkies. And I think we all know that there are plenty of his ilk to be had at less conspicuous levels of society, and those should perhaps be of more concern to us.
Is West going to drive up the numbers of antisemites in the world with his hateful, unhinged rhetoric? I doubt it. The hate junkies don't care the name of their dealer, and they'll find one no matter what. We already know enough about this guy and his words and deeds without giving him and his 'story' more oxygen than they merit.
The question for me about the latest West 'incident' is not what he said, but where and to whom he said it: How the hell is it, all things of late considered, that Alex Jones and Info Wars are still on the air?