A couple of days after Kanye West was banned from Twitter, I decided to write an opinion piece about it. Not even a whole day after I finished writing, he doubled down on his new wild stances. West entered talks into buying conservative social media platform Parler. The app is notorious for housing the domestic terrorist attack at the Capitol on January 6. He has commented on George Floyd’s death, claiming that the cause of Floyd’s death was a fentanyl overdose rather than the cop suffocating the defenseless man.

Both of these moments have led to West receiving immense backlash from the public and his sources of income. Adidas, the shoe brand that he had multiple deals with, recently cut its ties with West. This resulted in him losing his status as a billionaire, so it’s safe to say there were consequences for his actions. Regardless, there will still be people that support him, including literal Nazis. An anti-semitic group in Los Angeles, California was seen hanging a banner that read “Kanye was right about the Jews,” according to Gizmodo.

We are at a point where supporting this man’s actions could end up aligning us with all sorts of the wrong crowd. It’s simply not worth trying to apply the mental gymnastics to bend West’s words into anything other than blatant antisemitism and toxic fame. It’s time to move on from Kanye West once and for all.

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed such a fall from grace. The writing was on the walls, but I don’t think anyone could’ve seen the sheer extremes that Kanye West, who goes by Ye, would go to. Surely there are some explanations for why he is the way he is, but it certainly doesn’t excuse the anti-semitic tirade that got him banned from Twitter the week of October 10.

For the uninitiated, West turned to Twitter to spout some sort of cryptic tweets after not posting on the platform for almost a year. A couple of days before this, he ran a fashion runway with his models in shirts that read “White Lives Matter.” He also was pictured wearing that same t-shirt with popular conservative Candace Owens, who is currently under fire for fighting against the Black Lives Matter movement. His friendship with Owens is one of the most bizarre and disturbing crossovers I’ve seen in the past year.

In the span of his music career, West has gone from the biggest rap star possibly of all time, to one of the most harmful contrarians of our popular culture. From his Donald Trump era to running for president unironically, he has become absolutely impossible to defend. As a former West fan, it’s disappointing but not surprising to see him go down this path.

As I said earlier, the writing was on the walls. The Make America Great Again hat that he rocked in every public appearance should’ve been enough for most to throw in the towel, but that wasn’t enough. He still somehow had one of the most hyped-up album releases of the year and topped every chart when he released Donda in 2021. His meeting with Trump also should have been enough for people to cast Kanye as irrelevant. So should his slavery comments.

The point is he has always been creating controversies, but never to this level of hatred. He specifically called out Jewish people, stating that he can’t be anti-semitic because, and I quote from his Twitter, “because black people are actually Jew.”

We’re really not losing a whole lot by West getting canceled for what feels like the eighteenth time, give or take a few. He created his best music at the start of his career, so it’s safe to say we won’t be getting anything of quality from him in that department. I just hope that this time we can leave him in the past.

Myles Arnott is an opinion writer. Contact him at [email protected].