Kanye West news – Biden says ‘silence is complicity’ as Elon Musk suspends rapper for posting swastika

Racist and antisemitic slurs, anti-gay comments and gender-based attacks have spiked on Twitter, according to new reporting from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

In the first full week under his ownership, there were more than 26,000 posts mentioning the n-word – triple the average in 2022, according to the report. There were also more 50,000 posts mentioning transphobic and homophobic slurs, up by 53 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively, than 2022 averages.

Within his first two weeks at the helm, from 31 October to 13 November, there were more than 204,000 tweets and retweets using the gender-based slur “c**t” – up 30 per cent from the 2022 average – and more than 831,000 posts mentioning “sl*t,” up 75 per cent from the 2022 average. Posts mentioning “wh*re” were also up by 60 per cent.

The platform also saw significant spikes in antisemitic slurs and racist abuse towards Hispanic and Latino people, the report found.

More from The Independent:

“It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Christian message Kanye West is spreading isn’t one of love, but of Christo-fascist dominance and control,” Noah Berlatsky writes for The Independent’s Voices.

24-year Nick Fuentes – an antisemitic white supremacist, Holocaust denier and former cheerleader for Donald Trump who rallied for the ex-president’s stolen election lies – has drawn mainstream attention after appearing at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West last month.

If the former president really never heard of the man with dark brown hair who showed at up his door for dinner, then he really should have, The Independent’s Andrew Buncombe writes:

The Twitter account for prominent neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, founder of the notorious website The Daily Stormer, has been reinstated. He was removed from the platform in 2013.

His return to Twitter comes just days after a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest, after he was accused of ignoring a $14m judgment against him for an antisemitic harassment campaign against a Montana family.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said Kanye West’s praise for Hitler and Nazis “is abhorrent and disgusting.”

“Whether it is anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, sexism or homophobia there are always those who want to divide us up,” he shared on Twitter. “Our job is to unite people around a progressive agenda that improves life for all.”

Just over a week after he hosted Kanye West and a pair of racist internet trolls for dinner at his Palm Beach, Florida country club, former president Donald Trump has not commented on his celebrity dinner guest’s praise for Hitler.

He has shared a flurry of posts on his Truth Social account, largely targeting his Democratic political opponents, but he has not mentioned West.

The rapper formerly known as Kanye West paid a settlement to a former employee who accused him of using antisemtic language in the workplace, including praising Hitler and Nazism, according to documents reviewed by NBC News.

In the settlement, Ye paid a former employee who allegedly witnessed several incidents, which Ye has denied.

The former employee spoke on the condition of anonymity after signing a nondisclosure agreement.

News of the settlement came roughly one month before Ye’s antisemitic tirade on Alex Jones’s InfoWars broadcast, during which he said “I like Hitler” and denied that the Holocaust happened.

The subreddit dedicated to the rapper formerly known as Kanye West has transformed into a tribute to Taylor Swift and as a page to raise awareness of the Holocaust.

Top current posts on the page discuss the Auschwitz concentration and death camps; Krystyna Chiger, who hid in the sewers of Lviv to avoid Nazi capture; or are just images of Taylor Swift.

“This is officially a holocaust awareness sub,” one post reads, accompanying charts from a study about public awareness of Nazi-led genocide.

Alex Jones has filed for personal bankruptcy protections on Friday, weeks after the conspiracy theorist and the company behind his InfoWars platform were ordered to pay roughly $1.5bn in damages for defaming the families of victims from the Sandy Hook school shooting massacre.

The chair and CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which recently hosted top Republicans including Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis at a major conference in Las Vegas last month, have condemned yesterday’s InfoWars show as a “horrific cesspool of dangerous, bigoted Jew hatred.

National Chairman (and former US Senator) Norm Coleman and CEO Matt Brooks said the broadcast with Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West reflected “a disgusting triumvirate of conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, and antisemites.”

“We vehemently condemn those comments and call on all political leaders to reject these messengers of hate and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong,” they said in a staement on Thursday.

“Given his praise of Hitler, it can’t be overstated that Kanye West is a vile, repellent bigot who has targeted the Jewish community with threats and Nazi-style defamation,” they added.”

“Conservatives who have mistakenly indulged Kanye West must make it clear that he is a pariah. Enough is enough.”