All Sunday long, my phone was blowing up with people asking for a reaction to Kanye West’s supposedly anti-semitic tweet.
I know what it’s like. I have been falsely accused of being anti-Semitic — when I was working for Prager University named after a Jewish man Dennis Prager — so my first instinct was to go, “What did he actually say?”
I want to make this very clear. This is not a defense of Kanye West’s tweet. This is an open question, something that never seems to happen anymore.
So let’s read that tweet Kanye wrote which was subsequently removed by Twitter:
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I’m going death con three on Jewish people,” he tweeted. “The funny thing is, I actually can’t be anti-Semitic because black people are actually Jew. Also, you guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone who opposes your agenda.”
Now, if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was anti-Semitic. You did not think that he wrote this tweet because he hates or wants genocide for the Jewish people. This does not represent the beginning of the Holocaust.
If you’re an honest person, when you read this tweet, you really had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
I had no idea when I read that tweet what the hell he was talking about. This tweet inspired questions, not answers.
First and foremost, what is “death con three?” Did he mean DEFCON Three — which would be a military defense position, not an offense for those of you that are offended — a military defensive position?
Is he tweeting this because he’s reading the headlines calling him anti-Semitic because of his comments about former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his brother Joshua Kushner? Is it because’s he’s angry because he’s not free to talk about people in his life who happen to be Jewish without being accused of anti-semitism?
Is he saying, “I’m not going to shut up and I’m going to keep tweeting and I’m going to keep calling these people out, referring to his friends that he feels slighted by?”
If you are a liar, you’ll say, “You know I was scared, Candace. I actually thought that Kanye West was going to launch a military strike in Israel” — because that’s the reaction I received when my phone blew up the next day.
When I woke up and looked at my phone and looked at the headlines, the reaction was practically, “Kanye West had gotten together for a military strike and it was going to go forward in the morning time in Israel.”
That was the reaction that was met with this tweet.
Now, once again, I want to make this very clear. This is not a defense of his tweet. These are open questions.
It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset in the same way that you’re not allowed to say black anymore, in the same way, that you can’t talk about the struggles of black Americans or talk about the people in black America. Can we talk about Patrisse Cullors, the founder of Black Lives Matter, someone who is harnessing historical pain to line her own pockets? (My new documentary The Greatest Lie Ever Told goes into detail on the abuses of BLM.)
Are we allowed to have an open discussion about all this?
We need to stop this nonsense. We are smarter than this. Stop telling people to be emotional when they should demand answers from Kanye for what he said.
Stop calling people names. “You’re racist. You’re sexist. You’re misogynist.”
Stop it. Be smarter. Be better. And just ask Kanye to explain what he said.
And that’s all I have to say about that.