Amid the Eagles’ 40-22 drubbing of the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX, Kanye West ripped off another disturbingly heartfelt and grotesque display of vitriolic Jew hatred — a frequent pastime of Mr. West. Tropes from fringe lunatics on the extremes of American political and social discourse have always existed; the social media megaphone is new.
Kanye West can easily be dismissed as a fringe character who parades his wife around nude at the Grammys and spends his days ingesting ayahuasca. This framing is challenged when the fringe character can freely reach 30+ million people on Twitter and 20+ million on Instagram.
Ultimately, the impact of West’s rhetoric is nebulous. It exists in the ether, eroding society’s social fabric and expanding the Overton Window of acceptability.
Scott Galloway, a famous entrepreneur and podcaster, frequently recommends that listeners seek counsel from those around them because … “it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.” Galloway’s message is that true situational and self-awareness is really challenging. Contextually, the gradual deterioration around us, the slowly expanding breadth of the acceptability spectrum, is hard to identify in the moment. Post facto, with hindsight and when identifying moments for the historical record, the breakdown of the social fabric is obvious and glaring.
On Monday morning, I peeled myself out of bed in the post-Super Bowl Monday fog. As is routine, I hopped on the New Jersey Transit bus to Port Authority Bus Terminal. I walked hastily through the terminal, exiting at a busy 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. Ahead of me, covering half the sidewalk on the northeast corner of the intersection, is green wooden paneling that wraps a construction zone — a familiar site to Manhattan commuters. Walking past the side, listening to a podcast, I see a worker with green spray paint covering some red graffiti. Looking over, my heart sinks a bit … “ […] IS JEWISH HITLER. HIS LAWYERS ARE TERRORISTS.” I do not know who this overnight graffiti “artist” was vilifying — I am confident, this is yet another sign that our society, our comfort zone, is gradually, noticeably, deteriorating.
Kanye West is a laughingstock — we point and laugh at his tweets. He is a dismissible clown. His words are justifiably shrugged off because we feel sufficiently safe, respected and comfortable. We are not in 1930s Berlin, Warsaw or Lodz. We are not in 1948 Aleppo, Baghdad or Alexandria. Broadly, I agree with these sentiments. We live in the longest lasting, most well- developed and freest democracy in the history of the world — this is something to appreciate.
All that said, the elixir of American freedom becomes tainted as the safety of our freedoms gets chiseled away by the tropes screamed into social media megaphones. Antisemitic graffiti does not happen in a vacuum and is not washed away with a new coat of paint. Awareness, a guarded stance, is demonstrably necessary — it likely always was, beneath the surface. Sensible reactions can range from a simple awareness to picking up everything and moving home to Home. To start, everyone needs to be aware.
