During Sunday’s Super Bowl game, a relatively small number of people around the country were treated to a bizarre experience when Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, purchased an ad spot in some local markets. He used the few expensive seconds to direct viewers to his website in what appeared to be a self-filmed video. Viewers who did go to the website saw a single item for sale: a T-shirt with a swastika prominently featured on it.
It’s the kind of publicity stunt for which Ye has been known for decades now, the kind that usually generates massive media coverage and outrage. From calling George Bush a racist on live TV to interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs to running for president, he’s been there before. But this latest antic, damning as it was, disappeared into the night just as quietly as it came. I don’t think many people knew the ad even aired.
This latest antic, damning as it was, disappeared into the night just as quietly as it came.
On Tuesday, Ye’s website was offline. The website’s ecommerce platform Shopify provided a statement to NBC News, saying, “This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify.”The anticlimactic gimmick is a fitting note on how far Ye has fallen from his once elite ability to command the cultural conversation. More of Ye’s recent folly — a flurry of antisemitism, Nazi apologia and conspiracy theories posted to X last Friday — doesn’t seem to be making the waves it used to, either. (His account on X appears to be deactivated following his posts.)
This shows me that in 2025, Ye’s dwindling relevancy operates mostly as a sign of the times. In a second Trump presidency, where the powers of bigotry exist in a federal, influential capacity, it’s pretty easy to see Ye’s misdeeds for what they are: desperate grasps at attention. Unfortunately for him, our attention is rightly focused on more real, more pertinent threats.
For a few years now, Ye, perhaps driven by his well-documented hypercontrarianism, has publicly praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, as we saw reiterated in his X rants Friday, when he posted, among many other things, that he loves Hitler, that he’s a Nazi, and that Jewish people “use” Black people nefariously.
Some of Ye’s most ardent defenders — people who are bafflingly still along for the ride — will argue that he’s just “trolling,” but it almost doesn’t matter. Like a toddler who notices that the adults in the room are focused on another baby, Ye will attempt to ratchet up the shock value of his actions until the spotlight returns to him, if it ever will. But the high is just not as good as it used to be, and that’s partly because we’ve been reintroduced to forms of antisemitism and hate that have far more influence than Ye’s social media posts.
Several Trump administration officials are on the record parroting racist conspiracy theories like the “great replacement theory.” The vice president spread racist lies about a Haitian community in Ohio. Elon Musk has spoken at Germany’s far-right AfD party campaign events, and a key staffer in his Trump-approved DOGE operation was reported to have posted racist ideas on social media. The employee resigned after his online remarks were revealed, but Musk has said he would like to rehire him. In other words, when you consider reports of a rise in hateful rhetoric and bigotry in the past months, Ye’s bigoted stunts are inherently less urgent than those of the people who can actually affect our lives.
A few friends who, like me, were once early fans of Ye before the hateful rhetoric began, agreed that his recent cry for attention was more sad than anything. Ye praising Nazis, facetiously or not, because after a career of shocking people for the sake of shocking people, it’s one of the last things he can do to scrape at the bottom of the barrel of influence. I recall, for instance, when a 2018 Ye social media rant had my phone going off nonstop from the number of texts and notifications from friends and family, eager to pick apart his argument and discuss what it all meant. After his Friday rant: almost nothing. Near total silence. To be sure, his exploits are still shared by many people, and we shouldn’t ignore the signs of growing antisemitism in our own culture and government in the past year, but there is clearly a large contingent of people who are no longer affected by these antics.
Ye’s miscalculation was that those of us who do not wish to live with bigotry in our lives have already been trying to fend off more pressing versions of it, in the form of political movements and presidential administrations around the world.
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