Kanye West is again accused of anti-Semitism, this time by a former partner

A new BBC documentary, titled The Trouble with KanYe, which will air this Wednesday night, seems to be the final nail in the coffin that Ye West himself (Atlanta, 46), formerly known as Kanye West, has been months in the making. In it, his former partner and friend Alex Klein, a tech entrepreneur who collaborated with the rapper on his album Donda 2, accuses West of verbal abuse and, again, anti-Semitism. An anti-Semitism that already cost him his juicy contract with Adidas in October last year.

According to Alex Klein in the documentary, the businessman decided to end the collaboration with West after he entered a spiral of verbal and anti-Semitic violence that cost him his expulsion from social networks such as Twitter and Instagram and the cessation of his collaboration with the sports fashion firm despite the millionaire benefits he had reported. At the height of his messages, in December 2022 the rapper published a tweet with an image where a swastika and a Star of David appeared intertwined, shortly after stating in an interview on the Infowars program, hosted by American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, that he liked the figure of Adolf Hitler: "There are many things I like about Hitler. A lot of things," West said.

Kanye West's Rise and Fall: How the Century's Greatest Hip Hop Artist Has Become a Pariah Without a Future

As a result, Klein announced to the rapper his decision to move away from him. Then the businessman was immersed in a dispute of racist dyes: "Kanye was very angry," explains Klein in the documentary of the British public network; "He would say, 'I want to slap you' and 'You're exactly like other Jews,' almost enjoying and reveling in how offensive it could be, using these phrases in hopes of hurting me." Klein claims he asked West if he really thought there was a Jewish plot to stop him, to which the rapper replied, "Yes, yes, I do."

According to Klein, who worked with West between 2019 and 2022, his public anti-Semitic statements are a deliberate political strategy, of which the rapper himself is proud: "He thinks it's his destiny, a destiny chosen by God to become president [of the United States]. He used the anti-Semitic statements as part of a political strategy and told me he was trying to do what Trump did in a more intense way." When the documentary's host, investigative journalist Mobeen Azhar, asks the businessman if West's plan is to "outdo Trump," Klein replies, "Exactly, yes."

Kanye West and his partner, Australian Bianca Censori, through the streets of Los Angeles on May 13, 2023. Rachpoot (GC Images)

Award-winning journalist Mobeen Azhar, the documentary's host, also travels to Cornerstone Christian Church in California, which Ye West frequently visits. There, he meets a homeless man, who lives in the parking lot of the church, inside his own car, and who claims that the artist asked him to direct his presidential campaign for the 2024 election: "Everyone said I was the greatest religious scholar in the room and Kanye started looking for me to ask my opinion on every issue that came up. He called me the Monday before Thanksgiving, and the first thing he said was, 'I want you to be my campaign manager to run for president,'" says the man, who goes by the name Mark.

The journalist decided to visit the church after seeing a video of the rapper attending one of the masses, hoping to have contact with him, but unaware of the strong ties that united Ye with the place. It is the church's own pastor, who did not want to be filmed for the documentary, who says that West had bought part of the property and had "big plans." On that same site, streamer and political commentator Nick Fuentes, identified with the incel and white nationalist movement that participated in the Charlottesville marches, usually organizes political meetings.

It's hard to look back and determine the exact moment when the rapper's nosedive began, going from being one of the best-regarded hip hop artists of his generation to a pariah. A few years ago, West, who in 2019 admitted suffering from bipolar disorder, surprised the world by wearing a hat with the slogan Make America Great Againin support of Trump. Shortly after, he announced that he would run for president of the United States. In October 2022, during the Paris show of his Yeezy brand, Ye himself and some of the models of the parade wore a T-shirt with an image of Pope John Paul II on the front and, on the back, the phrase White Lives Matter, a slogan used by white supremacism in response to the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement. Some of the attendees, like Jaden Smith or fashion editor Lynette Nylander, left. In December 2022 he began tweeting anti-Semitic messages on social networks, which is why his profiles were blocked, and he began to lose his juicy advertising contracts. In April of this year, two former teachers of his private school, Donda Academy, sued the designer, the educational center and the management for racial discrimination and unfair dismissal and revealed numerous details of their controversial Christian school: "They wanted to suppress a lot of historical information," revealed one of the teachers of the center, "they did not want the students to know parts of the black or Asian history in our country. The Holocaust was also omitted from the school curriculum." Perhaps this new documentary will put an end to his story.