According to a new report from Rolling Stone, Kanye West’s usage of pro-Hitler language isn’t new.
On Thursday (Dec. 14), the outlet revealed that Ye’s obsession with Nazi culture dates back to his College Dropout era, with two unnamed sources stating he took direct inspiration from Hitler’s methods of mass control.
The sources disclosed the information as a “well-known but well-kept secret within the rapper’s inner circle.”
“It’s not a stretch to now compare Kanye’s ‘by any means necessary’ methods and tactics with Adolf Hitler’s,” an ex-longtime collaborator said. “To know that a Hitler/[Joseph] Goebbels playbook has been a central inspiration to Kanye’s own media playbook helps bring a great deal of clarity to the exact types of moves he’s been making over his career.”
During the College Dropout sessions in 2002, the Donda 2 artist reportedly discussed Hitler’s reign over Germany with many collaborators working on the project. In addition, West would frequently and seemingly randomly quiz others on Nazis and the Holocaust. A source claimed that the controversial entertainer would question people around the studio and executives until he received a “satisfied” answer.
“It sometimes became heated depending on the person,” the unnamed collaborator source revealed. “[West’s] pattern of speaking on this in the studio [or] workplace was reasonably consistent. If he felt you were trustworthy, there was a reasonably high likelihood that he would attempt to engage with you and evangelize his beliefs about Hitler and the Nazis to you.”
Later in the report, a third source recalls a moment in 2014 when the fashion designer struck up an intense conversation regarding Germany’s former authoritarian leader and stated that there was some “good” that Hitler had done. The ex-collaborator then explained that they felt Hitler was where the artist got his blueprint for upward mobility in his music career.
“I feel like he used those techniques to get to where he is, to be honest,” detailed the music industry source from 2003. “He was just so fascinated by [Hitler] — someone that can have complete control over people and how he did it. I think it was maybe the understanding of who Hitler was and how he created his army. I think [West] started to almost correlate how he could manipulate things to be, not the same level, but how he could try to get people to be his’ army.'”
“No one should be writing off his behavior as merely “Kanye being Kanye,” the unnamed source continues. “This is a person who purposely deployed nuanced manipulation and propaganda inspired by Nazi and fascist playbooks as a means of galvanizing himself for the purposes of accumulating power and influence and then attempted to convert that — with complete seriousness — into a run for the U.S. presidency.”
One of Ye’s former business associates chimed in, claiming that it was “reckless” for West to have a large platform with anti-semitic leaders as his source of inspiration.
“Between his fame, social media, and traditional media, he has a very big microphone,” the former business associate adds. “It’s reckless and dangerous because in some ways he’s legitimizing the fact that there was some justification. If you give a maniac a big audience — like Hitler — bad things happen. There are people listening who are buying into it because Kanye said it and what he’s saying is garbage.”