Rapper’s fashion brand Yeezy taken offline by Shopify, after he sold T-shirt with swastika design and praised Hitler

Kanye West has been sued and dropped by his talent agency after he posted a stream of antisemitic abuse, put T-shirts with a swastika on sale in his online shop, and was alleged to have described himself as Hitler to a Jewish employee.

Last week West, also known as Ye, wrote a barrage of antisemitic posts on X including, “I’m a Nazi … I love Hitler”.

The swastika T-shirt was placed for sale on the website of his fashion brand Yeezy, with the product line “HH-01”, assumed to be code for “Heil Hitler”.

Shopify, the company that provided the online platform for Yeezy, has now taken the store offline, stating: “All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform. This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms.”

  • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    As someone who’s out of the loop may I ask what the story is?

    What I’m getting is that he’s a wealthy has been who has some unmedicated mental health problems which manifest in these spectacular public brain farts.

    Is that all there is to it or is there some explanation for the antisemitism?

    • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      5 days ago

      That’s the whole story. Kanye has been off his meds for the better part of a decade now and that started, continued, and is still continuing to manifest as rampant antisemitism. You can’t interview him for more than three sentences anymore without him bringing up the Jews about something.

      Edit: Actually, I’m going to add on to this. I had a hunch and did a little research, and it seems I might be pretty on point. I remember Kanye first starting to seem kind of weird (well - weirder than expected from a rapper with more money than God) around the release of The Life of Pablo. The previous album, Yeezus, was pretty much a spot on killer, crisp, good album. TLoP was a mess in many ways, and at the time it was viewed as an interesting and out of the norm artistic endeavor and actually had pretty good reviews, but it’s universally regarded as messy, incomplete, and disjointed. Kanye stans will say that “the album is intended to sound unfinished” and that nobody else could have actually pulled that off except for Kanye because of his unique musical genius and status in the industry. And they could even be right. But that still means the album is choppy and strange and unfinished. And check this out:

      Ray Rahman of Entertainment Weekly noted the album’s frequent meditations on matters of faith, family, and West’s own role as a cultural figure while observing that “Pablo frequently (some might say abruptly) toggles between Sad Kanye and the bombastic and celebratory Kanye”.[64] McCormick described West as “constantly veering between swaggering bravado and insecurity bordering on paranoia, smashing the sacred against the profane and disrupting his own flowing grooves with interjections”.[54] He claimed the interjections sound as if “they are spilling over from another studio altogether”.[54] Referencing West’s lyrical performance, Sheffield wrote that he “knows he’s got some issues to work on”.[52] The Life of Pablo features “gloomy, doomy” discussions of trust issues, antidepressants, and familial problems on tracks such as “FML” and “Real Friends”.[64]

      Source: Wikipedia

      And after he released the album he still continued to tweak and change things on it and release new cuts and new entire songs on the already released, triple plat album. Again, at the time seen as brilliant, striking, and strange artistry, in hindsight maybe signs of instability.

      Somewhere between 2014, at the release of Yeezus, and 2016, at the release of TLoP, Kanye started losing his battle with whatever illness he struggles with. Since then he has slid down farther and farther with time. Kanye, once famously quoted saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” wholeheartedly endorsed Donald Trump in 2020. In 2024 Kanye West openly self identifies as a Nazi and sells swastika merch on a Super Bowl ad and invades an award ceremony he wasn’t invited to in order to force his wife to strip nude on camera.

      Kanye West died in 2015, R.I.P. to a real honest to God hip hop legend. Whatever is left piloting his corpse around is no longer who he once was. I mourn the artist we lost and I hope he can find help to recover himself, but I find that unlikely given his attitude.