Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — is facing backlash online after he called on jewelers to help him craft a swastika chain.
“For all jewelers, I’m looking for swastika chain designs,” Ye wrote in a post on X on Thursday (Feb. 27). Attached to the message, the rapper included a video of a bedazzled swastika, and fans flooded his comments with plenty of criticism.
“Kanye will be remembered as one of the greatest artists who destroyed his own legacy,” one person commented on his message.
“Back on the bulls–t I see lmao,” another fan wrote, while someone else shared the same sentiment along with an image of Hitler that read “Hitler Returns.”
“Bro you gotta chill,” another fan pleaded with Ye, while another simply wrote, “Bro doesn’t know when to stop.”
It wasn’t just on X that people were criticizing his post.
“There is no excuse — none — for praising Hitler. Glorifying a genocidal dictator with swastika jewelry is not ‘edgy,’ ‘cool’ or ‘controversial,’” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Billboard in a statement. “When someone with Kanye’s influence spreads Nazi glorification, it emboldens extremists. It’s unacceptable and downright dangerous.”
On the Kanye subreddit, users also shared their outrage at his continued display of antisemitism, with one wondering, “Doesn’t he realise that if he was alive in the time of Hitler, he would have been going into the concentration camps as well? It wasn’t just Jews they had a problem with. As a black man, he no doubt wouldn’t be accepted in their vision of the master race.”
Billboard has reached out to Ye’s team for comment.
Despite the backlash, the rapper continued putting his antisemitism on display in several early morning X posts on Friday (Feb. 28). In one message, he ranted about how some rappers write music about how many people they’ve killed, but are “SCARED TO WEAR A SWASTIKA T SHIRT” because of potential backlash from the music industry. And in another post, he wrote, “It was always a dream of mine to walk around with a Swastika T on.”
The latest wave of backlash against the Vultures rapper comes after he previously backtracked on antisemitic comments made on X earlier in February. The rant saw Ye praising Adolf Hitler and offering a T-shirt featuring a swastika on his website, a move that led to his marketplace partner Shopify taking down the website) and ushering in condemnation from the ADL, Charlie Puth, Lyor Cohen and others.
Check out some of the fans’ reactions to his request for a swastika chain below: