The last time I wrote about Kanye West was really the last time I ever felt the need to write about him. His exit from a fortnight of suggesting that he might jump into the presidential race in July 2020 was a good occasion to close the books on Ye. While trying to be gracious about his clearly whimsical and naive intrusion into the very strange election cycle, I was not unhappy to focus on more serious matters.

To quote Al Pacino from A Godfather Film Whose Existence Shall Otherwise Never Be Acknowledged … just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

To be fair, though, other writers here have covered Ye’s politicking before and since, although hardly at all of late. Most recently my friend Beege covered the media freak-out over Ye’s “White Lives Matter” shirt in her post “Ye, God, and little racists” last week. Beege did a good job of focusing mainly on the coverage, noting that Ye often talked in circular terms but felt he made a good argument on this particular issue. Others on the Right did the same, while some others went further to embrace Ye as a comrade in conservative arms for his tweaking of the Left, and pushed back against accusations of bigotry over this message.

That is, until Ye started publishing some other messages that are far less appealing, such as an anti-Semitic rant on Twitter:

Twitter locked rapper Kanye West’s Twitter account over an antisemitic tweet posted on the account on Saturday.

In the since-removed tweet, West said he was “going death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE,” and also that, “You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda,” without specifying what group he was addressing, according to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine records pulled by CNN.

A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed to CNN that the account was locked for violating Twitter’s policies. The tweet has been replaced on the account by a message from the company saying, “This tweet violated the Twitter Rules.”

Good Lord.

After that, the people who had been defending Ye against charges of bigotry didn’t seem so enthusiastic, understandably enough. MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones took the opportunity yesterday afternoon to say I told you so, brought a few receipts, and mentioned a second anti-Semitic posting on Instagram that also got tubed:

Last week, I denounced Kanye West, who formally changed his name to Ye last year, as a peddler of racism and hate after he chose to don a shirt bearing the phrase “White Lives Matter.”

This wasn’t an impulsive response. In fact, I provided a list of behaviors to demonstrate his history of anti-Blackness, which can very often denote more widespread bigotry. …

And what do you know? Within 24 hours of their breathless tantrum, Ye himself proved me right. On Friday, he posted screenshots to Instagram of an alleged text exchange with media mogul Diddy, who is also Black. According to the screenshot, Ye suggested Diddy was being controlled by “Jews” in the media. Instagram deleted the post for violating its guidelines.

Amid backlash, Ye leaned in on the antisemitism with a Twitter post using violent rhetoric to overtly target Jewish people.

Well … yup. Jones then notes that Fox actually addressed the issue, but tried to defend Ye’s earlier arguments while castigating the social-media posts. Mediaite also picked that up, and The Recount notes that Maria Bartiromo did the same. Jones argues that the “White Lives Matter” campaign and the anti-Semitism can’t be separated and that it is all part of Ye’s bigotry; others may disagree. I’ll leave that as a YMMV point for now, along with the status of Ye’s soul and heart. (My inclination is that Jones has the upper hand here.)

The real question is this: why did conservatives gravitate to Ye as a political ally in the first place at this point? At the very least, he has admittedly suffered from mental-health issues, which play out very publicly already. His public record in politics is similarly unreliable; I still recall Ye declaring during Hurricane Katrina that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” for instance. Other than Ye’s celebrity cachet, what exactly was the draw into rushing to push him to the front of the movement and then defending him from charges of bigotry on not much evidence at all?

We’ve remarked before on the cultural inferiority complex from which the conservative movement and right-leaning voters suffer. Most celebrities from the entertainment and sports industries are center-left to progressive, which means we don’t get nearly the same kind of coverage for our values and positions. When any celebrity, especially an A-lister like Ye, suddenly offers any small hint of validation and coverage, they end up getting tons of promotion without any sort of thought as to what else they might say or believe, or even whether their statements are principled or just a trolling effort against one side or the other. When we do that, we find ourselves burned in the end, more often than not.

That’s not to say there aren’t real and committed conservatives in either the entertainment or sports industries, or among celebrities, and that we should shun them. I am not a believer in “shut up and sing” at all. Anyone who wants to engage in political debate is qualified by participation alone, a point the Left often forgets when sneering about education status or former careers.  They did that to Ronald Reagan, for instance, an actor and celebrity but also a wise man who did a lot of hard work to establish a foundation for his conservative activism and political career.

It does mean, though, that we should make sure that (a) a sudden seeming convert to the Right is what they seem, (b) carefully consider prior actions as part of the evaluation, and (c) confirm that said celebrity can clearly argue from first principles rather than just push out talking points before rushing to promote him or her as a Hero of the Right. We have more allies than we know that can pass such scrutiny, even in the entertainment/sports celebrity industries, but episodes like this make it more difficult for them, and more difficult for everyone.

I’m all for fighting, but let’s get the right fighters in place and fight smart.

And with that lesson learned, maybe we can get back to not writing about Ye. Again.