My longstanding view of Kanye West was that he was a highly talented guy who was mentally unstable in ways that were not really separable from his musical gifts or from the simple cussedness that led him to break with Hollywood groupthink. You could appreciate aspects of his presence in the public square, but it was unwise to get too close to a man with no real mental or emotional guardrails. Thus, when he came out with a weird late-night antisemitic outburst on Twitter in October, I did not defend him, but I argued that this was more characteristic of Kanye’s erratic and often irrational behavior than with any public track record of anti-Semitic bigotry. Thus, it shouldn’t greatly change our assessment of the man’s character: He is what he is, just keep your distance. The fools on the right were people such as Tucker Carlson and whoever runs the House Judiciary Committee Republicans’ Twitter account, who were trying to embrace Kanye as a legitimate spokesman rather than just letting him keep doing his thing in the world like any other half-cocked celebrity, only moreso …

In this case, however, Kanye has kept on digging for the past month rather than offer any sort of acknowledgment that he had said anything wrong. I can’t blame his corporate sponsors for deciding, once he continued down this path, that he had made himself too hot to handle. At a certain point, it became the only proper course for them to take. We should, after all, have taboos against antisemitism, and while those taboos should not be enforced with a spirit of brainless “zero tolerance” stripped of all human capacity for judgment and perspective, we have seen all too often throughout history what happens when those taboos are simply permitted to collapse.

That brings us to this week’s outrage …