Rapper Kanye West praised Adolf Hitler and said people should not criticize Nazis in an interview with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Thursday, sparking a fresh round of condemnations of the antisemitic rapper who recently dined with former US president Donald Trump.
“I see good things about Hitler,” West, who also goes by Ye, told Jones during the bizarre appearance on the Infowars Network, alongside Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. “Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
“I like Hitler,” he added later, and called himself a Nazi.
The interview with West, whose face was concealed under a black ski mask, also included antisemitic comments from Jones, who referred to a “Jewish mafia,” and Fuentes, an outspoken white supremacist who has been called West’s “campaign manager.”
Jones, a serial provocateur who has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for claiming one of America’s deadliest school shootings was a “hoax,” tried to push back against West’s praise for Hitler and Nazis, saying that “the Nazis were thugs and did really bad things.”
“They did good things too,” West said. “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
West also took aim at Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, set to retake power in Israeli in the coming weeks, claiming the politician was trying to take the rapper’s family away.
“We have to control the history books, we have to control the banks and we have to go and kill people,” West said while doing an impression of Netanyahu and holding a net meant to represent the former premier.