Kanye West and the Limits of Explanation

By Abe Greenwald

Kanye West (no, I’m not going to call him “Ye” or any other name he makes up for himself) took out a full-page ad in yesterday’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal to apologize for his most recent round of anti-Semitism. His relentless, global, multimedia Jew-hating campaign was the result, he says, of his bipolar disorder. West writes:

“In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it. One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments—many of which I still cannot recall—that led to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”

We’ve been here before. He apologized for his Jew-hatred back in 2023. And I’m sure he’ll apologize for it again. 

Many are inclined to respond that bipolar disorder—or mental illness, generally—doesn’t turn someone into a bigot. This is, unfortunately, not true. Mental illness can transform people into all kinds of unthinkable monsters. And there’s a fairly robust link between psychotic thought and anti-Semitism. Paranoid delusions frequently focus on the Jews.  

Whether or not West’s anti-Semitism springs from mental illness, I couldn’t tell you. But I will tell you this: I don’t care either way. At some point, it doesn’t matter how a person becomes your enemy. It doesn’t matter whether they arrived at their hatred for you and your people through a long and considered process of ideological evolution, or as the result of an unanswered grievance, or via childhood indoctrination, or even owing to a mental illness. And the point at which it ceases to matter is when they’re doing you harm. If a mentally ill person comes at you with a weapon, you’d respond to him as if he were an assailant, not a suffering patient. That is, you would react as you would to a healthy person seeking to do you harm. 

There’s a reason that transformation horror has salience in our culture. The genre raises a real-life dilemma: How to respond to a dangerous person whose mind and will have been taken over by an evil external force. When a character watches his friend turn into a zombie or a werewolf, the character struggles and cries—and then shoots the thing that is no longer his friend. Survival dictates that he must. Enemies are defined by their actions, not by root causes.   

Someone like Kanye West has been far too malignant an influence on the culture for far too long for me to care whether or not his Jew-hatred is the result of mental illness. In mainstreaming, popularizing, and even racially integrating Nazism, he’s done tremendous harm to the Jews and the United States. If it really is all because of his bipolar disorder, I suppose I can take a moment to lament that there might otherwise have been a decent, loving person inside the soul of Kanye West. But that doesn’t change his status as my enemy. Not this time, or the next. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY