The tables seem to have turned for Kanye West fans. Following the 45-year-old’s appearance on right-wing talk show host Alex Jones’ “Infowars” on Thursday, where he continued to spew anti-Semitic rhetoric and deliberately gave praise to Adolf Hitler and Nazis, fans on the artist’s r/Kanye Reddit page, which has more than 700,000 subscribers, have decided to turn the subreddit into a Taylor Swift appreciation page.
Its spearheading post declared in its title: “This is now a Taylor Swift Subreddit. We had a good run fellas,” and has about 33,000 upvotes in agreement with the statement. Comments immediately rallied support for the singer, with some even confessing that their dislike of Swift throughout the pair’s long history of contention was misguided.
“I absolutely loathed [Swift] back in 2016/17 just because I took Ye’s side in their beef. Kinda regret it now that I like some of her music and it’s awfully clear that Kanye is a horrible person,” one comment remarked. Additional posts have become discussions about which Swift album West fans liked the best, while other comments remarked that Swift now “made ‘Graduation’” (a rather complicated reference to a longstanding retort by West’s fans about his problematic behavior, i.e. he got a pass “because he made ‘Graduation,’” his popular 2007 album).
West and Swift have been at odds since the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when West interrupted Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Video by a Female Artist to declare his support for Beyoncé. That incident was furthered in 2016 on the song “Famous” off the rapper’s “The Life of Pablo” album, when he declared: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that b—h famous.” Swift publicly denounced the lyric at the 2016 Grammy Awards and West and ex-wife Kim Kardashian later leaked a phone conversation with Swift where she seemingly gave approval to the lyric — the call was later revealed to be edited and Swift never signed off on West’s lines. Since then, the 32-year-old singer has refrained from engaging with the troubled rapper any further, though their respective fanbases have kept the feud alive.
Additionally, the Kanye subreddit has turned out several posts highlighting the severity and grim reality that the events of the Holocaust brought onto the Jewish community. This includes historical footage of heavy machinery being used to clean up piles of corpses in concentration camps, disheartening photos from the time period along with posts dedicated to victims of the tragedy, such as Anne Frank and her experiences that she recounted in a diary that was discovered after her death. These posts from fans essentially serve as a denouncement of West’s praise of Hitler in the “Infowars” interview and his denial of the Holocaust, further highlighting the artist’s loss of support as he continues to spread hatred toward the Jewish community.
After Thursday’s “Infowars” interview and a string of problematic tweets from West, including the posting of a Nazi-inspired logo, Twitter CEO Elon Musk suspended the artist’s account from the platform.
From Variety US