They don’t understand the things I say on Twitter. Nigga heil Hi-
I stop myself yet again.
Charles, you are in a farm shop! This is deeply unbecoming of a respectable member of the local community! You’re in Southwest England, not South Central LA!
I check my surroundings. I don’t think the nice lady behind the counter—the one who reserves my weekend papers for me and rushes to tell me when the butcher has delivered a fresh batch of homemade faggots—heard me.
Disaster averted.
It doesn’t help that Kanye West’s new song is really catchy. Like, really really catchy. I only had to hear it for the first time and it was stuck in my head like one of RFK Jr’s brainworms, burrowing through the pleasure centers and automatic behavior circuits of my gray matter, making me sing the chorus at the most inopportune moments like when I bumped into the postman or while I was waiting on hold to talk to an Indian about my mobile-phone bill.
Nigga heil Hitler!
My cool New York friends keep telling me the song is a cutting-edge piece of transgressive art, the kind of thing that’s been missing from pop music—or any form of popular culture—for so long. Kanye West is literally the only person who is pushing the envelope in 2025. Nobody else is doing what the great geniuses of modern art have always done—from Duchamp to David Bowie—which is to kick against the pricks and smash sacred idols and trample the two-faced pieties of bourgeois life. And that makes Kanye West a genius, they add.
The shock of the new, and all that.
Maybe. Maybe they’re right. And maybe it’s got something to do with the fact Kanye has what’s often referred to as “f*ck-you money,” generally estimated in the billions, and also because he has nothing to lose either. The man has already been disgraced, lost his wife, lost his kids, lost his trainer endorsements and his record deals—and now there’s nothing stopping him from saying what he really wants to say, like “Heil Hitler” and also how he’s a cuckold and addicted to nitrous oxide and he still can’t see his children.
To my more sceptical, provincial peasant’s eye, untutored—some might say uncorrupted—by the metropolitan’s taste for the endlessly novel and the frivolous, the whole thing looks much more like a desperate cry for help, an exasperated plea with a world that can’t understand Kanye West and can’t give him what he wants, which is, among other things, to see his children. (Pro tip for fathers involved in custody disputes: a public declaration of support for Adolf Hitler is unlikely to aid your cause.)
To my (simple) mind, the whole thing is of a piece with Mr West’s first presidential campaign. Recall the unseemly spectacle as the Chicago-born rapper, at his launch event, burst into tears on stage and recalled how his mother came close to aborting him before he was born. It’s a potent mix of self-aggrandisement and self-pitying that only the most pampered and privileged, who have become so totally unmoored from the reality of their situation, can display.
The “heil Hitler” bit is incidental. It’s a guarantee of attention at best, the verbal equivalent of defecating on the floor in a crowded room.
And sure, there is something transgressive in that. Taking a dump at a social event will never not be unwelcome and a violation of established norms. Shouting “heil Hitler” is probably the same.
Or is it?
Since October 7th and Israel’s enormous tubthumping response to the Hamas attacks, we’ve seen a display of sentiments of a kind and on a scale that would have been unthinkable at any time since the Second World War, anywhere in the West.
Kanye West’s own anger at Jewish people is limited and personal, though. It appears to derive mostly from his experiences in the music industry, and from the fact that his ex-wife Kim Kardashian went on to date a notoriously well-endowed Jewish man by the name of Pete Davidson. One also detects a certain infiltration of Hotep-type views into West’s bricolage of bigotry. Hoteps are those strange people who say black people used to have angel wings, black people built the pyramids (WITH THEIR MINDS!) and melanin is being used by white people to make superconductors and advanced tech, which is why so many black people are killed by police officers (THEY’RE HARVESTING THE MELANIN!). Many of these profoundly confused race-wizards aren’t so much anti-Jewish as anti-white. They think that Jewish people are just a variant of white people. Super white people. The final boss of white people—but white people all the same.
One of the main wellsprings of the broader outpouring of anti-Jewish feeling is demographic change in the West, and that demographic change also touches the Kanye West saga. Look at his two strongest soldiers right now: one is a Mexican test-tube baby, and the other a Filipino influencer whose face would be right at home in a Victorian book on the dangers of miscegenation.
A real cloaca gentium, as Madison Grant would have said.
If you want a proper example of present-day transgression, transgression happening right now, I’d point you to the whole Shiloh Hendrix thing instead. There’s something far more transgressive of established norms going on there.
A quick recap: Shiloh Hendrix is the young mother who was filmed calling a Somali pedo the N-word on camera when he was harassing her at a park. What makes her case so transgressive is that, instead of being cancelled and destroyed, Hendrix has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via GiveSendGo, and in the process stirred a nascent sense of inter-white solidarity.
Until it actually happened, this was unthinkable. But now, it seems, the barriers to fellow-feeling among white people—the kind of mutual support you see in every case of a black person being accused of a crime where a white person is the victim, like the dismal killing of Austin Metcalf by Karmelo Anthony —have started to disappear, as if by magic.
Of course, there’s still been a debate about the ethics of ever uttering the N-word and whether a single mother with tattoos and a foul mouth deserves to be lionised, and it’s still the same boring-ass conservatards telling us we must maintain decorum and never utter those terrible two syllables that will bring down ruin upon us as surely as reading aloud from the Book of the Dead. But now, it seems, many white people are prepared to say eminently sensible things like, “If a mother is protecting her child from a strange man, she can be forgiven saying a mean word. Mothers shouldn’t be harassed in parks by strange men—especially not strange foreign men who, it turns out, are pedos.” Many white people are also prepared to say Shiloh Hendrix isn’t anything like Karmelo Anthony either. Saying a word blacks repeat endlessly and stabbing someone in the heart are not the same thing. No way. Not any more.
Given the absurd excesses of identity politics; the relentless Radio Rwanda-levels of anti-white propaganda from government, education and the media; and the cold, hard facts of rapid demographic change, it was obvious that, sooner or later, a sense of ethnic identity among whites, long disavowed, would start to coalesce. Where that will lead, who knows, but it seems pretty important to me. Much more than a shitty song I just can’t stop singing.