We Need to Talk About Kanye... or not.

He's so super cool...

I hate writing about this guy — but here goes anyway. 

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The Kanye Delusion: Why We Need to Stop Pretending

Kanye West once said something that actually made sense. In 2005, during a Hurricane Katrina telethon, he went off-script and told the country that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." It was raw, it was brave, and for a moment, it positioned him as a voice willing to say what others would not. That version of Kanye was compelling. The problem is that version is long gone, replaced by something far more troubling, and yet a significant portion of the culture still treats him like a prophet. He is not a prophet. He is a rapper who makes beats and has decided, somewhere along the way, that toxicity is a brand. The arc from that Katrina moment to where he stands now is not a fall from grace. It is a long, slow, well-documented choice.

The death of his mother, Donda West, in 2007 marked a visible turning point. Grief is real, and losing a parent is devastating. But grief does not last two goddamn decades, and grief does not explain antisemitism, nor the racism, it does not explain targeting children, and it does not explain a pattern of escalating cruelty dressed up as art. Plenty of people lose parents without dismantling their moral framework in public. The loss is not irrelevant, but it cannot be the alibi for everything that followed. At some point, the behavior is the behavior, and the person making the choices is the person responsible for them.

West has identified himself as bipolar, though it is worth noting this has largely been self-reported and has not been independently verified in any clinical public record. Bipolar disorder is a real and serious condition, and as someone who lives with Bipolar II — yeah, me (writer), the weight of that diagnosis is not lost here. But bipolar disorder does not make someone antisemitic. It does not make someone call Black children slurs. It does not generate a coherent ideology of hate. What it can do, when unmanaged, is amplify grandiosity and impulsivity. But the fuller clinical picture points toward something additional, what mental health professionals would describe as narcissistic traits, possibly narcissistic personality disorder. (To cover my you know what, I am stating this as an industrial organizational psychologist, not a clinician, so I am not diagnosing him whatsoever, to be clear.) The pattern is consistent: an inflated sense of unique genius, a complete inability to absorb accountability, rage when challenged, and the manipulation of victimhood to escape consequences. The man has more money than most small countries. If he wanted the best psychiatrist and the best treatment team in the world, he could have them by Tuesday. Claiming illness explains the behavior, while refusing meaningful help is not a tragedy. It is a choice.

Then there is the Christianity, ah yes, the Jesus. West launched Sunday Service in 2019, an elaborate weekly gospel-inflected event that he positioned as spiritual ministry. He recorded a gospel album. He spoke repeatedly and publicly about his relationship with God. He branded himself as a vessel. And then there is the other side of that ledger. West's current wife, Bianca Censori, was photographed in what appeared to be a sexual act in a boat in Venice, Italy, in 2023, an incident that was reported widely and that Italian authorities reportedly investigated. West, the man who runs Sunday Service, was present. West, the man who records gospel music, has described his own style as encompassing pornography, drugs, and sexual harassment. This is not a person wrestling with faith. This is a person using faith as another costume, another brand extension, worn and discarded depending on what the moment calls for. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is the whole show.

The Christianity circus connects directly to how he presents his relationships. West has been publicly linked to Amber Rose, Kim Kardashian, and now Bianca Censori. Amber Rose, who is of Cape Verdean and Scottish-Irish descent, is a mixed woman who West later publicly humiliated after their split, making degrading comments about her past and her body. Kim Kardashian, his ex-wife and the mother of his four children, is Armenian American, a woman whose family's cultural proximity to whiteness has been well discussed in popular culture. Censori, his current wife, is white and Australian, and has appeared almost exclusively as a visual object in his public world, rarely speaking and frequently displayed in states of near undress that read less like partnership and more like exhibition. This is not an argument against interracial relationships. Plenty of people, including this writer, are in them. But West has made Blackness central to his public identity for decades. He has used Black pain, Black culture, and Black rhetoric as currency. For the man preaching Black consciousness to have a personal life that consistently trends in one very specific direction, while publicly degrading the Black women adjacent to him and making statements about Black children, is a contradiction that deserves to be named. You do not get to perform Blackness as a shield and then deploy it selectively when it is convenient.

The antisemitism alone should have ended the conversation. Beginning in late 2022, West threatened to go "death con 3" on Jewish people, praised Hitler publicly, and pushed conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media and culture. He lost Adidas, Balenciaga, and his talent agency, shedding roughly 1.5 billion dollars in the process. He spent time with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has made a career out of Holocaust denial and open racism, and that was not that long ago. That is not a phase. That is a direction. In January 2026, he took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal apologizing, claiming he is not a Nazi or an antisemite. The Campaign Against Antisemitism and other groups were skeptical, and rightly so. The pattern has been consistent: say something horrific, face consequences, apologize, then escalate. The apology is part of the cycle, not evidence of change.

Then there is what he has said about Black people specifically, which receives far less attention than it deserves. He used a slur to describe Beyonce and Jay-Z's children in a social media rant, suggesting their kids were cognitively impaired. He has aligned himself with Black Hebrew Israelite rhetoric that frames mainstream Jewish people as imposters. He walked around in a KKK hood as an aesthetic choice and used a Magnum photographer's image of an actual Klan wedding, without authorization, for his album cover. He released a song reportedly titled "Heil Hitler." He called his album Cuck. Speaking personally, as a Black man married to a Jewish woman, the KKK hood and the swastikas are not abstract provocations. They are symbols with a body count behind them. There is nothing to intellectualize there. When a man who claims to love Black people puts on that hood, he is not being provocative. He is being precise about something, and that precision should be taken seriously.

Multiple lawsuits, all of which West's representatives have denied or moved to dismiss, allege a pattern of serious misconduct. Former assistant Lauren Pisciotta allegedly filed a second amended complaint in 2025 claiming she was sexually assaulted and orally raped while working for West between 2021 and 2023, and further alleged that he orchestrated stalking and swatting campaigns against her after she filed her initial suit. Model Jennifer An allegedly sued West in 2024, claiming he sexually assaulted and choked her during a 2010 music video shoot, with singer Elly Jackson of La Roux reportedly corroborating her account in court filings in 2026. Pisciotta's lawsuit also allegedly includes claims that West routinely used antisemitic slurs and demanded employees draw swastikas in the workplace. West's spokesperson has called these allegations fantasy fiction and has vowed to fight them in court. Everything here is alleged and unproven, but the volume and specificity of the claims are not nothing. Once again, all alleged. 

The alleged ties to Sean "Diddy" Combs add another layer. Singer-songwriter Niykee Heaton alleged in June 2024 that both West and Combs attempted to sexually assault her during a studio session when she was 19 years old, claiming the two men were intoxicated, pressured her to remove her clothing, and allegedly tore her shirt and attempted to remove her pants before she managed to escape. She also alleged she witnessed West assaulting Lauren Pisciotta that same night. Combs was later arrested in September 2024 amid mounting sexual abuse lawsuits. West has continued to publicly defend Combs. All of these are allegations, and West has not been charged. But consider this: Aubrey O'Day, who has been publicly vocal about her own alleged experiences with Combs and his conduct, was reportedly present at a West concert during this same period. O'Day has been among the more outspoken voices against the man West continues to defend. The irony of that overlap does not require much elaboration. But hey, what’s possible abuse matter when you need to party. 

And then there are the supporters who should know better. Chloe Bailey, an artist under Beyonce's label, called a recent West concert legendary and inspiring, drawing immediate backlash given that West publicly degraded Beyonce's children in a rant not long ago. Dave Chappelle, who has long performed as a culturally conscious voice, has maintained a friendship with West through much of this. Chappelle was on stage at a West concert while West was wearing a KKK hood. Friendship is real, but so is accountability. When you keep showing up for someone who keeps doing this, your presence is an endorsement. Being funny and being pro-Black are not the same credentials, and one does not cover for the other. The presence of white celebrities in those same spaces, people who absorb none of the cultural cost, rounds out a picture of a man whose audience has decided the spectacle is worth the cover charge.

Here is the bottom line, and it is personal. I do not care what celebrities think. I generally have no interest in what famous people do with their time. But I do care about hypocrisy, and I care about what symbols mean when they show up in the world. A man cannot run Sunday Service and allegedly receive oral sex in public in Italy and call both of those things consistent with Christian faith. A man cannot claim to love Black people while degrading Black children, putting on a KKK hood, hanging out with Nick Fuentes, and defending an alleged predator. A man cannot perform Blackness as an identity while his personal life consistently reflects something else entirely, and then expect that contradiction to go unexamined. Kanye West is a talented producer who built a real career. That is true, and it is not nothing. But genius is a word that gets applied to some artists with particular recklessness, as though prolific output places someone beyond critique. He is not beyond critique. He sits on the toilet like the rest of us. The people still calling the concerts legendary, still framing this as complicated, are not being nuanced. They are being complicit. The work stopped justifying the man a long time ago.

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Notes and Sources

1. West's 2005 Katrina telethon comments were broadcast live on NBC before being edited from later replays and are extensively documented in news archives.

2. Donda West died on November 10, 2007, following complications from cosmetic surgery. Her death has been cited repeatedly by West in interviews as a defining personal rupture.

3. West's bipolar disorder has been discussed publicly in interviews and promotional content but has not been confirmed through independent clinical documentation. References to narcissistic personality traits in this article reflect behavioral pattern observation and do not constitute a clinical diagnosis.

4. Sunday Service launched in January 2019 and continued through multiple events including a Coachella appearance. West's gospel album Jesus Is King was released in October 2019 and won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album.

5. West and Bianca Censori were photographed in Venice, Italy, in September 2023 in what appeared to be a sexual act on a water taxi. Italian authorities reportedly opened an investigation into potential public indecency. The incident was reported by multiple outlets including the Daily Mail and the New York Post.

6. Amber Rose is of Cape Verdean and Scottish-Irish heritage. Her relationship with West lasted from approximately 2008 to 2010. West made degrading public comments about her on The Breakfast Club in 2016, including remarks about her sexual history.

7. Kim Kardashian is of Armenian and Scottish-Dutch descent. She and West were married from 2014 to 2022 and share four children.

8. Bianca Censori is Australian and of Italian descent. She and West married in a reported private ceremony in January 2023. She has made few public statements.

9. West's antisemitic statements from 2022 onward, including the "death con 3" post and public praise of Hitler, are documented by the ADL, the BBC, the New York Times, and numerous other outlets. His business losses following those statements are estimated at approximately 1.5 billion dollars.

10. West's association with Nick Fuentes was reported in late 2022. The two appeared together publicly, and West brought Fuentes to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with then-former President Donald Trump.

11. West's use of the KKK wedding photograph for the Cuck album cover, and photographer Peter van Agtmael's statement that it was used without authorization, was reported by ARTnews in May 2025.

12. West reportedly released a track titled "Heil Hitler" in 2025. The UK government cited this and related conduct when blocking his entry to headline the Wireless Festival in 2026.

13. Lauren Pisciotta's allegations are contained in lawsuits filed and amended in 2024 and 2025. West's spokesperson called the claims "fantasy fiction." All allegations are unproven and actively contested.

14. Jennifer An's lawsuit was filed in November 2024. Elly Jackson's corroboration was reported in March 2026. West's legal team filed a motion to dismiss. All allegations are unproven.

15. Niykee Heaton made her allegations via Instagram Live in June 2024, stating she was not pursuing legal action. All allegations are unproven.

16. Sean "Diddy" Combs was arrested in September 2024 on charges including sex trafficking. His criminal proceedings were ongoing as of early 2026.

17. Aubrey O'Day has spoken publicly about her experiences with the Combs orbit in multiple interviews. Her presence at a West concert during this period was noted in entertainment reporting.

18. Chloe Bailey's comments calling a West concert "legendary" drew backlash reported by the Independent Bulletin and other outlets in April 2026.

19. West's rant targeting Beyonce and Jay-Z's children was posted on X and widely reported before deletion. The ADL has documented his use of Black Hebrew Israelite rhetoric.

20. West's January 2026 Wall Street Journal apology and the subsequent skeptical response from the Campaign Against Antisemitism are on public record.