An episode of YouTube talk show The Shop featuring rapper Kanye West has been axed over the celebrity’s allegedly offensive comments, show runner Maverick Carter told Andscape website on Tuesday.
West “used The Shop to reiterate more hate speech and extremely dangerous stereotypes,” Carter said, adding that unlike Fox News – which merely edited out West’s more inflammatory remarks from a Tucker Carlson interview with the rapper that aired last week – The Shop had opted not to publish any of his remarks.
“While The Shop embraces thoughtful discourse and differing opinions, we have zero tolerance for hate speech of any kind and will never allow our channels to be used to promote hate,” Carter explained, apologizing to the show’s crew and the episode’s other guests, who included fellow rapper Jeezy and designer Salehe Bembury. “Hate speech should never have an audience,” he concluded.
West reportedly “doubled down on his recent antisemitic remarks” in the now-lost episode, according to inside sources cited by Andscape. The star was recently locked out of his Instagram account for a post he made implying fellow rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was acting on orders of “the Jewish people” after Combs reportedly told him to tone down the “White Lives Matter” messaging after he was seen wearing a shirt of his own design featuring the slogan in public. In a video posted to social media, Combs urged others not to buy or wear the shirts, which West unveiled in a surprise fashion show in Paris earlier this month.
Switching to Twitter after a two-year hiatus, West then declared he was “going death con three [sic] on the Jewish people,” reiterating that he could not be antisemitic because “black people are actually Jew [sic].” He was nevertheless locked out of that account as well, his tweet deleted.
West had previously used the word “Jew” to refer to black people during the Fox News interview in one of the segments that ended up on the cutting room floor, declaring that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had created the organization “to control the Jew population.” Other comments that did make it into the broadcast version of the interview, including his claim that former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner oversaw the Abraham Accords between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors “to make money,” were also called antisemitic by the American Jewish Committee.