The last time I wrote about Kanye West, it was about ten months ago, when he was in the middle of yet another crash-out. Remember when he had his eldest child, North West, in his home and he invited notorious trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate over at the same time? That was ten months ago. I have no idea if Kanye has been quiet since then or whether I’ve simply gotten very good at tuning him out. That’s what I was doing again yesterday when I saw that he was trending on social media – “oh, whatever, I’m sure it’s for nothing I need to know about.” Well, it looks like someone or something finally got through to Kanye regarding his bigotry, antisemitism and catch-all hate. He lost almost every part of his career several years ago and there really hasn’t been any coming back for him. So he might as well try this: taking out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, apologizing for his many pro-Nazi statements. Why.. the WSJ??
Kanye “Ye” West has placed a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal taking back a number of antisemitic statements he made on social media over the past several years and now attributing his hateful rants to a brain injury, while declaring, “I love Jewish people.”
Nearly a year ago, in February 2025, the rapper and fashion mogul was widely condemned after posting about his admiration for Adolf Hitler and declaring himself to be a Nazi. He walked that affiliation back in Monday’s ad.
“I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people. … I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state and am committed to accountability, treatment and meaningful change.”
West goes on, in the ad’s copy, to explain that the right frontal lobe of his brain was injured in a car accident, saying that “it wasn’t properly diagnosed until 2023,” when he was told he has bipolar disorder. West was in a car accident after leaving a recording studio in 2002, which left his jaw broken in three places. He has said that the accident inspired some of the songs on his Grammy-winning debut album, The College Dropout.
In the advertisement, West wrote: “I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment and meaningful change,” and added that the “medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type 1 diagnosis.” Because of the accident and his recovery, he claims, “I lost touch with reality” and “became detached from my true self.”
“Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem. I said and did things I deeply regret,” he wrote. “Some of the people I love the most, I treated them the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation and the exhaustion of trying to love someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self.”
In a “fractured state,” West wrote that he moved “toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika.” In many of the moments that he lashed out at people online, he says he “can’t remember,” but that it showed “poor judgment and reckless behavior that feels like an out-of-body experience.”
West also wrote about four months in 2025 when he experienced a “long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life,” adding that he contemplated suicide during this period. His wife, Bianca Censori, helped him by encouraging him to seek medical treatment.
I have no idea if anyone is in the mood to forgive Kanye or allow him to take the first steps towards any kind of professional comeback, but just in case, y’all should probably know that he’ll take all of this back in a few weeks/months. He’ll go off his meds or just decide one day that he actually didn’t mean any of this and he’ll make “Heil Hitler Part Two the Remix.” I’m just saying, we’ve been down this road before, where he’ll try to apologize, then take it all back and do something even stupider and more faux-provocative. What he actually believes, I have no idea. I do know that these were not isolated incidents over the course of one manic episode. He was making wildly antisemitic, bigoted and misogynistic remarks for years. People around him covered it up for a long time. Maybe it was a traumatic brain injury or maybe that’s the real Kanye. I really don’t care enough to stick around and find out.
Ye, fka Kanye West, takes out a full-page in the Wall Street Journal to apologize to the Black community, and for antisemitism:
“I lost touch with reality” pic.twitter.com/Po8s4gNz5P
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) January 26, 2026
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
