At the start of the week the reputational rehabilitation of the disgraced rap singer Kanye West, now known as Ye (the Medieval English definitive article which West mispronounces as “yay”), hung in the balance. Between 2022 and 2025 the rap singer had repeatedly expressed sympathy for Nazism, releasing a single called Heil Hitler and advertising a stylish swastika T-shirt for sale at only $20 during an ad break in the 2025 Super Bowl, which at least represented quite good value for money for anyone whose choice of ideology was swayed by the cost of the appropriate clothing.
In May that year Yee, as I have chosen to spell Ye’s name, announced he was “done with antisemitism”, like it was a fashion choice of a particular style of beret or a dietary fad involving cabbage soup, and retitled the offending Heil Hitler song Hallelujah. Hallelujah is, quite brilliantly, a Hebrew word meaning “Praise the Lord”, so Yee’s sensitive new name for the song is a bit like retitling Agatha Christie’s now-unpublishable novel Ten Little N****** as Free Nelson Mandela.
Apparently Yee had been driven to supporting Nazism by the stress of a custody battle and his financial difficulties. I sympathise with Yee’s woes. A few years back I had a hefty bill for some unpaid congestion charges and, in a similar fit of fiscal rage, I briefly joined the Germanic neopagan organisation Allgermanische Heidnische Front and sought to blend Odinism and antisemitism through the use of ritual and chanting, before coming to my senses and paying the fines. I was done with Odinistic antisemitic neopaganism.
But Yee’s now disavowed Nazi fandom came back to haunt him, like Jacob Marley in jackboots or a goosestepping ghost, when it transpired that the Festival Republic promoter Melvin Benn had booked Yee to headline three nights of his Wireless pop festival. This annual event traumatises nesting birds in north London’s Finsbury Park, and disturbs the sleep of the massive Orthodox Jewish community that adjoins the park’s south-eastern perimeter. The fundamentalist liberal in me thinks by all means be a rapping ex-Nazi sympathiser with a nice line in budget swastika T-shirts, but maybe don’t be a rapping ex-Nazi sympathiser with a nice line in budget swastika T-shirts and perform right next door to loads and loads of Hasidic Jews. To every thing there is a season.
Yee’s new excuse for Nazism was that, when he supported Hitler and flogged swastika shirts, he had been in the throes of a three-year bipolar episode. This is plausible. During a bad bout of indigestion in 2023 I briefly tried to sell boiled eggs I had painted with the face of Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann to local homeless people that gather in my alley. I only made one sale. And that was to a woman who mistakenly thought the egg depicted Les Dawson’s old double-act partner Roy Barraclough, whom she had enjoyed in the role of the Machiavellian Rovers Return landlord Alec Gilroy in TV’s Coronation Street.
But what I don’t understand is, surely an artist as massive as Yee has some smart people working for him? Did no one in the chain of command between Yee thinking up the idea of making swastika T-shirts, and them being designed, manufactured, marketed, advertised and sold during the Super Bowl, think to ask him if he thought it was a good idea? Or were they only obeying orders? Perhaps that’s what happens when you surround yourself with sycophants. Donald Trump just seems to have started World War Three unquestioned, for no real obvious reason.
By Tuesday, I had already written a lot of the so-called “jokes” for this now outdated “funny” column, as you can plainly see. But then the Home Office denied Yee a British visa, and Melvin Benn had to cancel the whole Wireless festival, at a cost of £30m to the Finsbury Park area economy, where local traders shift more fruit-flavoured vapes in the Wireless weekend than they do in the whole rest of the year combined.
A few years back I had a bill for unpaid congestion charges and, in a fit of rage, briefly joined the Germanic neopagan organisation Allgermanische Heidnische Front
But there do seem to be a number of double standards involved. Musicians and comedians who criticise Israel’s role in the war in Gaza are routinely barred by festival promoters, but Yee’s unambiguous antisemitism seemed, initially, to have been overlooked by Festival Republic, which also promotes Suffolk’s family-friendly Latitude festival, and which is ultimately owned by Live Nation, on whose board sitswhose CEO, Richard Grenell, is now executive director at Trump’s vandalised and culturally bereft Kennedy Center. All news filth eventually flows toward Donald Trump, it seems, who now stands in a waterlogged field of cess.
In the end, Yee’s right to visit Britain was denied, but he was dealt with more harshly than our own homegrown media-friendly racists, who can hiss “Gas the Jews!” at their Jewish classmates, according to over three dozen witnesses, and dismiss it as “banter” without any evidence of them even being bipolar, and then carry on going on the BBC complaining how they are never on the BBC, despite having claimed to boycott the BBC. Bernard Manning! Bernard Manning!! Bernard Manning!!! Who decides what is unacceptable?
At the start of the week, a friend of a friend, who had never expressed any interest in racist books or racism generally, sent me evidence that he had received an unsolicited “push notification” by Amazon, Jeff Bezos’s Trump-bankrolling mail-order and mass-media conglomerate, suggesting he purchase a new book by Reform’s failed Gorton and Denton byelection candidate Doctor Matthew Goodwin. Goodwin’s Gorton and Denton Reform campaign manager, Adam Mitula, was finally suspended by Reform nearly two weeks after it had been revealed he was a Holocaust denialist who had said he “wouldn’t touch a Jewish woman.” I expect the Jewish woman in question was probably relieved, to be honest, but that doesn’t make the remark any less offensive.
Goodwin’s book is about the death of Britain as he knows it due to “Islam, immigration and identity”, and is called Suicide of a Nation. It’s reportedly so bad even the right-leaning culture-war megaphone the Critic couldn’t find a way to soft-soap it. And my teenagers tell me that, because the book was in part AI-generated, and appears to use AI-enhanced fabrication of non-existent quotes from non-existent sources, all the cool kids now call Matthew Goodwin MattGPT.
But should Amazon be aggressively pushing a shit book full of made-up shit, especially when some of the made-up shit, as Andy Twelves’s in-depth Nerve investigation revealed, pretends to be quotes from Cicero, Friedrich Hayek and Roger Scruton, all of whom are dead, and therefore won’t have been able to give permission for MattGPT to quote the things they didn’t even say anyway?
And is the title Suicide of a Nation a deliberate, or an unconscious, nudge-wink reference to DW Griffith’s 1915 Ku Klux Klan-endorsing epic silent classic, The Birth of a Nation, which, among other things, glorifies the lynching of a white actor in blackface? If it is, it’s fairly tasteless. But if instead MattGPT’s title is an accidental echo of Griffith’s racist blockbuster, which it may well be, then MattGPT’s editors and publishers, who should have spotted this, are about as much use as Yee’s fashion advisers when it comes to avoiding stepping on cultural landmines. Maybe the book was named for MattGPT by ChatGPT.
Not that MattGPT need worry about the book’s success in the short term, as it transpires he has been in receipt of up to £10,000 a month from a Hungarian private college, Mathias Corvinus Collegium, part-funded by Russian oil money, which has spent more than half a million pounds trying to promote right-leaning voices in the UK and is widely viewed as a propaganda outlet for the government of Viktor Orbán. The government which Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, desperately wants to remain in power so he can continue America’s clearly stated aim of wishing to undermine European liberal democracies to save us from being overwhelmed by Islam, even though he says he isn’t interfering in the election. But that’s another story.
Yee’s cartoonish, cack-handed racism is easier to understand and easier to deal with than the pernicious and respectable racism of MattGPT and his ilk, which comes cloaked in academic pedigree and TV-talk-show viability. I don’t know what the best way to deal with either is. But one thing is certain. If and when Melvin Benn’s Wireless festival gets on its feet in Finsbury Park again, it would be interesting to see how much opposition there would be from the mainstream media if he invited Matt Goodwin to learn some AI-generated raps and headline all three nights.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart will appear with the virtue-signalling Ivo Graham and Tadiwah Malunge in a benefit for Asylum Aid and Hackney Migrant Centre at London’s Earth venue on 19 April. He is talking to the director Mark Jenkin at a screening of his new film, Rose of Nevada, at Hackney Picture House on 26 April. And he is co-hosting a screening of the rockumentary King Rocker, with director Michael Cumming and star Robert Lloyd, as well as launching his new podcast, Joking Apart, at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival on 2 May.