David Letterman Covered Up Kanye's Bigotry

And why it matters

A note to my subscribers and followers: As Twitter begins to crumble and as I look for more creative ways to put out my writing, I will begin using this newsletter as space for my writing around antisemitism & extremism, as well as continuing my essay writing.

As I have taken to Twitter and in my writing to speak out about the rise of overt antisemitism on the right, I have been blessed to connect with more and more people on the front lines of this battle.

One very brave one emailed me recently to tell me about an experience he had at a taping of David Letterman’s new show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. It was January 14th, 2019, only a few months after the Tree of Life shooting.

As he told me, “We went as audience members hoping to see an insightful conversation about the arts and culture. We were ecstatic when we found out we were sitting front row center. The premise of the show is that the audience doesn’t know who the guest will be until the very moment they walk out on stage.”

It turned out that this audience member was there for the Kanye West episode. And for 90 minutes, Kanye spread misogyny, antisemitism, and racism. Although they were more coded, he shared the same ideas that cost him his Adidas contract and that got him blocked from using Twitter and Instagram.

Throughout the interview, according to the witness, “Kanye exposed the audience to white supremacist propaganda, blatant sexism, antisemitism, anti-MeToo movement, and anti-Black hate.”

He added, “During this particular day and taping, his target was the #MeToo movement and he was determined to convince the audience that it was a scam and a conspiracy.”

Kanye has long held these views and shared them publicly, especially as he has become close with accused rapist Marilyn Manson.

But the difference here was that the most vile parts of the interview were cut, with the goal being to make it acceptable enough for the audience and for Letterman to air it. According to the witness, Kanye spent the vast majority of the time talking about MeToo, not just the short part that was aired. He said Rihanna “must’ve done something to deserve” Chris Brown’s assaulting her. He claimed there was a conspiracy to get him “MeToo-ed.” He defended R. Kelley.

He also used blatant antisemitic tropes: “He kept referring to this larger group of people controlling our minds through media. The thread of that was throughout the entire interview.”

All of the above was cut.

The most harmful part of this, and this should be the focus, is that David Letterman did nothing, and that most of it didn’t air.

“It was a harmful experience. Dave should have spoken up many times over the interview. He abdicated that responsibility.

I directly confronted Kanye West from the front row twice during the taping calling on him to be accountable for his words. He lashed out at me verbally from the stage…”

Other audience members called him out as well. It didn’t matter: Letterman did nothing.

And later, when the show aired, it was massively edited, with the audience interactions removed, the antisemitism gone, the white supremacist talking points largely erased. Instead, it fit more neatly into the ongoing vanilla narrative of Kanye being “critical” of the MeToo movement and supportive of Trump.

According to the audience member: “These rambling moments left Letterman rattled and then he would try to change the subject and have it lead to the next question. The parts that were left in were the portions where Letterman either responded to or tried to feebly challenge. “

Letterman’s team had a chance to confront Kanye’s antisemitism, racism, and pro-abuse views head on. Instead, not only did he refuse to confront Kanye strongly in the interview itself, his team went out of their way to remove it to make it more palatable to the audience.

This is now coming out a day after a former business associate of Kanye’s revealed that he had long been fascinated by Adolf Hitler. These two stories reveal something critical: in order to continue to profit off of Kanye, the people near him, the media, and his business partners all went out of their way to hide his most despicable views.

And that all reveals a far larger problem in America as dog whistles become foghorns and as the naked bigotry of those with massive audiences has led to massive witch hunts against trans people and no-longer-hidden antisemitism.

This was not Fox News. It was not Tucker Carlson. It was a major mainstream interview, and it was aired on Netflix. There are multiple layers of culpability here, and it is impossible to imagine that it is an isolated incident.

Here’s the simple reality: if someone makes others money, it is likely that their hate will be covered up or sanitized. We have known for years that Kanye had despicable views, but it turns out that Tucker Carlson was not the only one who knew how to make sure to keep his hateful views while removing the stuff that would lose them money.

This leaves us with a systemic issue, similar to what the MeToo movement exposed. Those in power, and those with the ability to help others’ careers continue to get away with untold hate and worse.

Even more sickening and disheartening: this can only last so long. As Kanye has revealed, eventually this hatred will start to become more overt. You cannot sanitize someone’s hate without it leaking out, hurting people along the way. Even what Letterman did air shows what they felt was acceptable: attacking women who come forward against abuse and the overt support of a fascist.

If you are wondering how we got to an America where fascism is rising, antisemitism is spreading, women’s rights are being stripped away, and white Christian nationalism is supported by a large part of our population, it has a lot to do with the way the media has found ways to include the most acceptable parts of these views while masking the rest. Systemic dog whistling, in other words.

If you come away from this story only with another Kanye scandal, then you are missing the big picture. That’s why I published the story here, and it’s why the eyewitness came to me instead of to other places: we as Jews insist that the world see these stories for what they are instead of taking the micro-stories and turning them into scandals. The real scandal is the system. The real scandal is profit being prioritized over ethics and morality. The real scandal is that Kanye is the only one being focused on when the culpability goes much wider.

If you are reading this, I hope you will come away from this with that realization. Don’t let this be only about Kanye.