Kanye West would like to re-enter the national conversation, yet again. This time, with a more lengthy, detailed, full-page apology for his racist and antisemitic outbursts last year.
West took out an ad in The Wall Street Journal in a supposed effort to reach “the Black community,” to whom he would like to apologize for “letting you down.” He wrote in the ad, “I love us,” as he explained his months-long “manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior” was a byproduct of head trauma he suffered from his 2002 car crash.
“One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 is the disconnected moments—many of which I still cannot recall—that lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience,” West also wrote in the apology ad.
West was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2023. He wrote on Sunday that an undiagnosed frontal-lobe injury from the crash contributed to his mental health struggle. “The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed,” after the crash, he wrote. The “possibility of a frontal-lobe injury was never raised.”
“I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change,” he continued. “It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”
West also told Post readers that he found an answer to his behavior on Reddit. “I read their stories and realized that I was not alone,” he wrote.
“The scariest thing about this disorder is how persuasive it is when it tells you: You don’t need help. It makes you blind, but convinced you have insight. You feel powerful, certain, and unstoppable,” he explained. “You don’t think you’re sick,” so you believe that “everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you’re seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you’re losing your grip entirely.”
During his “episode,” West fully embraced Nazism and racism with his social media channels, writing, “I love Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi.” He took his antisemitic views much, much further by selling swastika t-shirts on his website. West wrote in the ad that his “fractured state” caused him to “gravitate toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika.” A few months later, he released the song, “Heil Hitler,” which was embraced by and emboldened hate groups.
West’s embrace of Hitler and Nazi Germany pre-dates his extended meltdown last year by decades. Several sources told Rolling Stone in 2022 that West has pushed pro-Nazi views on his music industry collaborators since he first hit the music scene in the early 2000s.
West wrote that the rhetoric is behind him now, however: “I’m not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home.”
The rapper similarly apologized for the same behaviors in December 2023, writing in Hebrew in a post to Instagram at the time, “I sincerely apologize to the Jewish community for any ‘unintended outbursts, caused by my words or actions. It was not my intention to hurt or demean, and I deeply regret any pain I may have caused.”
