As someone who has spent the majority of his career offending people in one manner or another, Howard Stern seemingly knows controversy as well as he knows the radio business. So whenever he takes the position of criticizing another celeb’s scandalous statements, it tends to mean some rather extreme behavior is involved. Such is the case with Kanye West’s latest round of publicity interviews, in which his anti-Semitic claims have sparked widespread condemnation throughout the pop culture sphere, with Stern invoking Britney Spears’ prior conservatorship when speaking about the rapper’s self-addressed mental health issues.
During the Wednesday edition of his Sirius XM show, Howard Stern and co-host Robin Quivers shared some unbridled opinions about West spreading his unfounded and hateful claims across various media platforms, and were not having it with the notion that it should all be casually explained away as being a symptom of mental health issues. According to Stern:
I almost don’t want to give any energy to this Kanye West character. I don’t know much about Kanye West. I’m not big into the rap scene, but he is… You know, I’m really tired of people excusing his behavior, by saying, ‘Well, he’s just mentally ill.' . . . I’m talking about his latest wacky anti-Semitic rant that he seems to feel really free to spout. And a lot of media organizations are giving him attention with it, and rightly so; I mean, they’re exposing him. I don’t have any problem with that. But, boy, what this guy’s into, it’s the same old stuff with the Jews. Growing up Jewish, I gotta tell you, I caught so much horseshit in my life for that.
To be sure, Kanye West has taken aim at a host of targets during his post-summer public appearances, from entire populations to mega-corporations he works with to his soon-to-be ex-wife Kim Kardashian to other rapper-businessmen like Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. The relative frequency of such statements has sparked questions about why he’s still being given the microphone so often, and Stern pointed to the rapper’s appearance on former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s new NewsNation series.
Anyway, Kanye was on the Chris Cuomo show, and good Lord, you gotta hear the shit this guy’s into. And fuck this mental illness self defense thing that he’s into. Like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s just mentally ill. Don’t worry about it.’ . . . If he’s so mentally ill, why don’t they appoint a conservator over his money like they did with the poor Britney Spears?
No two people’s mental highs, mids, and lows are the same, so such comparisons aren’t entirely valid. But generally speaking, Stern talked to the notion that Spears’ eccentric (though not hateful) behavior years ago, which was largely incited by constant public attention, unfairly landed her in an extended and extremely limiting conservatorship, which has been the subject of multiple docu-projects. While West, on the other hand, hasn’t seemed to have had anyone serving as a guiding filter throughout his professional trials and tribulations.
Howard Stern — who has previously spoken of a Presidential run, not unlike West himself — could really have been talking about any of Ye’s recent interviews with his thoughts above. The biggest of which — that extremely long-winded Drink Champs installment — has not only been scrubbed from the Revolt TV podcast’s lineup, but it’s also sparked a $250 million lawsuit filed by the family of George Floyd, whom West made several false claims about during the recording, amongst a variety of other backlash-fueling statements. And that all followed his headline-making Paris fashion show, for which he and Candice Owens wore “White Lives Matter” shirts.
West talked about his mental health during the aforementioned fashion show, which might have earned heckling had Howard Stern been in the audience. The host did clap back against West’s complaints about the “Jewish Underground Media Mafia” for not referring to him as a billionaire or tycoon, saying:
Guess what, douchebag? When they write about me, they call me the shock jock. You don’t have control over… You are a rapper. That is what you are. That’s how you became famous. If a newspaper article doesn’t point out the fact that you’re some sort of designer or genius, maybe that’s not because they’re Jewish, but maybe because they just don’t put that much thought into who the fuck you are and what your business is. This is so depressing. I mean, Kanye used to be fun crazy. Now he’s like Hitler.
For all the negative attention Ye is drawing — including publicizing the name of the school that his kids go to, in an effort to get them at his Donda institution — he is apparently moving forward slightly with divorce proceedings, which has been a long time coming, and has taken a revolving door of lawyers to come to light. While Kim Kardashian has stuck with her to-be former hubby from a support position over the years, she is allegedly changing course after the latest string of controversies.
For what it’s worth, Britney Spears has appeared to be as happy-go-lucky as ever in the months since her conservatorship ended, even if she continues to spark suspicions in fans with her wild and sometimes nude posts, as well as her sporadically deleting her social media accounts. She also continues to make claims about her family’s actions during those dark years.
