Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has hit a snag with his attempted comeback tour. A summer music festival in London he was set to headline was officially cancelled today after the UK banned him from entering the country, citing his long history of making anti-Jewish statements and praising Adolf Hitler.

Still, Ye’s career is far from over. He reportedly made $33 million performing this week in the US, a country whose current administration has deep ties to Holocaust denial and other extreme forms of antisemitism. Ye’s sold-out concerts at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles were some of the highest-grossing nights in live music ever, if the anonymous sources providing the numbers are to be believed. But there is no denying the massive crowds that showed up to support Ye, nor the slew of celebrities who attended and tacitly endorsed his return to the mainstream.

It’s no surprise to me that people were so quick to forgive Ye, even less than a year after he released a song called “Heil Hitler” where he blamed Jewish people for, among other things, him losing custody of his kids. When powerful people—in this case, one of the most beloved musicians of all time—do terrible things, their fans tend to find convenient excuses for their behavior.

In this case, Ye provided the excuse in the form of a full-page letter ad he took out earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal. In “To Those I’ve Hurt,” Ye wrote that his anti-Jewish and pro-Hitler statements were the result of a “four-month long manic episode” stemming from his bipolar disorder. He expressed regret and wrote “I love Jewish people.” He apologized to the Black community. And he said he aspires to earn forgiveness.

Here’s the problem: Ye’s bigotry and violence against Jewish people and Black people and women didn’t start with a four-month manic period last year. He has reportedly been praising Hitler and pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories in private business settings for more than twenty years. He has publicly promoted white supremacy for more than a decade, too. His letter did not acknowledge there are more than 15 years of sexual violence and abuse allegations against him. Some of them are the basis of more than a dozen lawsuits he is currently facing, including that he started strangling model Jennifer An in front of witnesses on a music video set in 2010 (Ye doesn’t even deny this; stunningly, the same month he issued his “apology,” his attorneys argued that the violence was a protected form of free speech) and that he raped his former assistant in 2021. Her attorney said she was “in hiding” as of last year after West harassed her in retaliation for filing her lawsuit, which her attorney alleged including organizing a swatting attempt. (This is when you provoke a SWAT team to respond to your victim’s residence by calling in a fake hostage situation or bomb threat. Innocent people have died and been fatally shot by police in these attacks before.)

In my opinion, Ye’s apology is not real or genuine. It’s an obfuscation. It’s calculated PR as part of a broader strategy to avoid accountability, not make amends. By admitting to only some of what happened in clear public view and claiming that it was purely a product of mental illness, Ye has released something his fans can use to try and justify his past and present behavior. I’ve been analyzing public statements issued by alleged perpetrators for years, and this is a common and effective tactic.

The apology letter was not really for anyone Ye has hurt. It was for his audience. And at this point, Ye’s fandom is arguably the biggest force shielding him from accountability. As a Black man, Ye has faced significantly more institutional consequences than his white male counterparts. He is now banned and deplatformed in the UK. He has been condemned by numerous figures and entities with political, economic, and cultural authority in the US. The mainstream media has long treated him punitively. This institutional blowback is actually one of the reasons why Ye maintains such a strong fan following. He can be positioned as an underdog and a victim, even though he has also made billions of dollars, has two dozen Grammys, and is the tenth most-streamed artist on Spotify of all time.

In recent days, I’ve seen a wave of Ye defenders argue that he has already faced enough consequences, that his actions weren’t harmful enough to justify “cancellation,” and that his bigotry is actually a form of performance art. But numerous people who have worked with Ye throughout his career say he espoused the same bigoted views in private. “Having bipolar disorder is not a state of constant mental illness,” Ye wrote in January. “When you go into the manic episode, you are ill at that point. When you are not in an episode, you are completely ‘normal.’” Ye’s “normal” self for more than two decades, as documented in articles and lawsuits and documentaries and even his own lyrics, is monstrous. He says he’s improved his mental health, but has he stopped actively hurting people? Will he face accountability for the alleged crimes he has committed against employees, women, and children?

Probably not. Just last month, Ye lost a case brought against him by a former contractor who said Ye underpaid him and forced him to act as a round-the-clock security guard. But the plaintiff received far fewer damages than he asked for, and now Ye is countersuing him in retaliation, claiming he “recorded” and “publicized” an “unlawful mechanic’s lien” on Ye’s property. And Ye’s publicist who shared that statement? Milo Yiannopoulos, the ex-gay far-right political commentator who now claims homosexuality doesn’t even exist.

If you think that the Ye controversy is a distraction from current geopolitical crises, it’s really not. In the past few years, Ye has actually helped bridge the gap between Donald Trump’s GOP and the formerly fringe antisemitic far-right. After all, Ye brought Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to meet Trump in 2022, and Fuentes has soared in popularity since. He’s one of the conservative influencers angling the party in an explicitly antisemitic direction. Ye has been a longtime supporter of Trump, and his political stances since 2018 have mirrored the conservative mainstream in many ways: Ye has spoken out against abortion, repeated common anti-Black talking points, and targeted prominent Black women.

“He’s a very useful tool for white supremacy,” says novelist and writer Chantal James, who has spoken out against Ye’s comeback in recent days. As a Black woman who shares Ye’s diagnosis, she told me that multiple things can be true at once: Ye is a bigot, having bipolar disorder isn’t an excuse for his bigotry, having it doesn’t make him hold bigoted beliefs, and also, Ye is a disabled person who can be exploited by the people around him to amplify his bigotry. “He’s useful for Nazis. He’s useful for the KKK. He’s useful for the far right. He’s useful for Trump.”

James says Ye and his fans’ reliance on mental illness as an excuse for his bigotry is also harmful to other people with bipolar, since it creates the false perception that people with bipolar are more likely to be bigoted and that bigots can be excused by saying they have mental illness. For many of Ye’s fans who want to be able to hear him perform songs from Graduation and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy again, blaming anything uncomfortable about supporting him on his struggles with bipolar is a comforting illusion.

“He’s one of the most talented people in the world, but you do cancel an artist when they are a great force of harm. That’s just what you do. You don’t empower them. Doesn’t matter what you love. Doesn’t matter if it makes you feel good. You relinquish it,” James said. “People really need to take agency. Do you want to do something about Nazism? Don’t support a Nazi. Put two and two together. Do something with your behavior to help things get a little better.”

Both James and I enjoyed Ye’s music before we knew all this about him. When I was a teenager, I actually loved Ye’s music so much that my parents once confiscated my ticket to his upcoming show as part of being grounded. I went to the show anyways, and I got quadruple-grounded. I spent years excusing Ye’s bad behavior to myself and others until it reached a point where I could no longer sustain the cognitive dissonance.

A lot of people act like it’s some Herculean task to acknowledge when male artists in particular cause harm. A woman who acted like Ye would not receive the same defense. In fact, celebrity women who attended Ye’s concert in Los Angeles last week and have been criticized for it have fewer defenders than Ye himself. (And to be clear, I don’t think we should defend women for supporting Ye, but it’s telling that women often face more blowback for associating with a man than the man himself faces.)

Sometimes an old song of Ye’s will come up in my recommended queue and I’ll let it play. But it doesn’t feel the same as it used to, because now I know how he wields his power. And if I tried to separate that from his art, I would find there was nothing left.

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