Kanye West has again been brought into serious disrepute following an allegation that contends he professed his love for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis back in 2018 during the same TMZ interview when he notoriously said slavery was “a choice”.
During this Wednesday’s edition of the Higher Learning podcast, ex-TMZ staffer Van Lathan, who stopped working there in 2019, claimed that the rap icon made the outrageous comments on camera but that they were ultimately edited out of the final cut.
“I’ve already heard him say that stuff before,” Lathan told his co-host, Rachel Lindsay, of Kanye’s latest anti-semitic sentiments. “I mean, I was taken aback because that type of anti-Semitic talk is disgusting. But as far as him, I knew that that was in him because when came to TMZ, he said that stuff and they took it out of the interview,” he claimed.
Lathan then asserted that he brought up the Holocaust, one of the worst genocides the world had ever seen, when he refuted Kanye’s claims about slavery. However, the rapper’s response was not what anyone expected.
“If you look at what I said at TMZ, it goes from me saying like, ‘Hey Kanye, there’s real-life, real-world implication to everything that you just said there.’ What I say after that — if I can remember, it’s been a long time — was, ’12 million people actually died because of Nazism and Hitler and all of that stuff,’ and then I move on to talk about what he said about slavery,” Lathan continued.
“The reason they took it out is because it wouldn’t have made sense unless they kept in Kanye saying he loved Hitler and the Nazis, which he said when he was at TMZ. He said something like, ‘I love Hitler, I love Nazis.’ Something to that effect”.
Most shockingly of all, Lathan also said that a Jewish staffer at the publication challenged West over his remarks, but he remained steadfast in his views. Lathan concluded: “When I saw [the new tweets], I was like, ‘Oh, I knew that this was eventually coming.’ As a matter of fact, I had anticipated it coming, like, way earlier than this”.
Van Lathan’s claims come just days after Kanye West was widely condemned for his ‘White Lives Matter’ line at Paris Fashion Week.
