Credit: Alamy

Kanye West allegedly shared “love” for Hitler and the Nazis in 2018

Thu 13 October 2022 14:30, UK

With Kanye West currently under fire for a multitude of factors at the minute, a new claim has just added credence to the cause of his detractors. A former TMZ staff member has claimed that the rapper openly discussed his “love” of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during that 2018 interview when he claimed that slavery was “a choice”.

During this Wednesday’s edition of the Higher Learning podcast, ex-TMZ staffer Van Lathan, who stopped working at the publication 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 has 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 claimed 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.