In 2018, Kanye West headlines when he publicly told TMZ that slavery was a personal preference.
Van Lathan said the rapper made the words on camera, but TMZ cut them out of the tape during Wednesday’s broadcast of the Higher Learning podcast. Lathan said to Rachel Lindsay, “I’ve already heard him say that stuff,” referring to Ye’s recent anti-Semitic comments.
I mean, it shocked me because anti-Semitic rhetoric like that is abhorrent. And I knew that was in him because, he claimed, he had told TMZ precisely what he was thinking and feeling, but they had edited it out of the interview.
A former TMZ employee named Lathan claimed he brought up the Holocaust to refute Ye’s views about slavery, but Ye hit back with some surprising claims in his album Gold Digger.
If you look at what I said on TMZ, you’ll see that I went from saying, “Hey Kanye, there are real-life, real-world consequences to everything that you just stated there,” to something closer to, “I’m not going to comment on it,” which is what I said. If I remember correctly (and it’s been a while), Lathan said, “12 million people perished because of Nazism and Hitler and all that stuff,” before discussing his supposed comments on slavery.
Kanye’s comments about loving Hitler and the Nazis, which he made in an interview with TMZ, made no sense. Therefore they were excised. He allegedly expressed his admiration for Hitler and the Nazi party. That or a similar idea.
According to Lathan, a Jewish member of the tabloid’s staff confronted West about his anti-Semitic comments, but the musician’s opinions remained unchanged.
I knew this moment would arrive when I noticed the new tweets. The podcaster remarked, “I had seen it coming, like, a bit sooner than this,” referring to Ye’s tweet from earlier this week.