Kanye West’s current crusade to try and talk his way through wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt isn’t getting any better. The hole the rapper has dug for himself — in light of a half-baked promise that he “absolutely” plans to run for president again a few weeks ago — is getting bigger, and he doesn’t seem to care who he leaves behind in his path. Now Van Lathan, ex-TMZ staffer and now host of the The Ringer’s Higher Learning podcast, has accused West of saying far more hurtful and outlandish things in his infamous 2018 TMZ office rant — yes, worse than saying 400 years of slavery “sounds like a choice,” if that’s even possible.
In the episode, Lathan accuses Kanye of saying anti-Semitic things that go far beyond his latest Twitter rant about “Going to death con 3 on Jewish people.” Lathan said that he’s already “heard him say stuff like that before…I knew that that was in him because when came to TMZ, he said that stuff and they took it out of the interview.” The 2018 video of Kanye West on TMZ shows Lathan calling out West for his views on slavery being “a choice.” Lathan can be seen standing up and scolding Kanye, saying, “I think what you’re doing right now is actually the absence of thought…I’m unbelievably hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something that’s not real. You gotta be responsible.”
— Elliott Wilson (@ElliottWilson) May 1, 2018
Lathan now says in the podcast episode that there was more to Kanye’s rant than just what was captured on the tape in 2018. “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 said. “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.”
It’s getting tiresome saying that things “keep getting worse,” for Kanye. But somehow here we are again.