Kanye West latest: Biden says ‘silence is complicity’ as Elon Musk suspends rapper for swastika and Hitler comments

Just over a week after he Kanye West and a pair of racist internet trolls for dinner at his Palm Beach, Florida country club, former president Donald Trump has not commented on his celebrity dinner guest’s praise for Hitler.

He has shared a flurry of posts on his Truth Social account, largely targeting his Democratic political opponents, but he has not mentioned West.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said Kanye West’s praise for Hitler and Nazis “is abhorrent and disgusting.”

“Whether it is anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, sexism or homophobia there are always those who want to divide us up,” he shared on Twitter. “Our job is to unite people around a progressive agenda that improves life for all.”

The Twitter account for prominent neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, founder of the notorious website The Daily Stormer, has been reinstated. He was removed from the platform in 2013.

His return to Twitter comes just days after a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest, after he was accused of ignoring a $14m judgment against him for an antisemitic harassment campaign against a Montana family.

24-year Nick Fuentes – an antisemitic white supremacist, Holocaust denier and former cheerleader for Donald Trump who rallied for the ex-president’s stolen election lies – has drawn mainstream attention after appearing at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West last month.

If the former president really never heard of the man with dark brown hair who showed at up his door for dinner, then he really should have, The Independent’s Andrew Buncombe writes:

“It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Christian message Kanye West is spreading isn’t one of love, but of Christo-fascist dominance and control,” Noah Berlatsky writes for The Independent’s Voices.

Racist and antisemitic slurs, anti-gay comments and gender-based attacks have spiked on Twitter, according to new reporting from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

In the first full week under his ownership, there were more than 26,000 posts mentioning the n-word – triple the average in 2022, according to the report. There were also more 50,000 posts mentioning transphobic and homophobic slurs, up by 53 per cent and 39 per cent, respectively, than 2022 averages.

Within his first two weeks at the helm, from 31 October to 13 November, there were more than 204,000 tweets and retweets using the gender-based slur “c**t” – up 30 per cent from the 2022 average – and more than 831,000 posts mentioning “sl*t,” up 75 per cent from the 2022 average. Posts mentioning “wh*re” were also up by 60 per cent.

The platform also saw significant spikes in antisemitic slurs and racist abuse towards Hispanic and Latino people, the report found.

More from The Independent:

President Joe Biden appeared to condemn Ye and others who have given him a platform for his virulent antisemitism.

“I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides,” he shared in a Twitter post from the office’s official account on Friday.

“Silence is complicity,” he added.

Extremism researchers and experts who have closely studied the spread of online hate and mis- and disinformation have warned that Elon Musk’s acquisition and the mass return of previously banned users could rapidly deteriorate the platform.

Under the disingenuous banner of “free speech”, Twitter could become one of the most toxic spaces on the internet for marginalised groups, they tell The Independent’s Alex Woodward:

White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is joining Kanye West’s apparent presidential campaign, has accused far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of seeking an audience with the antisemitic rapper. In a broadcast, Fuentes – who joined West during his appearance on InfoWars – lambasted the congresswoman, a far-right flamethrower in Congress who was voted out of her committees for her own offensive behaviour.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, has issued a statement condemning West’s remarks on yesterday’s InfoWars broadcast: