A bizarre controversy has unfolded thanks to Fox-owned-and-operated affiliates airing a Kanye West Super Bowl commercial that promoted a website with swastika shirts.
West recently rejoined X with shocking rants promoting Adolf Hitler and saying that he was a Nazi before his account was deleted.
The disgraced rapper also bought a Super Bowl ad for his website, Yeezy.com. West invites people to visit his website from what looks like a dentist’s chair in the low-budget and incredibly strange commercial.
However, West pulled a bait-and-switch with the Super Bowl ad. According to Variety, the spot featured normal merchandise before it aired. However, after the commercial, it was replaced by a lone white T-shirt sporting a swastika.
Kanye West‘s Yeezy.com advertisement during Sunday night’s Super Bowl stunned viewers with its bizarre vibe. But then what happened next shocked the station execs who ran it and media buyers who approved the spot even more: West immediately flipped the website after the ad aired, replacing its previous content with just one item: A swastika T-shirt for sale, at $20 each.
Up until the ad actually ran, the Yeezy.com website featured a Shopify-powered store selection of various non-branded articles of clothing like shirts, pants and jackets — nothing that would have been deemed a content issue. And Variety can confirm — because this reporter immediately checked the site after the spot aired in Los Angeles — that when the ad first ran, the swastika T-shirt wasn’t there.
Thankfully, the commercial did not air nationally but was televised in three Fox-owned-and-operated local markets: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, where millions still saw it.
While literally selling Nazi merchandise would seem like it would be the easiest thing in the world to condemn, apparently, it’s not so when it comes to the Fox Corporation.
Thus far, neither Fox nor its sports department has commented on the ad or West’s behavior. Now, the Anti-Defamation League is speaking out, asking Fox Sports to condemn the commercial and Kanye West’s hate speech.
The ADL petition states the following:
At the Super Bowl, hate took a front-row seat. Kanye West promoted an ad with a link to swastika t-shirts, broadcasting it to millions on live TV. Just days earlier, his dangerous rants on X praised Hitler, self-identified as a Nazi, and spread antisemitic vitriol. In 2022, ADL identified 30 incidents of harassment, assault, and vandalism linked to Kanye’s online outbursts. We refuse to let hate win. Bigotry has consequences. Join ADL in demanding that Fox Sports condemn this ad and never give hate a platform again.
When contacted by Awful Announcing, Fox did not respond to multiple requests about Kanye West’s Super Bowl commercial after our story yesterday. An inquiry to Fox Sports was redirected to Fox TV Stations, and no comment about the situation was given. The Wrap noted a similar silence from Fox.
You can feel some sympathy for Fox and the local stations that aired this ad. There’s nothing offensive in the Kanye West commercial itself, and if he changed the website only after it aired, then there wouldn’t be much that the stations could do.
However, the question could be asked why these Fox stations allowed the commercial to move forward in the first place after West himself was ranting about being a Nazi in the lead-up to the Super Bowl. Perhaps that could have been a red flag that something bad would happen, and the commercials should have been canceled.
But for Fox not to offer any comment about the Kanye West controversy is truly astounding, given that it’s understandable what happened here. In fact it’s not just astounding, it’s incomprehensible. Just come out and say we regret what happened, Kanye West is crazy, and Nazis are bad. It’s not that hard. At least, it shouldn’t be.
