Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has been busy this week destroying his career while spewing hate.
He’s rendered himself a pariah not just in the world of business but in the world of politics, a significantly harder feat. 
In the past few weeks, he has been going around the country with two controversial characters, former journalist and commentator Milo Yiannopoulos and vile neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. On Nov. 22, all three had dinner with former President Donald Trump.
So, how did we get here?
Ye has made his rounds through a series of political podcasts. His comments got worse and worse with each show he went on, destroying his career even more with every sentence he uttered. This came to a climax on Thursday, Dec. 2, as Ye’s Twitter account was suspended by Elon Musk, who has had a public friendship with the musician, after he posted a picture of a swastika.
The questioning of Ye’s awful antisemitic comments by podcasters illustrates the necessity of freedom of speech, and his subsequent swastika posting and suspension from Twitter illustrate when speech goes too far.  
The series of wild and inappropriate adventures of Ye have shown us that the marketplace of ideas, a term coined by former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, is the best way to rid our society of horrible ideas. This point is best illustrated by two interviews of Ye by The Timcast IRL Podcast and Alex Jones’ Infowars.
Ye went on the Timcast IRL Podcast with Fuentes and Yiannopoulos to discuss recent events, and the first story Pool pulled up was of Ye’s dinner with Trump. Ye was not interested in discussing the dinner and quickly began to speak of his grievances with the press.
This is where things took a dark turn. 
After Ye espoused his issues with mainstream media, Pool said, “I think they’ve been extremely unfair to you.” 
“Who is ‘they,’ though?” Ye responded. “We can’t say who ‘they’ is, can we?” 
Fuentes chimed in, saying, “It is ‘them,’ though, isn’t it?”
It’s obvious from the context Ye and Fuentes meant “they” and “them” to be Jewish people.
Pool responded with, “No, it’s not.” This did not sit well with Ye, who proceeded to walk off the podcast with Fuentes and Yiannopoulus.
If you can’t defend your ideas, and instead of defending them, you simply walk away from the conversation, what does that say about the things you espouse?
There is no defense at all for Ye’s hateful, deeply antisemitic rhetoric.
Deceased Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said sunlight was the best disinfectant for bad ideas, and when ideas like this see sunlight, we can truly see them for how horrible they are.
After this excursion, Ye went on Alex Jones’s conspiratorial Infowars podcast. In the three-hour podcast, during which Ye wore a Balenciaga mask covering his entire face, Ye made more shocking comments.
“I like Hitler,” Ye said. 
“I don’t like Hitler,” Jones responded. “I know you’re trying to be shocking with that.” 
Ye doubled down and expanded on this idea, saying, “I’m not trying to be shocking. I like Hitler. I do not – the Holocaust is not what happened. Let’s look at the facts of that. Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.”
During this interview and this interaction, Jones, one of the most sensational conspiracy theorists of all time, looked shocked. When you say things that shock one of the most conspiratorial men of the century, you’ve gone horribly wrong.
Hours after this now infamous incident, Ye posted a picture of a swastika inside the star of David, which was too far for self-prided free speech absolutist Musk, who tweeted, “I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”
When your account has millions of followers, and you post a symbol that can only be associated in recent history with mass murder and world war and is rallied around by violent extremist groups, it has the potential to incite violence or “imminent lawless action,” as defined by the Supreme Court.
That’s when you know you’ve gone too far. 
Brandon Poulter is a 27-year-old political science and psychology major from Baton Rouge.