Just before Valentine’s Day, Kanye West began his latest bout of public insanity by reactivating his dormant X account and declaring that Sean Combs is innocent, Adolf Hitler was “so fresh,” and Kanye himself would never be “apologizing for my Jewish comments.” After a brief suspension, he resumed posting, spending the waning days of February soliciting jewelers for “swastika chain designs” and reporting himself “prepared for another day of high-quality antisemitism.”
Although the politics have changed in the 20 years since he told a live audience that George Bush didn’t care about black people, or the 16 years since he leapt on stage at the VMAs then fled the country as a “soldier of culture,” Kanye West has reliably self-destructed in public at intervals consistent with the recurrence of mania in an ordinary course of bipolar disorder. The only interesting fact about him as a patient is how his public profile likely exacerbates his grandiose delusions. West is perhaps the only manic-depressive to ever live who declared that he had some important ideas that he needed to share as soon as possible with the President of the United States and promptly received an invitation to the White House.
But in his role as a public lunatic, Kanye has been revealing in the ways he has tested the limits of enlightened attitudes toward the insane. The ritual response to his antics has become as predictable as the outbursts themselves. First, voyeurism: the natural response to a man going crazy in public. Then, tepid expressions of concern for his well-being. Finally—and as Kanye’s derangements have evolved from the merely wacky and defiant into the unambiguously bigoted, this is the first step for a larger and larger share of the culture industry—a chorus of indignant reminders that mental illness does not cause this behavior. Or at least, as the celebrity Pete Davidson told Kanye in 2018, it isn’t an “excuse to act like a jackass.” Just a reminder, tweets the minor journalist with a vague diagnosis; mentally ill person here, declares the junior academic who identifies as neurodivergent; uh, quick PSA, announces the power user who has done some clinically significant late-night posting of their own, I’m mentally ill, and I’ve never gone on a month-long tirade about Jews exploiting the rap industry. Mental illness doesn’t make you a piece of shit.