ApologYe
On Kanye's recent apology ad in the Wall Street Journal.
Reader’s Note: If today’s piece seems like a detour from what you’ve come to expect here, allow me to kindly point out this mailing list was founded in 2019, after my write-up of a Chicago listening party for Kanye West’s album “Jesus Is King” reached the front page of the Reddit. Linked below is the last time I wrote about Kanye, after the whole swastika T-shirt fiasco last February:
Over the last few days, in the midst of a blizzard across the entire country, TikTok going up and down after its sale, a man getting murdered in broad daylight, and another man climbing a skyscraper in Taiwan for some reason, a different man took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to publicly apologize for his recent actions and behavior.
Here at David Zucker’s Mailing List, our Authentic-Nature-to-Totally-Insincere Statement Evaluation and Measurement In-house Team / Internal Committee1 can’t help but notice how that last man’s next record, BULLY, is expected to be released on Friday.
Some of our constituents are also resisting the urge to comment on the irony of using the Wall Street Journal as a means of communicating with the Jewish people at large to let them know you are no longer an antisemite.
But the message was received.
And if not, here is the full apology, reprinted for your convenience:
To Those I’ve Hurt:
Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage—the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.
Comprehensive scans were not done, neurological exams were limited, and the possibility of a frontal-lobe injury was never raised. It wasn’t properly diagnosed until 2023. That medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis.
Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system. Denial. When you’re manic, you don’t think you’re sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you’re seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you’re losing your grip entirely.
Once people label you as “crazy,” you feel as if you cannot contribute anything meaningful to the world. It’s easy for people to joke and laugh it off when in fact this is a very serious debilitating disease you can die from. According to the World Health Organization and Cambridge University, people with bipolar disorder have a life expectancy that is shortened by ten to fifteen years on average, and a 2x-3x higher all-cause mortality rate than the general population. This is on par with severe heart disease, type 1 diabetes, HIV, and cancer - all lethal and fatal if left untreated.
The scariest thing about this disorder is how persuasive it is when it tells you: You don’t need help. It makes you blind, but convinced you have insight. You feel powerful, certain, unstoppable.
I lost touch with reality. Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem. I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation, and the exhaustion of trying to have someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self.
In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it. One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments - many of which I still cannot recall - that led to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body-experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.
To the black community - which held me down through all of the highs and lows and the darkest of times. The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us.
In early 2025, I fell into a four-month long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life. As the situation became increasingly unsustainable, there were times I didn’t want to be here anymore.
Having bipolar disorder is notable state of constant mental illness. When you go into a manic episode, you are ill at that point. When you are not in an episode, you are completely ‘normal’. And that’s when the wreckage from the illness hits the hardest. Hitting rock bottom a few months ago, my wife encouraged me to finally get help.
I have found comfort in Reddit forums of all places. Different people speak of being in manic or depressive episodes of a similar nature. I read their stories and realized that I was not alone. It’s not just me who ruins their entire life once a year despite taking meds every day and being told by the so-called best doctors in the world that I am not bipolar, but merely experiencing “symptoms of autism.”
My words as a leader in my community have global impact and influence. In my mania, I lost complete sight of that.
As I find my new baseline and new center through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise, and clean living, I have newfound, much-needed clarity. I am pouring my energy into positive, meaningful art: music, clothing, design, and other new ideas to help the world.
I’m not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home.”
With love,
Ye
A couple of things.
Firstly, you can’t decouple the timing of the statement with his imminent album release.
But assuming this apology was written authentically (which our committee is inclined to believe), what else could you even want or expect from someone in Ye’s position, unless you’ve already determined he is beyond reformation and reintegration into society?
Personally, I’ve done all I can.
I tried signing Kanye up for Birthright, but he doesn’t meet the age restrictions:
But when we cancel someone, do we actually want them to re-air?
Is Kanye expected to meet with “Jewish leaders”, sitting through stilted presentations from people who I – and every Jewish person I know – have never even heard of?
Do you want him to perform at a JUF Gala hosted by John Mulaney for some reason?
Is he supposed to play a game of H-O-R-S-E with Deni Avdija in some YouTube video while they discuss their difference in cultural upbringings between sports gambling ads?
Wouldn’t anything like that, or even donating a shit ton of money to whatever Jewish charity is deemed ontologically good and not corrupt, feel completely disingenuous?
And so beyond an earnest attempt to get his mind right, and take responsibility for his dangerous language and actions, what else do you want Ye to do, so that you can once again play beer pong to Graduation without a guilty conscience?
The Substack writer Freddie DeBoer, who frequently writes about having bipolar disorder, commented on the situation in 2025, even before the swastika T-shirt incident. I recommend reading the full piece, but I’ll share some excerpts below:
[Kanye has] grown increasingly unstable, particularly on social media, prompting more and more criticism and performative exhaustion from the type of people who most directly shape American culture and media.
This underlines how strange elite attitudes towards mental health and disability have become: the more or less explicit attitude of West’s many critics has been that, as he has become more and more unstable, they have grown less likely to allow for the possibility that his actions are influenced by mental illness and thus not entirely his fault. That’s weird!
But why would treating disabilities as perfectly valid identity markers lead to less sympathy for West? Because it prompts a dilemma: these people really hate Kanye, but they’ve been trained by their political tribe to see those with disabilities as perfect unblemished angels, beings of pure light, in common with progressive attitudes towards “marginalized peoples.” The only way to resolve these feelings is to deny that West’s behavior could possibly be the result of his disability. If identity liberalism insists that people with disabilities are to be treated as blameless, and you’re an identity liberal who very much wants to blame Kanye West, you must deny that he has a disability or that his disability could possibly be related to his behavior.
This is what has led to the sublimely witless claim “Mental illness doesn’t do that!” It’s become a commonplace on social media. 20 year olds with absolutely no background in psychiatry confidently stare into their front-facing cameras and declare what mental illness can and can’t do. Mental illness can prompt people to cut out their own tongues, to light themselves on fire, to kill their children because they believe that CIA bugs are implanted in their brains, but it can’t prompt ordinary socially disreputable behavior or bigotry, apparently. It’s hard to believe, but very convenient for people who are desperately trying to keep various elements of their personality and politics stitched together without confronting the contradictions.
Prior to his antisemitic flare-ups in 2022, you had either already written Kanye off as a jackass for a number of perfectly valid reasons, or you were still bumping Donda.
Nothing he had done from 2005 until then had dissuaded the vast majority of people I knew from playing his music at a house party.
Even after the infamous Alex Jones appearance in 2022, I can recall bars in New York City slowly testing the waters with tracks like “American Boy” in the summer of 2023, where he was merely a feature.
No one cared.
My gym soft launched his music back into their playlists in late 2023. I vividly recall a game of pickup when “Gold Digger” came on and feeling deeply uncomfortable, particularly as no one else I was playing with seemed to notice or be bothered.
I remember being stunned as everyone around me rapped along to multiple songs of Kanye’s at a Going Away party for a guy I didn’t know in early 2024, at a public bar in New York City. I was someone else’s +1. Maybe it’s an important detail to mention the guy was black and from Chicago like Kanye, and so were 90% of the people in attendance. I don’t know. It feels wrong either way to include or exclude that detail.
And these were people who non-black people assumed had written Kanye off after his “Slavery is a choice” rhetoric in 2018, around the time Ye was released.
The point is, the online public continued to outrage while the offline public shrugged.
And that was just the offline public in liberal, multicultural New York City!
I don’t know.
Here’s what someone replied when I posted Kanye’s letter without comment on Instagram. I found this response to be brilliantly articulated, and the final sentence genuinely moving:
@kobirussellinsta: I’m stuck between two things I know to be true - as someone with bipolar 1 with psychotic symptoms, who’s been manic multiple times and psychotic once for an extended period of time.
My experience has more been that things that you feel deeply - but have not addressed and don’t talk about - come to the surface during these episodes. So I’ve always thought that he is antisemitic - and his episodes bring it out.
At the same time - psychosis especially can involve hearing voices to do things or think things that you would never otherwise. You can absolutely enter another reality. Considering how many LOUD antisemitic voices are around - it would be very easy for him to pick up on that.
All in all - this sounds like it could be t’shuva. Return again. If he’s really working on himself - the best we can all do in life - I wish him well.
To close, I will again turn to DeBoer:
The point is that there is no simplistic rubric you can apply for how to feel about mentally ill people, their disorders, or their behavior, including Kanye West, no matter what TikTok says. “Mental illness doesn’t do that” is embraced so lustily precisely because it appears to remove the burden of responsibility of judgment, takes away these sticky, unhappy, shaky decisions we make about how to treat people with mental illness. And in that it’s part and parcel of a broader world of identity liberalism which has relentlessly pursued an ethics of moral simplicity and universal ethical binarism, dividing the world into the utterly pure and good and blameless on one side and the forever unclean on the other. Madness is particularly poorly suited to this sort of thing, which is why so many liberals are so aggressive in insisting that “mental illness doesn’t do that.” They don’t want to experience the unmoored feeling of being unsure of how to judge someone.
So consider me unsure.
But I’ll be listening on Friday.
(Who am I kidding, this thing isn’t dropping for another six months.)
Feel free to reply to this email or comment on Substack with your thoughts. I’m genuinely interested in what anyone has to say about this.
Or, ANTISEMITIC.
Pretty funny you thought this would actually drop today. Thoughtful interesting article per usual.
Dear David,
Thank you for sharing this!
Love
Myq