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JK Rowling liked a tweet supporting antisemitic rapper Kanye West. It hasn’t aged well.

JK Rowling, transgender inmates, New Jersey
JK Rowling in 2011 Photo: Shutterstock

Transphobic author JK Rowling recently liked a tweet about Kanye West – who goes by “Ye” – coming back onto Twitter. The tweet — posted by the rabidly anti-LGBTQ activist Chaya Raichik, who goes by LibsofTikTok on social media — hasn’t aged well now that West has been banned from Twitter after posting a swastika and admitting that he loves Hitler and Nazis.

Raichik posted the tweet in question on November 20, when Twitter’s transphobic billionaire owner Elon Musk welcomed West back to the microblogging platform after a two-week suspension for publishing antisemitic tweets.

Raichik’s LibsofTikTok account is mostly videos, photos, and other posts made by LGBTQ people and allies that she and her followers mock and call “groomers” if they mention anything related to LGBTQ+ identities in the vicinity of children. But she also posts other social media messages from liberals to mock them.

The tweet showed a Twitter comment thread of one user commenting on West’s first tweet after returning to the platform. The user’s comment read, “Elon Musk is jailbreaking another one of his white supremacist pals.”

A commenter responded to the tweet, disapproving of how the first person called West a white supremacist: “2022: Where we call a black man a white supremacist.”

The first user responded, “I said what I said.”

Raichik’s tweet also contained an image of the rapper, appearing to look incredulously at the tweet comment thread; the picture of West effectively shows Raichik’s response.

Rowling apparently reads Raichik’s anti-LGBTQ+ account and liked the specific tweet implying that it is wrong to call West a white supremacist, despite the racist and antisemitic comments he had already made at that point. The tweet remained among Rowling’s liked tweets as of Friday, December 2.

 

While West’s embrace of Hitler wouldn’t happen for another two weeks, he had already made antisemitic and racist comments by the time that Rowling was liking Raichik’s defense of him on Twitter.

Many conservatives initially waved off West’s attacks on the Jewish community. He claimed that Jews control the entertainment industry and will blacklist anyone who dares speak against them or otherwise defies them. These comments reinforced long-held anti-Semitic tropes about wealthy, powerful Jews controlling society.

He was hanging around white supremacist Nick Fuentes and had said that racist, antisemitic, transphobic, and homophobic troll Milo Yiannopoulos was helping with his 2024 presidential campaign. In October, he appeared in public with far-right commentator Candace Owens wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris Fashion Week.

Shortly after, he was suspended from Twitter for posting that he would go “death con 3 on Jewish people.”

However, Rowling’s apparent support of West seems far worse now.

West was banned once again from Twitter on Thursday after he published a swastika superimposed on a Star of David to the social media platform. This came just after he appeared alongside Fuentes on Infowars, hosted by anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. During his appearance, West repeated antisemitic conspiracy theories and repeatedly declared his “love” for Hitler and Nazis.

“They did good things too. We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time,” West said.

This is just the latest chapter in West’s very public downward spiral. In late November, West reportedly brought Fuentes to dine with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, sparking widespread condemnation of the former president.

As for Raichik, her public posts about drag shows and gender-affirming medical professionals have led to armed protestors attending public drag performances and to bombing and death threats against children’s hospitals.

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