“Kanye West Banned from Entering the UK for Nazism” is another newspaper headline that, in 2010, would have sounded like an absurdist fever dream but, in 2026, is just another day ending in “y.” On Tuesday, the UK Home Office bowed to the inevitable and withdrew West’s electronic travel authorization to headline London’s Wireless Festival this July, in response to West’s recurring habit of making wildly disinhibited antisemitic statements, apologizing, and then making them again. The latest iteration of this cycle happened in January when he took out a page in The Wall Street Journal apologizing for his recent behavior, which has included but is not limited to releasing a song called “Heil Hitler” and selling what I can only describe as swastika merch from his Yeezy.com website. West blamed his behavior on his bipolar disorder. This went down about as well as the swastika merch. “Bipolar doesn’t make you antisemitic!” was the online chorus reaction, from people who believe mental illness is expressed only in socially acceptable ways.
Banning West from the UK was, as I say, inevitable, not because it was necessarily the correct thing to do, but because the row had grown to such a pitch that West’s UK concerts had become unsustainable. Since the announcement last week that West would headline Wireless, the festival’s sponsors, including Pepsi, had withdrawn their support and condemned West—although one of the organizers of Wireless said in an interview on the BBC on Tuesday morning that Pepsi had originally approved West, only to clutch its handkerchief in horror once it sensed the public outrage. This, I believe, is called corporate social activism.
