Kanye West’s Yeezy online store has been taken offline after selling T-shirts featuring a swastika. The rapper, also known as Ye, directed Super Bowl viewers to his website on Sunday to purchase the controversial clothing, which displayed the Nazi symbol often associated with extreme-right ideology.
E-commerce giant Shopify, which hosted the store, deactivated the site and listed the domain name yeez.com for sale at $98,999 (£79,692). In a statement to NBC News, Shopify stated, “All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform. This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms, so we removed them from Shopify.”
The white T-shirts, priced at $20 (£16), featured a black swastika on the front with no accompanying text, only the letters “HH-01″—which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) identified as code for “Heil Hitler.” Initially, visitors to Yeezy’s website saw a notice stating the store was “unavailable,” but it now redirects to GoDaddy, where the domain is listed for sale. GoDaddy has not yet clarified whether the sale was enforced by the company or initiated by West.
The ADL condemned the T-shirts as “further proof” of West’s antisemitism, emphasizing that the swastika remains a symbol of hate and white supremacy. West has recently posted antisemitic messages on X, including statements such as “I love Hitler” and “I’m a Nazi,” prompting a sensitive content warning before he logged out, writing, “I appreciate [X owner] Elon [Musk] for allowing me to vent.”
Following his account deactivation on Monday, his spokesperson Milo Yiannopoulos stated that “Ye is an intergenerational artist and icon who continues to redefine the limits of creativity and free expression” and that he “has deactivated his X account for the time being.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism, along with Friends star David Schwimmer, has urged Elon Musk to ban West from X. West’s Yeezy fashion brand, once a billion-dollar collaboration with Adidas, was dropped by the German sportswear giant in 2022 over his antisemitic remarks, leading to a settlement in October.
Source: Swifteradio.com
