Kanye West’s appearance on an Alex Jones live stream to declare his admiration for Nazis has put the troubled rapper’s biggest boosters in a perilous position. While Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens were more than happy to embrace West despite his weeks of casual anti-Semitism, saying “I love Hitler” on a live stream viewed by millions has made things a whole lot trickier.

Their current approach to this latest conflagration appears to be abject silence. Carlson, on his Fox News show Thursday night, completely ignored the disturbing meltdown from a man he was championing as a brilliant right-wing voice less than two months ago. Owens, who has consistently backed West (some would say used him) as he struggles through an obvious mental health episode, has — for the first time in what feels like an eternity — gone silent on Twitter.

The silence is a full U-turn for Carlson and Owens who, desperate for a celebrity supporter of former President Donald Trump, championed West in recent months.

They stuck by him despite obvious red flags. When Kanye declared his intent to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” Owens outright denied the comment was anti-Semitic.

“It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset,” she complained.

Her defense was well-rewarded: Days later it was announced Kanye would be buying her husband’s struggling social media platform.

Carlson’s boosterism somehow managed to be worse than that. The Fox News host knew West was anti-Semitic, but deliberately hid that fact from his viewers, removing West’s bizarre comments about Jews from his lengthy interview with the rapper that aired on Fox.

In that interview — which was so important to Carlson that he aired it across two nights of programming — the Fox News host sought to cast West as a right-wing visionary.

“We’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes,” Carlson said, concluding West was not crazy. That is to say, the version of West that he carefully edited to be palatable for his audience.

Carlson has mostly avoided covering West in the weeks since their interview, and has certainly not informed his viewers about the rapper’s anti-Semitism. On Thursday night, he did not mention that the man he anointed a star of the right had hours earlier delivered a full-throated embrace of Hitler.

But while Owens and Carlson have abandoned Kanye, new boosters — like the white supremacist Nick Fuentes and painfully dated troll Milo Yiannopoulos — have sprouted up like weeds to take their place.

Unfortunately, there is a never-ending stream of nihilistic scumbags on the internet who will happily exploit an unwell man in exchange for a few dollars and a gasp of relevance.

So long as there are terrible people willing to use Kanye West for their own benefit, he will continue to be given a massive platform to perform offensive caricatures of Israeli leaders and declare his admiration for Hitler — and God only knows what next.

It would be naive to hope that Carlson and Owens would have the courage to condemn West’s behavior and reckon with their own role in promoting him — a hope that, even if miraculously achieved, would do nothing to reverse the harm they have done.

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