Police Powerless to Stop Antisemitic Kanye Messages Despite Fury

Kanye West last month made a series of antisemitic remarks that have inspired stunts by white supremacist groups, but there is little that police in the U.S. can do to stop them if they don't rise to the level of a hate crime.

It began with the rapper, now known as Ye, tweeting that he was going to go "death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE."

West's comments inspired a series of antisemitic stunts that sparked outrage: The Goyim Defense League dropped banners over Interstate 405 in Los Angeles on October 22, including one that read: "Kanye was right about the Jews."

The group is described by the Anti-Defamation League as a "small network of virulently antisemitic provocateurs" led by Jon Minadeo II that engages in "antisemitic stunts and schemes to troll or otherwise harass Jews."

Minadeo was reportedly in Jacksonville, Florida, where the same message was projected onto the TIAA Bank Field stadium following the Georgia-Florida game on October 29.

Minadeo's recent stunts have also involved using a bullhorn to provoke people at Jewish community centers and synagogues, according to the Petaluma Argus-Courier. He also regularly shares antisemitic videos and comments on his social media accounts.

But although Minadeo was reportedly arrested by Polish authorities following a Holocaust denial stunt at Auschwitz-Birkenau in September, experts and police say there is little authorities can do about his actions in the U.S. unless they rise to the level of a hate crime.

"His actions have clearly involved hate speech, but have not risen to hate crimes where a criminal complaint/arrest could be made," Ken Savano, the chief of the Petaluma Police Department, told Newsweek.

"Hate speech is disturbing to all of us and is not welcome in this community," Savano said. "It is unfortunate that this subject took up residence here at one point."

There is no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment, Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment expert and professor at the UCLA School of Law, told Newsweek.

That has been repeatedly affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently in a ruling in Matal v. Tam in 2017, Volokh said. "Indeed some of the most important free speech principles—which protect all sorts of viewpoints—were settled in precedents that involve bigoted speech," he said.

But "content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions on speech might be permissible; for instance, the state might be able to limit the power to project words onto the sides of government buildings, bridges, and the like (though that's not clear, since of course people do have the right to stand on bridges displaying their signs)."

However, Volokh said any such law "would have to apply equally to all speech, regardless of whether it's antisemitic; and I don't think any such law exists in California."

Brendan Lantz, an assistant professor in Florida State University's College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, added that "the threshold between hate speech—which is protected speech, no matter how offensive—and hate crime can sometimes be difficult to identify clearly."

"The fundamental distinction is that for hateful speech to rise to the level where it is considered a hate crime (and therefore not protected under the First Amendment), it must include some underlying criminal act," Lantz told Newsweek.

Lantz said this line "is often quite thin—verbally offensive hate speech can rise to the level of a hate crime without any physical action, provided that those words break a criminal law."

This would be the case, for instance, if the speech included a specific threat, he said. "But the simplest way to distinguish that threshold is to ask whether the perpetrator (in this case, Minadeo) has violated any criminal law."