5
Ice Cube's Been Dabbling In Anti-Semitic Memes
The Twitter feed of Ice Cube (real name Ichabod Cube) is the kind of whirling nonstop opinion parade that you'd expect from someone with way, way more time on their hands. Most of what he posts is benign and understandable: Trump is a doofus, fuck the police unless we're talking the beloved Ride Along Cinematic Universe, it's weird that America has military bases named after Confederates, it's weird that Ice Cube at age 5 has the exact same expression as Ice Cube at 50.
But having the same reposting filters as your grandma has led to Cube endorsing weird stuff, like this Ben "Definitely Cranks it to Trump" Garrison cartoon portraying anyone who wears a mask to shield their fellow citizens from COVID as cowards duped by a liberal media that's invented a plague to advance a variety of nefarious conspiracies. Garrison, when he's not mocking school shooting survivors, has dabbled in anti-Semitism with all the subtlety of a German public school textbook circa 1938. A cartoon depicting the Rothchilds as shadowy puppeteers managed to get him uninvited from a White House event, and you have to try pretty damn hard to make the Trump White House distance themselves from you.
Cube, meanwhile, has been sharing conspiratorial images, like a mural portraying scheming, hook-nosed Jews secretly controlling the world by an artist who, just in case you didn't pick up on his subtle messaging, has called Jews "demons." Over a spree of posts that, in a non-COVID world, should have seen an assistant rip his phone from his hands and throw it into the nearest river, Cube linked the oppression of black people to a Jewish conspiracy in-between sharing pictures of Trump photoshopped as the Joker, to the applause of 14-year-olds intellectuals everywhere.
When critics pointed out that his anti-Trump hot takes were hard to take seriously when wedged between his anti-Semitic hot takes, he responded with posts like "I speak for no organization. I only speak for the meek people of thee earth. We will not expect crumbles from your table" and "DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE: THE DEVIL WILL COME AT ME (AND YOU) WITH THIS TATIC. 1)Dismiss us 2)Discredit us 3)Demonize us 4)Destroy us!!! The formula they used against Martin Luther King Jr & many others!!!" So, he was in a bit of a mood.
The fact that Cube also retweeted a QAnon image about how the media has committed treason, then told a critic "I don't know who the f--k Q is? It's just a True statement" tempts us to write this off as isolation driving him stir-crazy. But Cube has palled around with anti-Semitic preacher and all-around weirdo Louis "Actually, German Jews Funded the Holocaust, Duh" Farrakhan, and in 2015 he was accused of having his posse assault a rabbi while slinging epithets. So, he's unfortunately in deeper than his rogue grandma tweet storm would suggest.
Big sigh here, Cube. Well, we'll always have Nickelodeon.
4
The Russell Simmons Documentary, And 50 Cent Attacking It, Got Drowned Out By Everything Else Happening In 2020
Russell Simmons co-founded Def Jam in 1984, and if you're white enough to consider Taylor Swift's newer work too "urban" let's just say that was a big deal in the history of hip hop. In 2017 he was accused of raping a model when she was 17, and that led to a flood of evidence that he's been a predatory creep all these years.