After rapper and designer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, bought a local TV ad during the Super Bowl, people realized it promoted his website that was selling just one product — T-shirts with swastikas.
The symbol of Nazi Germany, which is still used by modern-day far-right extremists, appeared in black on the white T-shirts, NBC News reported. They were being sold for $20, and no text or explanation accompanied the item — just the letters “HH-o1.”
It was the only item for sale on the front page of yeezy.com as of Monday morning. The website was down as of Tuesday.
Though the Super Bowl ad wasn’t shown nationally, it was at least seen in the Los Angeles area, according to multiple reports, NBC News said. The 30-second commercial depicted Ye in a dentist’s chair undergoing treatment, the New York Times reported.
“So what’s up, guys? I spent, like, all the money for the commercial on these new teeth,” he said in the commercial. “So once again, I had to shoot it on the iPhone. Um, um, um, go to yeezy.com.” The shirts were not mentioned in the ad.
According to Variety, when the commercial aired Sunday night, the website was selling a range of non-branded clothing, but shortly after it was selling only the shirt with the swastika.
On Tuesday morning, the website for his store appeared to have gone offline, replaced by a message that said, “This store is unavailable,” the Times said.
A spokesperson for Shopify, the online platform that processes the website’s orders, said that Ye’s online store “did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify,” according to the Times.
British far-right political commentator, Milo Yiannopoulos, who acts as a spokesperson for Ye, told NBC News in an emailed statement that “Ye is an intergenerational artist and icon who continues to redefine the limits of creativity and free expression. He has deactivated his X account for the time being.”
The shirts appeared to go on sale on yeezy.com over the weekend — even though Ye said on X that he would never sell a shirt with a swastika, NBC News said.
“I would never sell a swastika tee because people could be physically harmed wearing it … I love my fans and supporters,” he wrote on Saturday.
Yiannopoulos did not respond to a question about the shirts.
The Anti-Defamation League posted a statement Monday describing the shirt sales as further proof of Ye’s antisemitism, according to NBC News. The organization, which was formed to combat anti-Jewish bigotry and discrimination, reiterated that the swastika was “adopted by Hitler as the primary emblem of the Nazis.”
“It galvanized his followers in the 20th century and continues to threaten and instill fear in those targeted by antisemitism and white supremacy,” the ADL said. “If that wasn’t enough, the t-shirt is labeled on Kanye’s website as ‘HH-01,’ which is code for ‘Heil Hitler.’”
The launch of the T-shirt comes after Ye had been posting a string of antisemitic messages in recent days on his X account. Ye was previously locked out of his X account in 2022 over antisemitic remarks.
The site reinstated his account almost eight months later, and in 2023, Ye apologized to the Jewish community for his comments with a post on Instagram written in Hebrew, the Times said.
On Sunday evening, West seemed to deactivate his own account. “I’m logging out of Twitter. I appreciate Elon for allowing me to vent, It has been very cathartic to use the world as a sounding board,” he posted, CNN Business reported.
In response to a user complaining about West posting “literal porn,” Musk wrote: “Given what he has posted, his account is now classified as NSFW. You should not be seeing that anymore,” according to CNN Business. (NSFW stands for “not safe for work.”)