Don’t you just love starting off the day with a new Kanye West headline? Doesn’t it just let you know that a great day is about to happen? Today’s Kanye West headline belongs to a genre that’s on the rise lately: Someone who has given Kanye West a platform removing a piece of Kanye-related content and apologizing for letting the guy say the shit that he said. In this case, the person is rap veteran N.O.R.E., who had Kanye on his Drink Champs podcast over the weekend and who let Kanye spread some truly toxic lies.

Two days ago, Kanye West made his third appearance on Drink Champs, a podcast that mostly consists of aging rappers telling drunken war stories. In his most recent interview, Kanye West claimed that George Floyd had not been murdered by police and that he’d died of a fentanyl overdose; Floyd’s family is reportedly considering legal action against Kanye. On that episode, Kanye also went on about “Jewish Zionists” and claimed that Jewish people “own the Black voice” because of all the prominent Black people “being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”

In the early parts of the Drink Champs interview, N.O.R.E. did not push back against Kanye West’s comments. Later on, he did try to rebut, but he was pretty drunk by that point. Now, that Drink Champs interview has been removed from YouTube and Revolt. (That follows the news story that LeBron James’ HBO show The Shop has pulled its Kanye episode and that Fox News even edited out some disturbing stuff out of Tucker Carlson’s Kanye interview.)

Yesterday, as Billboard reports, N.O.R.E. talked to to Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg. In that conversation, N.O.R.E. apologized for giving Kanye West that platform and attempted to explain how he and his team made the decision to air the conversation in the first place:

I have a relationship with Ye. When he was going through a lot of things that he was going through, he would call me, and he would actually listen to me and take my advice. So I felt like I could control the situation. I felt that I could control the interview. And I’ve learned early on that I didn’t. As a Black man, I feel like I failed. As a human, I feel like I failed. But as a journalist, I succeeded. Because as a journalist, you’re not really supposed to have an opinion. You’re supposed to let people talk, and my biggest critique on Drink Champs is “N.O.R.E. always cutting people off!” And the one time I didn’t cut the people!

N.O.R.E. also said that he regrets that he did the interview and that he conducted it the way that he did. Here’s the video of N.O.R.E.’s conversation with Rosenberg:

And here is Chris Cuomo calling West out in an interview on CNN.