Ye, the rapper and designer formerly known as Kanye West, aired a commercial in some markets during the Super Bowl that promoted a website selling a single product: T-shirts with swastikas.
In the 30-second commercial, Ye appears to be filming a close-up of his face while lying in a dentist’s chair. “I spent, like, all the money for the commercial on these new teeth,” he said, smiling into the camera. “So, once again, I had to shoot it on the iPhone.”
Ye then directs people to his online store, Yeezy.com, which is currently selling only one item: a $20 white T-shirt with a black swastika. 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.
The ad aired days after Ye unleashed a rant on social media in which he called himself a Nazi and professed his love for Adolf Hitler. He later deactivated his X account.
On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League condemned the commercial, writing on X that “there’s no excuse for this kind of behavior.”
“The swastika is the symbol adopted by Hitler as the primary emblem of the Nazis,” the Anti-Defamation League wrote. “It galvanized his followers in the 20th century and continues to threaten and instill fear in those targeted by antisemitism and white supremacy.”
Earlier this year, Ye released a confounding collection of clothing on his online store, including pieces with cryptic or nonsensical messages in Cyrillic and Greek lettering. Hoodies, sweats and shorts contained phrases in Russian like “Herald Tribune,” which linguistics experts said did not hold any hidden meaning within the language.
Fox, which broadcast the Super Bowl, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Shopify, the online platform that processes the website’s orders, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ye appears to have purchased the ad in local markets, and it was not broadcast nationally, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The ad ran again on Fox in the same markets on Sunday, a few hours after the game ended. While national Super Bowl ads can cost millions of dollars, local ads, which air in select locations, cost many times less.
A representative for Ye did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2022, Ye was suspended from X after he posted a series of offensive messages, including an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. Elon Musk, the site’s owner, said at the time that the post violated X’s rule against the incitement of violence. 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.
In the past, Ye has said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but in a podcast interview that was released last week, he said that he had been misdiagnosed and that he has autism.
