Longtime cryptocurrency journalist Isaiah Jackson was recently fired from Coindesk after a controversial tweet.
Jackson, host of Coindesk TV’s “Community Crypto Show“, posted on Twitter on November 11 claiming that the religious affiliation of “everyone involved in the FTX collapse” had apparently something to do with the exchange’s demise.
For context, FTX’s then-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was born and raised in a Jewish family in Massachusetts.
The journalist finished his tweet by claiming that “Kanye West was right“, allegedly alluding to West’s most recent anti-semitic claims.
Coindesk Response
Following Jackson’s comments, the cryptocurrency news website reported on Twitter that Jackson violated the company’s “values of mutual respect, diversity, and inclusion,” while also claiming that it “does not tolerate antisemitism and any other form of hate speech.“
“In response to a tweet from Isaiah Jackson that made an anti-Semitic, hurtful statement, CoinDesk is immediately terminating his contract for his weekly Community Crypto show on CoinDesk TV.” The company wrote.
After the departure, Jackson defended himself in an interview on The Gentleman Crypto. The journalist claimed that he is not anti-semitic in the slightest – and that the original tweet was written in sarcasm.
“I denounce antisemitism and stand with all my Jewish people,” Jackson said during the interview. “That tweet, I guess it got lost in translation.”
Ye’s Controversy Regarding Jews
West got himself into a lot of controversies when he decided to go on a rant on Twitter. In October, the award-winning rapper posted on Twitter an enigmatic message about going “Death Con 3 on Jewish people.”
The statement was not well received by both the media or the fans, who saw West’s statements ad overly inflammatory.
West proclaims that he cannot be anti-semitic due to being a black person since, according to his reasoning, “black people are also Jewish”.
The backlash from Kanye’s comments resulted in the rapper being banned from the JP Morgan financial institution altogether. Many wondered if Ye was about to move his fortune to Bitcoin, but no official statement was made so far.
Later, Ye doubled down on his claims by telling a street reporter that “they” arguably referring to Jewish people, “can’t control me.”
“They can control Shaq, they can control Charles Barkley. They can control LeBron James, they can control Jay-Z and Beyoncé, but they can’t control me,”
