Ye’s “WW3” Video Features Repurposed ‘Roots’ Scene, Depicts Woman Being Whipped

The artist formerly known as Kanye West, recently seen wearing KKK-style attire in a long-form interview with Akademiks, has shared a video for his song “WW3.” While the song itself is not new, having previously been made the subject of an Adin Ross reaction clip, the video is, or at least relatively so. Featuring a repurposed scene from the Emmy-winning 1977 miniseries Roots, it initially premiered at the tail end of the Akademiks upload from this weekend.

Monday, Ye shared the video to X, which has become his platform of choice as of late and is where he’s aligned himself with everything from “I love Hitler” to “After further reflection I’ve come to the realization that I’m not a Nazi.” Those remarks, of course, were preceded a little over two years earlier by Ye’s Hitler-praising Alex Jones interview.

The repurposed Roots footage is blended with a depiction of a nude woman being whipped. From there, still shots of two people fucking are included, thus rendering the video impossible to embed into this article. Deeper into the video, we’re shown a burning cross and what appears to be footage of a Ku Klux Klan meeting. The cross crumbles in the video’s final seconds.

The full video, at least for now, can be found here.

“WW3,” to be clear, is not part of the version of Bully Ye recently shared alongside a short film. In fact, the song’s lyrical content is directly at odds with much of what was heard on Bully, portions of which Ye himself admitted were made with A.I. It wasn’t immediately confirmed whether the “WW3” video employed the use of generative A.I.

In the Ak interview, as we already told you, Ye spoke about his jealousy toward Kendrick Lamar, likening it to the jealousy of the higher power depicted in the Bible. He also said that frequent collaborator Vanessa Beecroft is “really where SKIMS came from.”