Standing between a Nazi-era boxcar that once transported Jews to death camps and a Danish fishing vessel that smuggled Jewish refugees to safety, a coalition of Florida political leaders gathered at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg Monday and demanded the Tampa Sports Authority cancel two upcoming Kanye West concerts. Among them was Pastor Scott Thomas, Florida state director for Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and pastor of Free Life Chapel in Lakeland — a man who has spent three decades building bridges between evangelical Christians and the Jewish people, and who now finds himself on the front lines of a battle over what a publicly funded stadium is permitted to platform.
Ye — as West now styles himself — is scheduled to perform at Raymond James Stadium on June 26 and 28. He made a series of antisemitic statements in early 2025 on social media, including “I love Hitler. I’m a Nazi” and “I don’t like or trust any Jewish person,” and in May 2025 released a song titled “Heil Hitler,” sampling audio from an Adolf Hitler speech. Authorities in Italy, the UK, Switzerland, and Poland have already canceled his scheduled performances. Australia barred his entry entirely. Yet two sold-out nights at Raymond James Stadium remain on the books.
“His declaration: I love Hitler, I am a Nazi,” Thomas said. “A ‘Heil Hitler’ song released in 2025. ‘I’m going to go defcon on the Jews.’ These are quotes — and he is indoctrinating a whole generation. His merch is full of swastikas, and he stated ‘I had this idea eight years ago.’ By Kanye’s own admission, this is where we are.”
For Thomas, the outrage is deeply personal, rooted in a love for the Jewish people that began in 1992 when he made his first trip to Israel — a visit that, by his own account, changed everything. “I came back with a heart transplant,” he said. “It wasn’t the dead Jews of the Bible anymore. It was the living Jews of today.”
That bond has only deepened over the years. He has led twenty tours to Israel. He serves on the executive board of CUFI alongside Pastor John Hagee. He has worked with Jewish federations, the JCC, JNF, and AIPAC across the Tampa Bay area. When his Jewish partners alerted him that Ye was booked for two nights at a taxpayer-linked stadium, he did not hesitate.
“I received a phone call a week and a half ago from the Jewish community,” Thomas recounted. “They said, ‘Pastor, are you aware of this?’ Long story short, they reached out to Senator Rick Scott, and he jumped on the bandwagon immediately.”
Sen. Rick Scott sent a letter to the Tampa Sports Authority demanding cancellation of the concerts. “Kanye West has been an outspoken antisemite and has even called himself a Nazi,” Scott said. “As leaders, we should do everything in our power to keep public money and resources out of this kind of event.”
The Tampa Sports Authority pushed back, insisting that no taxpayer money is being used for the shows, and that the authority recognizes concerns being expressed about the upcoming events. But Thomas rejects the framing. “It is a publicly funded, taxpayer-subsidized facility,” he said. “That means Jews and Christians in Tampa who are against antisemitism — their resources are being used to platform somebody who would have settled in very well as Hitler’s opening act for the Third Reich.”
The press conference drew every major television camera in the region and went viral, with Rolling Stone picking up Sen. Scott’s letter. Sen. Ashley Moody echoed the call for accountability: “When you are a taxpayer-funded body, and you are prioritizing hate and antisemitism, you have a lot of explaining to do.”
The most raw statement of the afternoon came from Holocaust survivor Toni Rhinde, who cut through all the legal and political argumentation with six words: “Let’s go and tell Kanye to F-off.”
Thomas draws a direct line between the current cultural moment and the failures of 1938. He recalled Holocaust survivor Irving Roth, who spent years touring American universities with CUFI sharing his story. “When October 7th hit,” Thomas said, “several of us said we were almost grateful that Irving wasn’t here to see it happen again after all of his work — to see it rise back to this level.”
The comparison with the pre-war years, in Thomas’s view, is prophecy confirmed. He quoted Isaiah: “Woe to him who calls good evil and evil good” (Isaiah 5:20). “We are back in that day,” he said. “People don’t even know the difference between good and evil anymore.”
Thomas sees the current crisis as inseparable from a theological rupture inside American Christianity. Replacement theology — the doctrine that the Church has superseded Israel and inherited God’s covenant promises — has, in his reading, created the conditions for Christian indifference to Jewish suffering. “From 100 CE, Justin Martyr and the Patristic fathers were defining Christianity against anything to do with its Jewish heritage,” he said. “That schism fomenting hatred has run all the way to today. We are not asking the right questions, and we are not resituating our Bible back into its proper place.”
His prescription is blunt: “The cure for antisemitism is to open your Bible and actually read it.”
He frames God’s covenant with Israel not as ancient history but as present reality — a running promise that the Church has no authority to revoke. “God says in Ezekiel: ‘Israel defiled my name. They did not obey. But I am bringing them back for my name’s sake,'” Thomas said. “It’s not about how good or not good we are. It’s God’s covenant-keeping faithfulness — which is the epitome of grace. So how does the Church stand on a platform and preach grace to the congregation and then want to withhold it from God’s own people?”
He uses a football analogy to describe what Christian-Jewish partnership was always meant to look like: “At Mount Sinai, God handed the ball to Israel and said: carry this. Run with it — the Torah, the Word, for the nations. Christianity should have been running beside the Jews, blocking for them. Instead, for many centuries, Christianity has been tackling its own teammate.”
Thomas is calling on people to contact the Tampa Sports Authority directly. “CEO at tampasportsauthority.com,” he said. “Mr. Eric Hart is the president, and we are writing to him and saying: bad idea, wrong on every level.”
He is realistic about whether the concerts will be canceled. “I don’t know that we’re going to stop it,” he said. “But we want to set a precedent. If anything ever tries to raise its head again in our community, there will be a response — and it will be strong.”
The principle driving him is one he states without qualification: “The Holocaust succeeded because of silence. We have got to break that silence today. Anyone who wants to foment that ideology needs to realize there will be a massive rebuttal.”
