America needs Kanye
Kanye West has given up on politics. And America is poorer for it. Seriously. Once scorned by conservatives for proclaiming on national television that President George W. Bush didn’t care about black people, Ye, as Kanye now prefers to be called, seemed to rehabilitate his reputation with the right through his friendship with President Donald Trump.
During 2018, the multi-Grammy-winning rapper unleashed a torrent of Trump support that led many conservatives to believe an entertainment A-lister was redeemable.
For example, in April, West tweeted: “You don’t have to agree with trump (sic) but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.”
He displayed such independence on “Saturday Night Live” in September, delivering a Trump-loving sermon that left liberal jaws agape, and again in mid-October, by donning his MAGA hat and visiting Trump at the White House.
Yet in late October the lovefest apparently was over.
West complained on Twitter that he had been “used to spread messages I don’t believe in,” and was “distancing” himself from politics. The rapper griped that a black conservative activist named Candace Owens had attributed a major role to him in her #Blexit campaign, wherein she urges black Americans to flee the Democratic Party. The rapper denied involvement, and appeared both hurt and angry. Owens apologized to him.
Then recently, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, was interviewed by CNN and, according to the San Jose Mercury News, “confirmed what many suspected”: That her husband only supported Trump out of ignorance.
Liberals could sigh with relief. Kanye was back in the herd.
But more interesting was Kardashian’s explanation for her husband’s foray into politics: “He’s just fighting for free thought. And for the freedom to like a person, even if it’s not the popular decision.”
Free thought — now there’s a concept. If only liberals believed in it. Despite their pious claims to adore intellectual freedom, liberals deep down really despise tolerance and diversity of thought.
West noted as much on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in August. He told the host, “Just as a musician, African-American guy out in Hollywood — all these different things, everyone around me tried to pick my candidate for me and then told me every time I said I liked Trump that I couldn’t say it out loud or my career would be over, I’d get kicked out (of) the black community, because blacks, we’re supposed to have a monolithic thought — we can only be Democrats.”
Yes, in the liberal mind how dare Ye — a wealthy, popular, talented black man — support Trump.
Commentators, black and white alike, reacted to enforce the dogma. The kinder ones maintained West, who has struggled with mental health issues, was off his medications or out of his mind. Other less amicable observers cast West as a race traitor — one CNN panelist, Tara Setmeyer, called him Trump’s “token negro” — or just plain stupid.
The leftists’ reaction to West was appalling and shameful, yet revelatory.
Unlike the knee-jerk conformists in the #Resistance, West was a real revolutionary. On “SNL” he said, “We need to have dialogue, not a diatribe,” adding that in his line of work, “(i)t’s easy to make it seem like it’s so, so, so one-sided.” While it’s difficult to see why talking is a problem, liberals don’t want the former because they do want the latter.
So, their not-so-subtle message: Get back in line and don’t make us smack you again. And if it could be done to an influential black celebrity like Ye, why should any independent-thinking black person step up to challenge the left’s tired groupthink on race and politics?
Conservatives shouldn’t mistake Kanye for one of their own. But their momentary embrace of him was understandable. Hollywood has beaten down their ideals and values for decades, and so it’s refreshing to find someone willing to reject the orthodoxy.
On the other hand, it turns out liberals hardly knew Ye, and didn’t really want to hear Ye once they learned more. Now, Ye is silent. That unfortunate, but predictable, circumstance has only made politics less diverse and less interesting.