Kanye West Meet the new face of Black conservatism.
The Rebirth of Kanye West Meet the new face of Black conservatism.
By Zak Cheney-Rice
NY Magazine
Nov 7, 2022
For most of his career, Kanye West has griped about not getting what he deserved, so there was a kind of perverse poetry in how the past month unfolded. When he cut ties with Gap in September and premiered a “White Lives Matter”–themed collection weeks later under his YZY fashion line, Diddy reproached him. “Don’t buy the shirt,” the mogul urged his Instagram followers. When West claimed the next day that Diddy was being controlled by “Jewish people,” West’s Instagram account was restricted, prompting an antisemitic Twitter rant and the dissolution of partnerships with Balenciaga, Vogue, and athletes signed to his Donda Sports agency. “I can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me — now what?” he boasted shortly before Adidas, too, ended their near-decade-long relationship.
… Here’s how that process is going so far: West appeared for a two-part interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight, during which Carlson went to great lengths to reassure viewers that the rapper was lucid and rational — even as the show’s editors had to cut several more of his anti-semitic statements and conspiracy theories, including his claim that Hanukkah would be a better holiday for his kids to celebrate than Kwanzaa because it provides “financial engineering.” He has agreed to buy Parler, the conservative social-media platform known for being used to plan the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021. (Parler CEO George Farmer is married to West’s friend Candace Owens, the Black conservative influencer.) And he posted admiringly about NBA star Kyrie Irving, who recently stoked controversy by promoting an antisemitic movie on social media, and Herschel Walker, the former football player turned Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia. West captioned the Walker post with the words PRO LIFE.
West’s rising status in the conservative movement could be summed up in an October 6 tweet by the Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee, which has gone conspicuously undeleted even as the rapper’s antisemitism has ramped up: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
… It was the natural next step for West to find an ideological refuge in a conservative movement transformed by Trump. His declarations about being victimized by a host of specters — his ex-wife, the Jews, the impostors who’ve replaced his children — is in tune with a movement whose identity is increasingly defined by enemies real or imagined, even when it’s in power, and demands for impunity. NBC News reported in early November that half a dozen of West’s former employees had heard him praise Hitler or mention conspiracy theories about Jews, a fascistic turn that no doubt will be glossed over by Fox News and other conservative organs that have done the same for dozens of Republican politicians. His singular voice will become one of many howling into the same ether. He’ll be more alienated than ever from the people and communities that made him, but at least he’ll be home.
More here
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/kanye-west-is-the-new-face-of-black-conservatism.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
