I Know But Still: Why You Need To Pay Attention To Kanye West

When I accepted Alpha News’ offer last year to write a weekly opinion piece for them, I could never have imagined writing about Kanye West. I know him in the way people vaguely know about dominant pop culture figures because you can’t really avoid them. It’s akin to standing on a street corner and getting splashed by a passing car.

But this weekend something genuinely remarkable happened and it’s worth noticing. Kanye tweeted to his sixteen million followers “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” From so little, so much.

Candace Owens is a black conservative woman who rejects what she calls the “victim” mentality of the black political establishment. She’s conservative and she supports Trump, which is more than you can say for a lot of Republicans, nationally and locally. She was making a name for herself through her intelligence, eloquence and powers of persuasion.

The reality though, is that she would have likely had a prominent profile on the right but would never have broken through to the mainstream but for Kanye’s tweet. That’s something we simply have to live with but the important thing is that it actually happened.

For a change, the hysterics and over-the-top meltdown from the Regressive Left was justified. Kanye endorsing Owens indicted everything they stand for; a cultural and political rebuke of the first order.

Naturally, Owens was viciously attacked and smeared but the stakes were so high that the Left even went after Kanye, something heretofore unthinkable.

Things got weirder: on Monday Scott Adams, of Dilbert cartoon fame, made a twenty minute Periscope talking about how Kanye had broken free of “the prison of the mind.” Not long thereafter, Kanye tweeted video excerpts and in short order there were no doors on hinges among the Cultural Marxists in America.

Sagely, Adams that day later made another Periscope in which he said he was about to be slandered, vilified and have his public comments over many years taken out of context in order to destroy him. That has happened.

What hasn’t happened is Kanye taking back that tweet, deleting it, apologizing for it or doing any of those things we too often see when the frenzied mob of Leftists are let loose. In fact, he went on some radio show called “Hot 97” (whatever) and said that he loved Donald Trump.

If you can’t understand the significance of this moment, you have no business following politics, let alone pretending to work in it. Bret Easton Ellis, the author of ‘80’s cocaine binges and insecure status positioning, tweeted: “Kanye on Twitter this week has been the most exciting thing happening in this cultural moment: an example for everyone to express themselves without fear. If you have a “problem” with Kanye’s tweets then YOU are the problem.”

Naturally a conservative had to get stupid about such an excellent development and FOX News host Jesse Watters didn’t disappoint, saying that Kanye “was a modern-day philosopher.” This left him wide open for an attack from the thuggish Cenk Uygur of “Young Turks” who tweeted: “Fox News hosts now calling ‪@kanyewest‬ a “modern-day philosopher.” That’s hilarious. Kanye is one of the dumbest guys in the country. But then those same hosts think Trump is a genius. Kanye might be Trump’s black twin – an empty celebrity who is dumb, narcissistic and shameless.”

When a Leftist is comfortable calling a successful black man those names, known literally all over the world, you know the stakes are extremely high. And indeed they are. If ten, fifteen or twenty percent of the voting population among American blacks flee the Democratic plantation, everything in our political life changes, and for good.

Scott Adams gets it, tweeting: “Democrats are on the verge of losing African-American votes, and that would be game-over for the party. You can see the panic in their fake news attacks on me. But especially watch how they IGNORE Kanye West’s IDEAS in favor of attacking PERSONALITIES. #DeathRattle”

It’s good to remember Saul Alinksy: “If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them.” Kanye’s endorsement of Owens is the start of something unprecedented and only yet to begin unfolding.

Even before the accelerant of tweeting out Adams’ videos and professing his love for Trump on radio had happened, Mark Tapson, writing in Front Page Magazine, captured the essence of the matter in his first paragraph: “A seismic shift in the cultural and political American landscape this weekend emanated from an unlikely epicenter: superstar rapper Kanye West, who tweeted a controversial endorsement of black conservative commentator Candace Owens. Nothing triggers leftist anger quite like blacks thinking for themselves, and not like they do. So the left erupted with predictable fury toward both West and Owens.”

I note, because I’m unable to resist, that this is happening under a Trump presidency. With no other Republican, putting aside the little matter of their losing in a landslide to Lady Macbeth, would this be possible. Lifelong, career politicians in both parties have made this country the mess that it is.

I wrote frequently in 2016 about Trump effectuating a political realignment and was roundly mocked for it until it happened. But no one could have seen something like this developing which helps free an entire segment of American society that has kept them in a new form of slavery, with disastrous results for them.

By happy chance, our friends at the Center of the American Experiment are bringing in Candace Owens on May 8 for a luncheon briefing. Her address is called “Why I Took The Red Pill.” Click here for registration information.

Dave Rubin, of the Rubin Report, recently had Owens as his guest and I can’t recommend the video enough.

On another show Owens said: “When you go up against the left, this is what they do: they try to, essentially, say that you are not allowed to think differently.”

After a seven word tweet, from of all people Kanye West, that stranglehold is in the process of being broken. I’m not tired.

 

John Gilmore

John Gilmore is an author, freelance writer & former opinion columnist for Alpha News. He blogs at minnesotaconservatives.org & is @Shabbosgoy on Twitter