Friday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson opened his program outlining his understanding of Kanye West’s recent involvement in politics and the backlash he is facing from the left and the media.
Carlson offered West’s opposition to abortion as an example of West’s foray into civics.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: At this moment, the most compelling voice against abortion and Planned Parenthood is not a Republican. The most widely heard Christian evangelist in America is not ordained.
Instead, he is a rapper married to a Kardashian, who by the way, everyone says is crazy. Kanye West is running for President. But that’s not really the headline. The headline is that on core conservative issues, not political issues like legislation before the Congress, but on foundational questions about life and children, and what happens when you die. No one with a national platform has been more honest or sincere or effective than Kanye West has been, maybe in generations.
It’s all pretty shocking, really, talk about an unlikely messenger. But it’s real.
Check out West’s Twitter feed if you haven’t seen it. Not everything he says is conservative, far from it. Not everything he says is even intelligible.
But when West talks about his faith and about the gift of human life, you start to ask yourself, why aren’t there any elected Republicans who sound like that? They say they believe the same things. But if they actually do, why don’t they talk like Kanye West does? And the answer, of course, is because they’re afraid to.
But West is not afraid. He doesn’t have to be. He is too famous. He has made too much money. He sold something like 150 million albums over the past 20 years. And really, it’s hard to cancel a guy like that.
So what is the left do in response to Kanye West? How do you make Kanye West shut up? The short answer is you can’t. So you work to discredit him. You go ad hominem. You ignore what he’s saying. You attack him as a person. You don’t engage with his ideas, you know, you would lose if you tried that.
So instead, you try to keep people from listening to him. It’s an easier job when you’re dealing with less famous people. Thanks to our centrally controlled internet, the left can usually silence dissent in an instant with a press of a button.
But with prominent wrong thinkers like Kanye West, censorship requires a finer touch, more artistic flair.
When the author J.K. Rowling had the gall to note that biological sex is a physical reality, not just a state of mind, Google couldn’t simply wipe her off the internet. She’s J.K. Rowling. She created “Harry Potter.” So the left had to destroy her more methodically.
One British news site compared Rowling to the anti-Semite, Richard Wagner, and then dismissed her as quote, “deeply unpleasant.” So multiply that attack by hundreds of stories, and over time, they are confident, and maybe they’re right, that no one will ever listen to J.K. Rowling again.
In Kanye West’s case, they decided to attack him as mentally ill. You hear that a lot now, but it’s a relatively new tactic. It was just a little over four years ago that CNN published a piece about Kanye West. They highlighted his most famous moments like the time he interrupted Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards.
CNN described all these incidents as quote, “controversial,” but there was no mention of Kanye West being a danger to himself much less mentally ill. No, just controversial. Not a problem.
And then West appeared to say something positive about Donald Trump and everything changed in an instant. Kanye West became a babbling lunatic. The kind of guy who pulls imaginary insects out of the air and soils his own pants, a total nutcase. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kanye West’s event on Sunday and you saw …
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: … at least, I saw him, and clearly in trouble.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): We met David Bowen, a Democratic state representative earlier this summer. Bowen telling CNN, “It’s sad to see a popular music artist like Kanye be used as a pawn to trick his own people and fans.”
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: So new questions this morning about Kanye West’s mental health after this tweetstorm and so-called campaign rally.
BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You see that ignorance and asinine thought and behavior has been something that’s risen to the top.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Whether a clearly vulnerable Mr. West is being used to try to siphon votes away from Joe Biden.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: They’re sad. They’re concerned. He’s in trouble. Oh, it’s also fake. The feigned concern, the oily fake empathy, Kanye is vulnerable, right? These people are actually worried, but they’re not worried about Kanye West or his family. They don’t care about them.
They’re worried about the threat that West poses to Democratic Party orthodoxy and, therefore, to their power. They don’t say that out loud. They’re liars. So instead, they continue to play the role of psychiatric nurse.
Here’s the guy whose job it is to get drunk on camera on New Year’s Eve, letting Kanye West know that he is embarrassing himself and his dead mother.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: What I saw was a minstrel show today. Him in front of all of these white people, mostly white people, embarrassing himself and embarrassing Americans, but mostly African Americans.
And now all of a sudden, he is the person who represents the African American community? He doesn’t. This was an embarrassment.
Kanye’s mother is rolling over in her grave.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: He is defiling the memory of his mother. Sad. You’ll notice that this group of cable news mental health experts may be deeply concerned about Kanye West, and yet for all of their apparent medical training, somehow, they don’t appear to notice that Joe Biden can no longer speak English.
Joe is fine. He is not embarrassing anyone.
Kanye West, by contrast, is deeply embarrassing to them, mostly because he is embarrassing to the Democratic Party. Here is someone who should be a Democrat, calling out the most absurd lie that party tells. We care about black lives. That’s why we want more abortion clinics in black neighborhoods. That’s their position. It is insultingly stupid, and anyone who thinks about it knows that.
When you love your kids, you want them to grow up and have children of their own. It’s the main thing you want. But if your most consistent message to your children was please, end your pregnancy. They might start to wonder how you really felt about them. And Kanye West has started to wonder about that and things like that.
Last month on Twitter, West wrote that he had quote, “Cried at the thought of aborting my firstborn. I’m concerned for the world that feels you shouldn’t cry about this subject.” That’s for sure. It’s obvious.
But when Kanye West says it, people might actually listen to him, and that’s a massive problem for the left. Here he is last month.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KANYE WEST, ARTIST: My mom saved my life. My dad wanted to abort me. My mom saved my life. There would have been no Kanye West because my dad was too busy.
I almost killed my daughter. I almost killed my daughter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: When was the last time you heard someone famous say something like that in public? Let’s see. Never. And then West went on to point out some of the more inconvenient facts that the progressive left wants you to forget, quote, “Over 22,500,000 black babies have been aborted over the past 50 years,” West tweeted. See, the media said, he’s not well. Pray for him.
Of course, what West said was factually true. What’s also true is that Planned Parenthood was founded by someone who wanted fewer black people. That’s why she founded Planned Parenthood. Her name was Margaret Sanger, and she once wondered aloud about the appearances of quote “exterminating the Negro population,” end quote. It’s disgusting.
You can find that on Google. West has, he knows it. And learning it clearly made him rethink his worldview. Here he is from a couple of years ago.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WEST: One of the moves that I love that liberals try to do, a liberal would try to control a black person through the concept of racism because they know that we are a very proud emotional people.
So when I said, I like Trump, to like someone that’s liberal, they’ll say, oh, but he’s racist. You think racism can control me? Oh, that don’t stop me. That’s an visible wall.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, no wonder they hate him. Now, to be clear, Kanye West is not a normal person. And we’re not saying he is. He has said out loud. He sometimes suffers from something he calls a sprained brain. We’re not sure what that is. We’re not pretending to be mental health experts. And maybe Kanye West is crazy. We don’t know.
But it’s also true and wise people know this, that at a time like this, a lunatic time, sometimes it is only the crazy people who can see the world clearly.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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