Kanye West, Tucker Carlson, and Who’s Crazy?

by Roger L. Simon

I am too old to be much of a rap fan. I paid attention at the beginning, with Public Enemy especially, but soon lost interest, so I largely missed the rise of Kanye West, now “ye” West.

Of course, no one could miss him entirely with the Kim Kardashian connection, not to mention the overt Donald Trump connection, the latter courageous for anyone in the entertainment industry.

I was also aware of the imputations that he had emotional problems, that he might be bipolar, an illness—if it really is one—said to be common to creative people.

In general, however, what I did know of multi-talented Kanye—including that he was a force in the fashion world—impressed me.

When I heard he had marched into Paris Fashion Week with Candace Owens, both wearing t-shirts with “White Lives Matter” emblazoned on the back, I was yet more impressed.

I regarded Black Lives Matter as a scam from the outset, a financial ripoff of white liberals with no benefit whatsoever to blacks—other than the organization’s leadership that absconded with the lavish donations and bought real estate.

That’s the hierarchal manner in which communism and socialism work. Leadership puts a system in place in which they profit and the rest are, in essence, serfs.

A man with 18 million Instagram followers, including, most probably, a fair percentage of the youth of America, Kanye is arguably the greatest threat to this system extant in this country.

So it was with considerable interest I watched on YouTube part one of Tucker Carlson’s interview with West.

It didn’t disappoint.

This was not the first time Carlson showed what an extraordinary interviewer he is—who can forget Tony Bobulinski and the Hunter Biden laptop—and why Carlson has been for some time the deserved king of cable news.

Unlike Bobulinski, who is newsworthy not so much for himself but for the Biden Family information he conveyed, West is compelling for who he is.

Not that there wasn’t information in the Kanye interview, although his succinct response to the necessary question of why he wore the “White Lives Matter” t-shirt—“Because they do”—should be obvious to any semi-moral adult.

Such people are likely the majority but they have been told by the left, as with so many things, to shut up. It was a seminal moment in 2015 when former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley sheepishly retracted his commonsensical statement that “All lives matter.” It’s all been downhill since then.

When West wore the t-shirt, the forces of the left—what he calls “liberal Nazis” and that I call reactionary because they are—massed to attack him in the media, social and otherwise. A black woman was brought forth to say she “felt traumatized” when she saw the shirt.

As West put it during the interview, “The majority of the media has a godless agenda.”

He is a devout Christian and, in a telling moment on the show, Carlson spotlighted that Kanye was wearing an amulet with a photo of a baby’s ultrasound around his neck. The pro-life rapper commented that “Fifty percent of black babies in America are aborted.”

He isn’t the first to say that the high black abortion rate is genocidal, but when he does, more young people than probably ever before are listening.

He also had a fascinating piece of gossip that I would deem more than likely true—that his estranged wife Kim was, unbeknownst to him, close to the Clintons who were urging her to wean him from Trump, warning Kanye the association could damage his career.

He was, as he said, “being handled.”

I also learned that his father was a reformed Black Panther. As a reformed leftie myself who knew some of the Panthers in my youth—some who reformed and some who didn’t—I found that interesting as well.

I didn’t agree with everything West said. I don’t think the Abraham Accords were exclusively about money, nor do I like his recommendation that blacks should have territory cut out for them in the middle of the country.

As far as I’m concerned, all identity politics stinks.

But the most important question arising out of the interview was is this man crazy?

Obviously not.

And I will go further. The definition of crazy or mentally ill—however you want to define it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association or wherever—in our society has become so politicized that it barely exists as a thing in itself except in the rarest of cases.

We are closer now to Stalin’s times when political dissidents were declared to be mentally impaired and put away.

It’s hard to find a therapist who has not been politically infected leftward. If you are conservative or even libertarian most will subtly try to change your views as if they were an illness.

Do not go, except in the most extreme circumstances, and even then, do so with caution. And be very wary of anti-depressants. Some are suggesting now that they may have a reverse effect.

If you’re feeling depressed or anxious, try exercise and/or meditation. Not only are they more effective, but they’re also cheaper.

Better yet, try prayer. I’ve been doing a bit of it lately, and it works.

First published in the Epoch Times.