Earlier this week, on CNN, I watched the “dumbest man on television” host a panel of two African American liberals. They were discussing Kanye West’s newfound political outspokenness in favor of President Donald Trump, and you’d think you were listening to southern Democrats from the 1960s. It got so bad, I was waiting for one of them to use the word “uppity.”
In case you missed it, here are the highlights — all assertions by the African American guests: “this is what happens when negroes don’t read”; “black folks” are ready to “trade Kanye West in the racial draft”; West is an “attention whore”; he’s the “token negro of the Trump administration”; “no one should take Kanye West seriously”; he “clearly has issues” and has “already been hospitalized.”
There was also one white person on the panel, a former member of the George W. Bush administration. He looked on with some horror as these words spilled out. It seemed, in my view, that he was the only one with a full understanding of how awful it all was.
Ironically, before the racial epithets started, Bakari Sellers, one of the African American panelists, dismissed Kanye West’s interest in the Trump movement as “anti-intellectualism.” “[It] simply isn’t cool,” he said.
But it’s worth asking the question: Why? What has West done to merit such vitriol?
The answer is frightening and simple: He is thinking for himself. He’s wearing a MAGA hat. And he has influence.
This terrifies the Left, who have bound black Americans to their policies for decades with fallacious propaganda. The briefest glance at any major city dominated by Democrats’ one-party rule for the past fifty years will reveal some of the worst sociocultural and economic realities in modern history for black Americans (Chicago quickly comes to mind).
Nevertheless, they insist it is the Republicans who are wholesale racists with no interest in helping black and other inner-city communities. It’s laughable, and an insult to black Americans.
Here’s the thing: Democrats can only win national elections when about 85 percent of black Americans vote for them. So any slip in blacks’ political adhesion to the Democratic party, at any electoral level, is totally unacceptable — and a figure like Kanye West would be poised to trigger exactly that.
So the quickest way to become the Left’s newest persona non grata is to do as he has done: break the narrative. Be a famous, outspoken black artist — who also wears a MAGA hat. Use social media to educate the tens of millions in your following — that they don’t have to vote Democrat just because they’re black.
Of course, the result is predictable, but nonetheless grotesque: West must now be destroyed through ad hominem attacks and throwaway references to the shaky state of his mental health. Denouncing him as deranged and illegitimate is the only option because the Left are a group whose policy positions are rooted in power, not progress. They must win at any cost and are willing to literally kick and scream until they’re back in charge.
Just ask Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, or even Hillary Clinton. The failed presidential candidate stated plainly just this week that civility will not return until the Democrats retake Congress. “Do exactly what we say, and nobody gets hurt.” (That sounds creepily totalitarian to me. Anyone else?)
And this is why Kanye West is such a threat. He has escaped the Left’s new plantation — the intellectual slavery under which the Left and their policies have oppressed black Americans for generations.
Thank God for people like Candace Owens, an outspoken conservative voice, campus activist, and modern-day abolitionist. Owens has routinely been smeared by the Left for her efforts to free black Americans from the thinking that they must be Democrats. She has spoken the truth—not nonsense about “black truth” or “her truth,” but objective truth—and has been smacked down and silenced as a result.
Kanye West, Candace Owens, and others are lighting the path toward political and philosophical freedom for other black Americans. We must all support them by calling out the Left for what they have purposefully created: a modern plantation rooted in intellectual enslavement as an ignominious means to consolidate political power.
Nicholas Fitzgerald lives in Washington, D.C., and comments on news and politics. Follow him on Twitter @therealNickFitz.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.