Despite declaring that celebrities are false idols in our society in a sometimes jealous response to the Left’s undeniable domination of culture, conservatives are too often desperately hungry to gain any cultural relevance they can.
And this desperation has one particularly irreparable consequence: The conservative movement is damaged by rushing to celebrate a single celebrity because he or she said one supposedly conservative thing — among a sea of not-so-conservative things.
INDIANA ATTORNEY GENERAL DEFENDS KANYE WEST’S ‘INDEPENDENT THINKING’ AFTER ANTISEMITIC TWEET
Kanye West is the ultimate example.
The rapper, who now goes by Ye, caught the renewed attention of conservatives after appearing at his Yeezy fashion show in Paris wearing a T-shirt that said “White Lives Matter,” as well as a large photograph of Pope John Paul II for an unexplained reason.
This was obviously a marketing ploy that relied on the conservative movement’s cultural hunger, and it succeeded. Ye became at the forefront of the conservative conversation and even appeared on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, later that week. During that one-on-one interview, he said some things in line with conservative principles, such as discussing the epidemic of abortion plaguing black communities.
Over the past few years, Ye has garnered acclaim from conservatives for his pro-life comments and support for former President Donald Trump. This time, rather than applying a moderate layer of restraint in response to a massively influential celebrity presenting a few conservative positions, the conservative sphere exploded in celebration of its cultural hero based on his pro-life stance and T-shirt choice alone.
Even the Republican House Judiciary Committee announced on Twitter, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
And then, Kanye went full Kanye.
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” West announced in a since-deleted tweet. “The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also.”
“You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda,” he concluded.
This came a few days after Ye appeared to send a message to fellow rapper Diddy that read, “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me. I told you this was war. Now gone get you some business.”
When we consider this as part of an even broader context of recent comments made by Ye, including the claim that Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, only pushed for the Abraham Accords to “make money” or that “black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people” — by the metrics we use to judge those on the Left, Ye is antisemitic.
After all, Democrats have been correctly labeled as antisemites for saying far less — or at least for being far more subtle about it.
Ye has promoted the notions that Jewish politicians are motivated solely by profit, that Jewish people exert an outsize level of control, and that Jews are actually black — the foundational and historically inaccurate claim at the center of the radical Black Hebrew Israelite ideology, which not only fueled two deadly attacks in December 2019 but also the waves of physical violence against Jews in black communities. So you’d think the broad conservative movement would move to condemn Ye as quickly as it moved to reject Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-NI), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
While some did condemn Ye, the awkward and embarrassed silence from others is deafening. Why?
The first answer is that both sides of the political aisle have made the same calculus when it comes to Jews, as British comedian David Baddiel explained in his excellent book Jews Don’t Count. As a matter of electoral math, there are about 8 million Jews in the United States, while there are well over 41 million black people. For the unprincipled among us, the risk of rejecting the monumental societal influence wielded by someone such as Ye far outweighs the reward gained by simply brushing his open antisemitism under the rug.
The second answer is the one we began with — that the conservative movement is desperate for cultural relevance. So much so that too many refuse to consider the contextual “whole” of each cultural figure that comes along. Whether it be Andrew Tate or Kyrie Irving or Ye, newfound ideological heroes are promoted based on single issues alone, with too many hoping to feed off the scraps of their short-lived notoriety.
But when the dust settles, conservatives find themselves having to answer for the wrongs of their temporary heroes, uncovering a level of undeniable hypocrisy that they will find hard to shake.
Conservatives must ask ourselves: Is it worth rushing to idolize a celebrity every single time he or she presents us with an opportunity to “win” a tiny element of the culture war if it means setting fire to our very ideological foundation? I would argue, as loudly as humanly possible, that it is not.
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Ian Haworth (@ighaworth) is the host of Off Limits with Ian Haworth.
