Rapper Kanye West opened up about the pressure he felt as a celebrity to support Hillary Clinton, and the ensuing firestorm that came from going public with his support, followed by his meltdown interview on TMZ.
“Man, I had my [expletive] [expletive] castrated,” West told the New York Times. “You have to like Hillary. That’s got to be your choice.”
West added that he didn’t feel like he had to speak for a whole group of people, but that he knew other celebrities who felt pressured to not support Trump.
“I felt that I knew people who voted for Trump that were celebrities that were scared to say that they liked him. But they told me, and I liked him, and I’m not scared to say what I like,” he said. “Let me come over here and get in this fight with you.”
But after writing a series of tweets propping up supporters of the Trump administration and the president himself, West said he was pressured by his wife and fellow artists to add that he does not support all of Trump’s policies.
West went on to explain the fallout of his TMZ interview, clarifying his comment about slavery being a mental choice as a failure of word selection, not ideas.
He said blow-back from the black community came not because it’s a “matter of facts,” but because “[he] put [him]self in a position to be unprotected by [his] tribe” by wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and talking about slavery.
