It’s not too late for the White House Correspondents’ Association to add some sense of relevancy to their annual dinner on Saturday. They can do so by inviting Kanye West to give the keynote.
If anyone deserves recognition for celebrating the First Amendment, it’s Kanye after his week of tweets against the infinitely boring concept that it’s cool to hate President Trump.
“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him,” West said Wednesday in one of his Twitter posts that broke the Internet in a way his wife’s backside never could. “We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.”
He also tweeted a photo of a “Make America Great Again” hat with Trump’s signature, and on Friday, he said he didn’t necessarily identify as a conservative but that he’s “refusing to be enslaved by monolithic thought.”
Everyone knows all of the national media and Hollywood are forced to conform to one view on politics. It’s why a fairly bland speech by Oprah Winfrey in January had journalists wondering (and hoping) she would run for president.
It’s why writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post rained approval on Meryl Streep last year when she repeated the lie about Trump mocking a reporter’s physical affliction.
Those are things celebrities have to do to get the media to like them.
By contrast, after West’s vaguely complimentary tweets about Trump, Washington Post opinion writer Molly Roberts theorized that they may have had something to do with West’s “mental-health struggles” or that he’s simply “cloistered in a world of wealth, away from the realities of racism…” (Roberts, by the way, is a white woman.)
[Also read: Kim Kardashian defends Kanye West: People should be ‘able to have their own opinions’]
I haven’t done enough research on conservatives to call myself or be called one. I’m just refusing to be enslaved by monolithic thought.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 27, 2018
Black activist and New York Daily News columnist Shaun King remarked on West’s comments in his own tweet, saying, “A market has always and will always exist for men and women like this who say what bigoted white folk love to hear.”
CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday said that West “has a lot of people wondering if he cares about black people.”
Lemon in 2013 told blacks to “pull up your pants” and “finish school,” but he saw racial controversy in West’s tweets about intellectual independence.
[Related: Tim Scott says claim that Kanye West is betraying African-Americans is ‘hogwash’]
The truth is always controversial to the people who enforce thought codes by race and status (Hollywood and the media), and the truth is that there is a monolithic thought on who is supposed to hate Trump (Hollywood and the media).
Even if it’s a publicity stunt, West is breaking it. That’s why you’d never see him at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.
