(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Older conservatives unfamiliar with the antics of rapper Ye—formerly known as Kanye West—were no doubt surprised with how well he presented himself during a recent two-show appearance on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Live.
Days ago, during fashion week in Paris, @kanyewest, accompanied by his friend @RealCandaceO, unveiled a t-shirt that read simply, “White Lives Matter.”
Here's why he did it: pic.twitter.com/tF9oQdtIwv
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 7, 2022
Even the satirical Babylon Bee took note of the rapper’s sudden crossover appeal with its article “Boomer Mom Asks If Son Can Download Her Some Music From That Nice ‘Ye’ Fellow.”
Not days later, though, Ye was back to his old, unhinged ways with a bizarre, provocative and anti-Semitic screed on social media that was quickly deleted.
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” he wrote in one of several controversial remarks across multiple platforms.
The fallout has led apparel companies like Adidas (which, ironically, was founded by a former Nazi), TJ Maxx and The Gap to drop their business ties to Ye. He also was escorted out of the Sketchers headquarters, despite having no known connection with the company.
Now, regrettably, those same Fox News viewers who recently cheered Ye for using his fame and wealth to challenge the corrupt leftist orthodoxy must rethink whether the imbalanced artist—considered by some accounts to be the wealthiest black man in U.S. history, worth an estimated $6 billion—is really the right person to hitch their wagon to.
Ye—who has long been reported on as suffering from bipolar disorder—exhibits all the hallmarks of the “troubled genius,” as those who have studied gifted education can attest.
Like any bored, brilliant mind, he has begun creating problems for himself to solve in the absence of any extrinsic challenges.
Likewise, he has become, above all, a masterful marketer, following the old axiom that “no publicity is bad publicity.”
Paired with his own narcissism and emotional immaturity, it seems likely that Ye intended the comments to generate scandal that would draw even more attention to himself—and he succeeded wildly in that regard.
‘SILENCE … IS NOT AN OPTION’
Enter Ari Emanuel, the celebrity agent who was the real-life inspiration for the HBO series Entourage and a well-known Hollywood power-player. Among Emanuel’s former clients is Donald Trump, who remains on friendly terms with him in spite of their political differences.
Emanuel—who is the brother of Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor—gave considerable support to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Trump but also offered to make a movie on behalf of his erstwhile client.
Suffice it to say, one can safely assume that Ari Emanuel, like his supposedly “moderate” brother, is at best a limousine liberal whose loyalty to the leftist cause is directly proportional to its ability to advance his own interests.
Following Ye’s outburst, Emanuel, who is Jewish, penned a letter to the Financial Times calling for the “Poopy Di Scoop” performer to be canceled.
“[T]hose who continue to do business with West are giving his misguided hate an audience,” wrote Emanuel.
He continued to denounce the hate speech in the starkest of terms as a sort of inflection point in the Jewish people’s centuries-long battle for religious tolerance.
“There should be no tolerance anywhere for West’s anti-Semitism,” Emmanuel wrote, according to Deadline.
“This is a moment in history where the stakes are high and being open about our values, and living them, is essential,” he continued. “Silence and inaction are not an option.”
BACK IN CHAINS
Interestingly enough, while doing so, Emanuel repeatedly referred to Ye as “West,” a slave name that the rapper has pointedly repudiated, including during a recent interview with Chris Cuomo.
“You guys are supposed to be made aware to use my legal name, Ye,” he told Cuomo.
“I’ve changed my name like how Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali,” he continued. “I’m sure you guys didn’t mean it as any disrespect, but at least on the chyron, change my name to ‘Ye.’ You can say ‘formerly known as Kanye West’ if you’d like to, but my name is Ye.”
When pressed by Cuomo, he explained, “I don’t owe people an explanation, to start off with. I have the right to change my name. I have the right to vote, in America, on whoever I want to vote on… but it was really… the name ‘West’ is a slave name, and I wanted to free myself of all of the older mentality.”
As a culturally and politically savvy figure in the entertainment industry, Emanuel undoubtedly would have been unaware of this reasoning when he opted to dead-name Ye in his attack.
It is hard, thus, not to see the microaggression as anything but a racially motivated attack from the uber-privileged liberal, who was brought up in the affluent north Chicago exurb of Wilmette while the young Kanye West and his mother, Donda—a professor at Chicago State University—scratched out a living on the Windy City’s black-dominated South Side.
SWORD AND SHIELD
Ye, for his part, reacted cooly to Emanuel’s insult, first noting that the Hollywood hotshot had gotten his wish.
“I lost 2 billion dollars in one day and I’m still alive,” Ye wrote on Instagram. “This is love speech. I still love you. God still loves you. The money is not who I am. The people is who I am.”
The incident raises serious questions, though, as to whether Ari Emanuel ought not also be canceled for his racist language.
The two-tiered justice system that exists in America today began with the efforts of the politically correct language police to undermine free thinking and free speech, the most sacred tenets of U.S. democracy.
Regardless of how toxic it may be, it seems particularly duplicitous for Emanuel not to hold himself to the same speech codes that he demands of others to remedy his own grievances.
Both black and Jewish Americans deserve unconditionally to live free from hate and bigotry, which have been tragically characteristic in the history of both cultures.
Yet, too often, leftists in both groups have used their own oppression as both shield and sword, to absurd lengths.
Billionaire oligarch George Soros, for instance, a Hungarian-born Jew, is a self-avowed atheist who shamelessly acknowledges having aided the Nazis in confiscating the property of other, less fortunate Jews.
And yet, at the first sign of criticism, Soros cronies on the far-left (including his son Alexander) will retreat to the safety of victimhood, claiming that the entirely justifiable accusations regarding his predatory financial practices tap into longstanding tropes “[d]ripping with poison of antisemitism.”
The cultural and religious heritage does not grant the Soroses and Emanuels any special immunity from criticism any more than West’s should afford him.
On the other hand, their sanctimonious and authoritarian views, paired with their own extreme privilege, mean they deserve even more scrutiny and accountability.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
