PrintKanye knocks the left off its axis, and triggers panic
If rap superstar Kanye West had intended to knock the left off its axis, he did. His extraordinary man-bites-dog twitter storm blasting President Obama and professing his love for President Trump shook the Internet, quite unlike anything I have ever seen.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 25, 2018
(This got 74,000 retweets and 286,000 'likes')
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 25, 2018
(This got 15,000 retweets and 86,000 'likes')
Kanye up until now had made himself most famous in the political arena by stating in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that President Bush 'hates black people.' So the turnaround was enough to draw attention. But the defiant series of tweets and Kanye's frankly courageous refusal to back down as the critics howled and trolled signalled something bigger. William Sullivan, writing in American Thinker, was the first to notice this when Kanye indicated support for a young black woman who signaled an independent turn of mind of President Trump. From there, the breach has intensified.
Kanye's statements expose of how leaden, how monolithic, how groupthinkish, how smugly self-satisfied, how Bourbon-like, how walled-off, and how decadent the celebrity left establishment really is. While half the country can vote for Trump quite comfortably, just one celebrity superstar going off the left's plantation and openly coming out and signaling he thinks differently is enough to drive the left into panic. Take a look at how panicked these leftist celebrities are. Kanye's message in his pro-Trump tweets suggests to millions of millennials and black people that it's o.k. to support President Trump, it's o.k. to be an individual,it's o.k. to think differently, it's o.k. to feel like an outsider (which is central to the support of President Trump), and in rapperly defiance, You Will Respect Us. It signals to other celebrities that it's o.k. to come out and say what you think. If the conventional wisdom has been that Trump can rattle the world with mere tweets, Kanye now shows that someone in his stratospheric renown can do it with even more impact.
It trended number one in Twitter yesterday, drew applauding tweets from the president of the United States, and put the celebrity leftwing monolith in absolute meltdown.
We may not know much about rappers in these parts, but this guy has 27.9 million followers on Twitter according to TwitterCounter, up by about ten million over the day earlier, with a global ranking of 57. Contrary to earlier news reports, he gained, he didn't lose, followers.
Kanye West's Twitter traffic after he came out with roaring support for President Trump // Screenshot from TwitterCounter
Kanye's wife, Kim Kardashian, with 60 million followers, and a Twitter rank of 12, defended him with unexpected classiness, extending the impact further.
That is a hell of a lot of influence, and it's influence among millennials who otherwise are exposed to nothing but leftwingery from celebrities, as well as many black people who up until now have been told they must only support the leftwing narrative and hate Trump or ostracism would follow.
It was followed by a tweet from another rapper, known as Chance The, who cut to the quick about what this is really about.
Black people don’t have to be democrats.
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) April 25, 2018
Whoa.
Yes, the left does have something to worry about with this breach. As Andrew Breitbart once noted, this is a shift in the culture. And as White House observers have noted, a dam has broken and more will follow. No wonder the left is panicking.
