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Here Are the Right Wing Creeps Cynically Embracing Kanye West

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The Alt-Right Embraces Kanye West

Ever since Kanye West tweeted praise for conservative commentator Candace Owens, the right wing fringe has been falling all over itself at the prospect of having a bona fide A-list celebrity to welcome into the fold. Although far right and so-called alt-right personalities have, in part, based their personas on lambasting the supposedly out of touch, limousine liberal Hollywood elite, conspiracy theorists like Infowars founder Alex Jones and vlogger Paul Joseph Watson are practically frothing at the mouth at the prospect of rubbing elbows with one of the most famous people of a generation. Among the first of the right wing personalities to embrace West was Owens herself, who tweeted at the rapper, begging him to “take a meeting” with her and then appeared on Fox & Friends on Sunday the day after West tweeted about how he likes “the way [she] thinks.” Part of the way the pro-Trump “Owens thinks” entails criticizing Black Lives Matter, denying the existence of systemic racism, and arguing that Black Panther is a “pro-Trump movie.”

“Kanye West does not really want to fold to controversy,” Owens said during her Sunday morning Fox & Friends hit.  “If you look at things historically, Kanye West has really represented the battering ram against political correctness.”

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This is all very funny considering that in September, Owens posted a YouTube vlog titled “Dear Celebrities: NOBODY CARES WHAT YOU THINK!!!” Apparently, Owens cares what celebrities think as long as they care what she thinks. Owens serves as “urban engagement director”—and, apparently, director of communications—of Turning Point USA, a dubious non-profit dedicated to spreading “true free market values” on college campuses. The organization’s founder, Charlie Kirk, wasted no time capitalizing on West’s endorsement by co-opting the rapper’s image for use in one of Turning Point USA’s Twitter memes. (West’s rep did not return a request for comment regarding his likeness being used in Turning Point ads.)

The team at Infowars wasted no time launching a full court press trying to court West. Paul Joseph Watson, who serves as an editor-at-large, recorded extremely thirsty videos praising the rapper for being an iconoclast and begging his followers to tweet those videos to West.

On Monday, Jones swooped in, hoping to cajole West into an appearance on Infowars, and presumably to get the rapper to start hawking the snake oil supplements that subsidize Jones’s operation. “I admire your bold moves against the thought police,” Jones tweeted at West. “And if you want to see these control-freak vampires really go crazy, please join me on my broadcast!”

This is quite the 180 from the days when Infowars, via Watson, used to accuse West and his wife Kim Kardashian of naming their son Saint West as an homage to the Illuminati. Or when Infowars writer Kit Daniel accused West of being emblematic of the country’s “decline.” Apparently all it took for the staff to reverse its position on West is the inkling of hope that he might actually pay attention to them.

The fact that disgraced Fox News host Bill O’Reilly spent years calling West a “disease” and his music a blight on society didn’t stop him from caping for the rapper when the backlash came for him over the Owens endorsement.

MRA mascot and Dilbert creator Scott Adams wasn’t going to be outdone by a bunch of second-rate YouTube stars, so he recorded a 22-minute DIY TED Talk praising West as a visionary.

West, in kind, tweeted clips of himself getting red pilled by Adams’s video, which itself demonstrated the cartoonist’s Sahara Desert-level thirst for the rapper’s approval. He, obviously, is far from alone.

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