Kanye West believes that the body-positive movement is a media-driven conspiracy to kill Black people.
“For people to promote that, it’s demonic,” West told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview that aired Thursday night. “It’s a genocide of the Black race. They want to kill us in any way they can.”
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West’s comments came after he was speaking about his “good friend Lizzo.”
“When Lizzo loses 10 pounds and announces it, the bots… on Instagram, they attack her for losing weight, because the media wants to put out a perception that being overweight is the new goal, when it’s actually unhealthy,” West said. “Let’s get aside from the fact whether it’s fashion and Vogue, which it’s not, or if someone thinks it’s attractive, to each his own. It’s actually clinically unhealthy.”
The artist’s comments about the existence of a conspiracy to systematically wipe out Black people by failing to adequately body-shame them was just the tip of the iceberg of batshit bewildering moments that made up the rambling interview filmed in West’s LA offices.
And whether West was claiming that Jared Kushner brokered the Abraham Accords for cash, or that he liked Trump because the former president “made Ivanka,” or that his former wife was being covertly manipulated, throughout it all, Carlson simply gazed at West with a look of undisguised affection.
West first addressed the controversy that was stoked when he appeared at Paris Fashion Week last week alongside right-wing talking head Candace Owens, with both of them wearing shirts bearing the phrase “White Lives Matter”—a slogan the Anti-Defamation League calls a “white supremacist phrase that originated in early 2015 as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The stunt prompted widespread backlash from figures within the fashion industry, including Jaden Smith, Gigi Hadid, and Vogue contributing editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. West told Carlson that he had received threats of physical violence as a result of wearing the shirt.
“I had someone call me last night and said anybody wearing a ‘White Lives Matter’ shirt is going to be green-lit,” West said. “That means they are going to beat them up if I wear it. I’m like, you know, ‘OK, green-light me then.’”
West compared the incident to when he was criticized for wearing a red MAGA baseball hat in 2018.
“My so-called friends/handlers around me told me if I said that I liked Trump that my career would be over. That my life would be over,” the artist, now known as Ye, told Carlson. “They said stuff like ‘People get killed for wearing a hat like that.’ They threatened my life. They basically said that I would be killed for wearing the hat.”
West also revealed that he had wanted to support Trump from the very beginning but was “bullied” into staying quiet. “I never actually told people that I liked Trump when he was running because I was bullied by Hollywood,” West said. “I was biting my tongue because I thought it would be better for my children.”
West also claimed that his ex-wife Kim Kardashian was being manipulated by outside forces and that pressure from these unnamed sources was one reason he stayed silent about his affinity for Trump.
He also claimed that Kardashian was forced to portray herself in ways that she didn’t want to, again because of the manipulation of others.
“Kim is a Christian, but she has people who want her to go to Interview magazine and put her ass out while she’s a 40-something-year-old multibillionaire with four Black children,” West claimed.
West also said it was “wild I didn’t know how close my own wife was to the Clintons” and claimed the Clintons forced Kardashian and him to use their platform to promote COVID-19 vaccines.
West then criticized the oversexualization of Kardashian in the advertising of the Skims clothing brand he co-founded with his former wife.
“I had a lot of issues with the imagery of Skims. I felt like there’s a lot of imagery that was overly sexualized and things I wouldn’t want to see my wife, and definitely not my daughters, doing in the future in order to sell product.”
But it seems the real issue West had with Skims came when he found out during a dinner with Jared and Ivanka Kushner that Josh Kushner, Jared’s brother, owned 10 percent of the company, compared to just 5 percent West owned himself.
West spoke at length about his dislike for the Kushner brothers, and how he felt they let Trump down.
“Wow, these guys might have really been holding Trump back,” West said. “They weren’t serving my boy Trump the way we could have.” He also said that unlike him, they had never created anything of their own. “I don’t think they have the ability to make anything on their own, I think they were born into money,” adding that he believed Jared Kushner’s work on the Abraham Accords, which West didn’t seem to fully understand, was done to “make cash.”
But there was no such dislike of Ivanka, who he described as “fire.”
When asked what first attracted him to the presidential candidate Donald Trump, West laughed and said: “What do you mean man? Trump’s the shit, he has his own buildings, what are you talking about, he’s like Ralph Lauren. He made Ivanka.”
West then compared Trump’s fall to Moses’ stumbling, and said that “God is not always going to bring the most perfect personality a lot of times, the most fake people, their job is talking and making people feel comfortable and the realest people are going to make you feel uncomfortable at first.”
West concluded the interview by briefly discussing a “potential” presidential run in 2024 and his friendship with soon-to-be-Twitter owner Elon Musk, who he described as being “a great team player.”
West ended the interview with this enigmatic statement.
“The people that make money and the powers that be, I am your true Nikola Tesla, and I’m not even a scientist.”
What does that mean? No one but West can know. Perhaps he’ll explain on Friday night, when part two of this interview airs.
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