Welcome back to another day in the nightmare that is 2020! Yesterday, I did my best to unpack the actual chances that Kanye West was being serious about running for President. Well, that was yesterday, and this is today. While Kanye still has deadlines and rules to deal with, in a new interview with Forbes, he made it clear that he wasn’t just joking with that tweet. F*ck.
Kanye told Forbes that he’ll make a final decision about running within the next 30 days, and shared his thoughts on many important issues. While some of his comments were actually coherent (he doesn’t support the death penalty!), most of what he said was low-key terrifying. Let’s go through the most concerning things he said in the interview, and why he’s still a nightmare of a Presidential candidate.
Political Parties
The most popular headline about Kanye’s interview is that he no longer supports Trump, which is technically true. But while he called Trump’s recent actions “one big mess,” that doesn’t actually mean much about his politics. He said he “would run as a Republican if Trump wasn’t there,” and that “Trump is the closest president we’ve had in years to allowing God to still be part of the conversation.”
Kanye criticized the idea that “all Black people need to be Democrat,” saying that this way of thinking is a form of a form of “white supremacy and white control.” Consequently, he said that his choice to wear the MAGA hat was “a protest to the segregation of votes in the Black community.” For those wondering, if he does run for President, he’ll run as an independent, but will call it the Birthday party, “because when we win, it’s everybody’s birthday.” Yes, really.
I think I can guess where he got the inspiration for that one:
Voting
If Kanye sounds a bit… new to politics, it might have something to do with the fact that he has never voted. In fact, he told Forbes that he registered to vote for the first time in his life this Monday. He said he never registered because he was “scared” of expressing his true political beliefs, and felt “threatened into being in one party.”
Vaccines
In one of the most troubling parts of the interview, Kanye questioned whether we should be seeking a vaccine for coronavirus, and cast doubt on vaccines in general. He said “so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed,” adding that we should be “extremely cautious” with a potential COVID vaccine. He called vaccines “the mark of the beast,” and claimed that “they want to put chips inside of us,” which will make it so that we “can’t cross the gates of heaven.” So Kanye is both an anti-vaxxer and a religious conspiracy theorist. Great.
For reference, the CDC states that “Data show that the current U.S. vaccine supply is the safest in history,” and maintains that “the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks.”
Abortion
Kanye told Forbes “I am pro-life because I’m following the word of the bible.” In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve entered the religion portion of the interview.
Planned Parenthood
Given his stance on abortion, it’s unsurprising that Kanye isn’t a big fan of Planned Parenthood. Specifically, he said “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.” Kanye may be referring to Margaret Sanger, an early reproductive rights activist and the first President of Planned Parenthood, who has been criticized for her support of eugenics. However, in recent years Planned Parenthood has been open about Sanger’s problematic beliefs, explaining that her history is “layered and complex.” The current CEO of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson, is a Black woman.
Religion In Schools
Kanye is unsurprisingly a supporter of bringing prayer into our schools. He believes that by reinstating “the fear and love of God in all schools and organizations,” we can “chill the fear and love of everything else.” He calls the removal of prayer in schools a “plan by the Devil to have our kids committing suicide at an all-time high.”
Foreign Policy
When asked about his plan for foreign policy, Kanye said, “I haven’t developed it yet. I’m focused on protecting America, first, with our great military. Let’s focus on ourselves first.” Where have I heard the phrase “America first” before…? Oh, right: nowhere good.
Policy In General
Actually, Kanye isn’t that into the idea of policy at all. He told Forbes, “I don’t know if I would use the word policy for the way I would approach things. I don’t have a policy when I went to Nike and designed Yeezy and went to Louis and designed a Louis Vuitton at the same time. It wasn’t a policy, it was a design.” Great, can’t wait to see how he runs the country the same way he would design a pair of sneakers. It’s gonna be fine!
Wakanda
Don’t worry, Kanye might not like policy, but he still has a plan for how his government will work. Here’s his plan, inspired by Black Panther, because why not: “I’m gonna use the framework of Wakanda right now because it’s the best explanation of what our design group is going to feel like in the White House… That is a positive idea: you got Kanye West, one of the most powerful humans—I’m not saying the most because you got a lot of alien level superpowers and it’s only collectively that we can set it free.” Again, it’s gonna be fiiiiiine.
So, Kanye hasn’t decided for sure if he’s running or not, but at least now we have an idea of just how terrifying his ideas actually are. But the thing is, reading through all these quotes, I can totally imagine lots of people falling for it. We are so f*cked.
Images: Rich Fury/Getty Images for Coachella
