Kanye West has always had a volatile relationship with politics. In 2005, he declared that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” during a Hurricane Katrina telethon. His 2013 album Yeezus pulsed with revolutionary anger, taking aim at the DEA and privatized prisons and systemic racism. And now after two years of nonsensical Trump-supporting non-sequiturs (“All Blacks gotta be Democrats,” he raps on Ye vs the People, “We ain’t made it off the plantation”), he has become a surprising benefactor to Black Lives Matter, allegedly at Kim Kardashian’s behest.
As anti-police brutality protests raged around the country, Kanye West donated $2 million to the families of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor to cover expenses and legal fees. To wit, West also established a college fund for George Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna, and has given money to a raft of black-owned businesses in Chicago and around the nation.
“He was pained by the video of the murder of George Floyd and fully supports the peaceful protesting happening around the world,” a source close to West told the New York Post. “He has always been a fierce advocate for black lives, racial equality and human rights. People confuse his support of the president to mean he supports his politics and ideology … it’s never about politics.”
As such, West’s apparent political face-turn suggests that his MAGA dalliance was but a ruse; West and Kim Kardashian have parlayed his chumminess with Trump to push for prison reform, a cause which Kardashian champions. (For what it’s worth, a representative for Kardashian denies she had anything to do with convincing West to support Black Lives Matter, telling Page Six, “Kanye fully made the decision to donate and peacefully protest in Chicago on his own accord.”)
“Kanye actually gave me the boxes of [MAGA] hats,” rapper GLC said on The Red Pill podcast in 2019. “[Kanye] said to me: ‘I’m never wearing these again. I’m just telling you that we got that amazing woman out of jail in Florida, right? We didn’t get to have that meeting until I put the hat on.’”
After years of wandering in the wilderness of his own insanity, West seems to have regained his footing, even if he seems content to make VeggieTales-adjacent albums forever. But is his recent beneficence proof that West has been launching a covert operation to enact positive change from within the rancid belly of the Trump administration? Probably not.
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