OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Days after rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West appeared on Fox News and spoke to Tucker Carlson Twitter has locked him out of his account.
The lockout was not due to what he said on Carlson’s show, but rather vile comments he made about Jewish people on Twitter that was later deleted.
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda,” he said on Saturday night.
Twitter promptly deleted the tweet and then locked his account, the social media giant confirmed to Mediaite.
“The account in question has been locked due to a violation of Twitter’s policies,” a spokesperson for the company said to Mediaite.
He defended wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt with conservative commentator Candace Owens when he spoke to Carlson.
“The answer to why I wrote ‘White Lives Matter’ on a shirt is because they do,” he said.
He said he talked to his dad via text message about the shirt.
“I do certain things from a feeling. I just channel the energy. It just feels right. It’s using a gut instinct, connection with God and just brilliance. If you asked Tonya Harding how she did the triple flip or the triple spin, she was in so much practice that when it was time for her to skate in a competitive format, it just happened… That’s what’s happening. God is preparing us for the real battles,” the rapper said.
“We are in a battle with the media. The majority of the media has a godless agenda… [But] what I was saying [with] the comparison of Tonya Harding about the White Lives Matter [shirt], my dad is an educated ex-Black Panther and he put a text to me today, he said ‘White lives matter, hahahaha.’ I said, ‘I thought it was a funny shirt. I thought the idea of me wearing it was funny.’ And I said ‘Dad, why do you think it was funny?’ And he said, ‘Just a Black man stating the obvious,’” he said.
Carlson asked the rapper why he thinks some took the statement s controversial.
“Because the same people that have stripped us of our identity and labeled us as a color, have told us what it means to be Black,” the rapper said.
He spoke about when he wore former President Donald Trump’s “Make American Great Again” hat and why it made him a target.
“My so-called friends-slash-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 rapper said. “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.”
He said that “he didn’t know how close my own wife was to the Clintons.”
He said he felt pressure from his wife, Kim Kardashian, and others to walk back his support of Trump.
“Yes, there was manipulation,” the rapper said. “Me not saying I like Trump was a form of manipulation.”
He also said his wife’s brand is too sexual.
“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 reaches another level when it’s like, ‘OK, well this is what my wife is doing. This is what she is doing for our children,’” he said.
But he did have some criticism of the former president.
“For older white people, they’re quick to classify a Black person only by the fact that we’re Black. Even Trump, a person that we’d consider a friend of mine, when I went to the White House, I called him after that to get ASAP Rocky out of jail. And one of the things he said to me is, ‘Kanye, you’re my friend. When you came to the White House, my Black approval rating went up 40%.’
“And for politicians, all Black people are worth is an approval rating,” he said. “The Democrats feel that they don’t owe us anything. And Republicans feel that they don’t owe us anything. Blacks have never demanded something for our vote.”
