Kanye West Joins Black Trump Supporter in Condemning ‘Self-Victimization’

By Ivan Pentchoukov
April 23, 2018 Last Updated: April 29, 2018
President-elect Donald Trump and Kanye West stand together in the lobby at Trump Tower in New York City on Dec. 13, 2016. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Rapper Kanye West expressed support for a conservative black Trump supporter on April 21.

“I love the way Candace Owens thinks,” West wrote on Twitter.

Owens is a writer, producer, and commentator. She is the communications director for Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit.

West supported President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

I believe the black community can do it without hand-outs. I believe the Democrats have strapped us to our past to prevent us from our futures. And I won’t stop fighting until all black Americans see that. I’m not far right— I’m free.
— Candace Owens, communications director, Turning Point USA, in a tweet

Left-wing media were quick to report on West’s tweet while labeling Owens as a “far-right media personality.”

Owens fired back a tweet to clarify her position. “Far right? Allow me to clarify: I believe the black community can do it without hand-outs. I believe the Democrats have strapped us to our past to prevent us from our futures. And I won’t stop fighting until all black Americans see that,” she wrote on April 21. “I’m not far right—I’m free.”

West’s support for Owens’s worldview caused a stir on social media. Scott Adams, the conservative creator of the Dilbert cartoons, live-streamed his response to the tweet, saying that West’s message will help show the rapper’s fans the way to a new “golden age.”

“He did something you could rarely see,” Adams said. “Kanye, in seven words, unlocked a mental prison.”

Kanye, in seven words, unlocked a mental prison.
— Scott Adams, cartoonist, Dilbert

West posted nine tweets on April 23 with clips from Adams’s video.

Owens has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement. She summarized her view of the group recently when a group of Black Lives Matter hecklers interrupted her event at University of California–Los Angeles.

“There’s an ideological civil war happening: black people that are focused on their past and shouting about slavery, and black people that are focused on their futures,” Owens said to applause from the audience. “I can guarantee you, what you’re seeing is victim mentality versus victor mentality.”

“Victim mentality is not cool. I don’t know why people like being oppressed,” she said, gesturing to the hecklers. “You’re not living through anything right now. You’re overly privileged Americans.”

West mirrored some of Owens’s thought in several tweets.

“Self victimization is a disease,” he wrote in a tweet on April 22.

“There was a time when slavery was the trend and apparently that time is still upon us,” he wrote in another message. “But now it’s a mentality.”

Left-wing commentators attacked both Owens and West for their tweets. When asked about the attacks on Fox News on April 22, Owens said that the backlash is a common left-wing tactic.

“I think it’s pretty typical of the left. The truth is that the left wants to strap black people with this idea that they are victims,” Owens said. “They do not want black people to focus on their future. They want black people to focus on their past.”

 

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