How Kanye West Became a Conservative Hero

Kanye West returned to Twitter earlier this month and promptly raised eyebrows by sharing posts from prominent conservative online supports of President Donald Trump. On Monday, he tweeted a conservative Scott Adams post, which earned the praise of Alex Jones. All this despite the Grammy-winning rapper once famously declared that former President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people.”

On Saturday, West tweeted his support for right-wing activist Candace Owens, who routinely deploys inflammatory rhetoric, according to The Daily Beast. Hours before West’s praise, Owens said that black people need to stop thinking about slavery, and that its “embarrassing” when black people invoke Jim Crow laws to discuss racial inequality.

I love the way Candace Owens thinks

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 21, 2018

Owens thanked West profusely online and during Fox & Friends, a show which has a long history of railing against rap music. Then, on Monday, West shared links from Scott Adams, the ardently pro-Trump creator of the cartoon Dilbert. Adams recently wrote a book about the 2016 election. Politico dubbed it the “worst explanation for why Trump won.”

pic.twitter.com/LIJfNwSnie

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 23, 2018

Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist who famously declared the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax, tweeted praise at the rapper.

.@kanyewest I admire your bold moves against the thought police. And if you want to see these control-freak vampires really go crazy, please join me on my broadcast!?

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) April 23, 2018

Three years ago, Jones shared an article that argued West was a “microcosm of America’s degeneration.” Meanwhile, in the wake of a liberal backlash to West’s tweets, former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly—who The Daily Beast reports once likened West to a “disease”—came to the rapper’s defense, tweeting that the rapper “finds himself under attack by the American Stalinists.��

Kanye West finds himself under attack by the American Stalinists. Please read my column posted right now on https://t.co/fqUvO5EEW0 about the attack crew. Frightening. I’ll deal with Mr. West tomorrow.

— Bill O’Reilly (@BillOReilly) April 22, 2018

Breitbart and The Daily Caller also praised West’s tweets. However, West’s politics are increasingly inconsistent. For example, he attended the recent March For Our Lives rally, a movement that has been widely criticized by the right, and he called actor Donald Glover a “free thinker.” Glover has been incredibly critical of Trump.