Tucker Carlson is all aboard the Kanye West train, as he devoted a significant portion of his Friday show on Fox News to praising West as the embodiment of “core conservative” principles. Tucker even went so far as to wonder why there are no elected Republican officials who sound like Kanye “on foundational questions about life and children and what happens when you die.”
The beginning of Tucker’s show on Friday was preempted for a few moments at the start by Donald Trump’s impromptu press conference, but at around 8:09 p.m. ET, Fox News cut away from Trump’s little presser, which was still ongoing, so Tucker could get on with his show.
“At this moment the most compelling voice against abortion and Planned Parenthood is not a Republican,” Carlson said as he got started. “The most widely heard Christian evangelist in America is not ordained. Instead, he is a rapper married to a Kardashian who, by the way, everyone says is crazy.
“Kanye West is running for president but that’s not really the headline. The headline is that on core conservative issues, not political issues like legislation before the Congress, but on foundational questions about life and children and what happens when you die, no one with a national platform has been more honest or sincere or effective than Kanye West has been. Maybe in generations.”
Tucker went on like this for about nine minutes before introducing his first guest.
“It’s all pretty shocking, really. Talk about an unlikely messenger. But it’s real. Check out West’s Twitter feed if you haven’t seen it. Not everything he says is conservative, far from it. Not everything he says is even intelligible. But when West talks about his faith and about the gift of human life, you start to ask yourself, why aren’t there any elected Republicans who sound like that?” Carlson mused.
“They say they believe same things, but if they actually do, why don’t they talk like Kanye West does? And the answer, of course, is because they’re afraid to. But West is not afraid. He doesn’t have to be. He’s too famous. He’s made too much money. He’s sold something like 150 million albums over the past 20 years. And really it’s hard to cancel a guy like that.”
Tucker could not, of course, let an episode go by without some fearmongering about “cancel culture,” which does not exist. Carlson says the supposed cancel brigade had had to come up with new tactics for Kanye.
“So what does the left do in response to Kanye West? How do you make Kanye West shut up? The short answer is you can’t. So you work to discredit him. You go ad hominem. You ignore what he’s saying, you attack him as a person. You don’t engage with his ideas — you know you would lose if you tried that. So instead you try to keep people from listening to him,” Carlson said.
“It’s an easier job when you’re dealing with less famous people. Thanks to our centrally controlled internet the left can usually silence dissent in an instant with a press of a button. But with prominent wrong thinkers like Kanye. West, censorship requires a finer touch. More artistic flair.”
Tucker then spent several minutes declaring that anyone on the left who has publicly expressed concern for Kanye West’s mental and emotional wellbeing is just a liar who is trying to silence Kanye.
You can watch the quoted portion of Tucker Carlson’s Friday night show in the video below.