Kanye West has been inching toward reimagining himself as both a virulent antisemite and the public face of Fox News—and now Republicans are in a quandary.
That’s according to hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill in this episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, which takes a deep dive into how the conservative media and the Republican Party is grappling with how to handle the rapper.
West attracted widespread opprobrium after wearing a long-sleeved shirt emblazoned with the words “White Lives Matter” at Paris Fashion Week earlier this month. Days later, West justified the moment in an interview with Tucker Carlson, telling the Fox News host he thought “it was funny” and that he respected the “White Lives Matter” message “because they do.” Then his antisemitic threats on social media to go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE” got him locked out of both Instagram and Twitter accounts. And leaked video shows West spat similar hate speech in the Fox News interview that was edited out.
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“He’s always been a loose cannon politically, on either side of the spectrum, but for the past few years he’s really been dabbling in more right-wing politics, or at least politics that benefit Republicans,” Weill says.
Conservatives are seeing a guy who, “although certainly not at the peak of his career, is still pretty popular, has some claim to a non-political relevance, who seems to want to be a big Republican and big talking head guy,” according to Sommer, who thinks “Tucker wants to make Kanye into this kind of popular conservative figure.”
The issue for Republicans now, Weill says, is how to handle a personality like West.
“I am not personally worried that Kanye is going to bomb a synagogue or something like that. I’m more concerned that there is a huge political movement that’s holding him up as this figure.
“It is really weird to see how Republicans will maneuver themselves around these comments, especially now that they’ve made him into this conservative celebrity.”
Also on the podcast, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and host of the podcast Posting Through It, discusses a new report that he co-authored on the ugly election trends we can expect in 2022 and 2024.
“We’re seeing a lot of things, whether it is violent and heated rhetoric towards election officials, calls for vigilante action… small-scale organizing, crowdsourcing information, any sort of irregularity in counting processes being sourced as fraud,” he says.
Holt doesn’t anticipate poll workers “having very good days in every place” on Election Day, he says.
“Poll workers have continued to be targets for threats, harassment. They’ve been incorporated into the center of conspiracy theories that have circulated online, which then produce more threats and more harassment. These are people who are volunteering and are not exceptionally well paid. Their payback for this is not a bunch of thank-yous and handshakes and whatnot. It is just being incorporated into this gobbledygook of conspiracy theories that have been snowballing since the beginning of 2020.”
Then, in this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the new Republican “unwoke” bank, GloriFi, and how the new venture is on the verge of bankruptcy.
“It was pegged to be the big new alternative banking system for people who think Wall Street is just a little too politically correct,” Weill says.
According to The Wall Street Journal, among the company’s stumbles include a plan to make a credit card out of the same material used for shell casings. However, the company soon realized the material could interfere with security chips and potentially be too thick for payment terminals.
“I think this should have been a relatively simple scheme to pull off,” Sommer says. “I think you don’t even necessarily need to make your own bank. I think you can make a front here that’s operating off the basis of another bank. Yet it has been a complete disaster.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
