Trump, West, Antisemitism: That’s Entertainment!
Much has been read into Donald Trump’s recent meeting with rapper Kanye West and his friend of antisemitic convenience Nick Fuentes. Trump is a celebrity opportunist and publicity whore whose troubled mind and untethered ego get him, along with anyone foolish enough to take him seriously, into a lot of trouble. Kanye West, as far as I can see from my vantage point far outside the thuggish world of rap music, is cut from the same damp rag as Trump: a reality television star at heart who furthers his aims and his profiteering largely by peddling his name, and all the hyperbole and mock daring he can associate with it, to suckers. Both men are psychological infants, destroyed by lives of undeserved fame and privilege, and no longer able to accept a universe that refuses to bend to their megalomaniacal wills.
The wildcard in this weird meeting, which Trump claims was supposed to be a one-on-one dinner with West alone, at the latter’s request, was Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying rabble rouser who, at a recent white supremacist gathering attended (and addressed) by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, called for, and received, a round of appreciative applause for Vladimir Putin.
The media, of course, is trying to use this meeting as yet another “last straw” in its effort to destroy Trump once and for all. Objectively, however, I fail to see what the fuss is about. Trump has an “impromptu dinner” with a fellow billionaire celebrity, clearly for no reason other than to score points with the populist grassroots — scoring points, of course, being the only reason Trump does anything. West brings along a loudmouthed punk, the sort of person a loudmouthed punk like West would tend to spend time with — and specifically one whose proximity to West helps to explain the latter’s recent costly outbursts about “the Jews.” Trump — whose daughter and son-in-law are Jewish — is too stupid to realize that while this dinner might be great for his ego, not to mention his “street cred” with black voters and the alt-right, it is likely to bring him cold shoulders from most other quarters, because this isn’t 2016 anymore.
But why does any of this matter? Trump is not a white supremacist or an antisemite, but he’ll play to those crowds if he thinks doing so will win him some adoring fans, which is even more dangerous in its way. West is not a Republican or a Putin water boy, but he’ll play to such people if they hold the key to gaining him more admirers, attention, and the emotional warmth of the crowd which he so obviously, if ineffectively, craves. Fuentes is the odd kook out here, the one with the most to gain just from being seen and spoken of in this company, much as Kim Jong Un saw the advantages to be gained from playing nice with Trump as the means to a global legitimacy he could never have earned on his own lack of merit, or won from the agency of any previous U.S. president.
All three of these people deserve simply to be ignored: Trump because he would (and has tried to) literally destroy his country for the sake of his ego, West because he is at bottom just another boring, spoiled celebrity trying to insert himself into everything as a means of keeping himself in the spotlight in spite of all the essential insignificance of his “art,” and Fuentes because he is just a calculating self-seeker trying to live parasitically off his country’s decaying body, paradoxically much like celebrity Jew Ben Shapiro, whose smugness and clever, smirking style he appears to be (poorly) imitating, whether he realizes it or not.
Kanye West, following up on the glory of meeting Trump at Mar-a-Lago, was then a guest on the podcast of another disgraced populist loudmouth, Alex Jones. With Fuentes in tow yet again, West took his Jew-baiting to another level, declaring that he likes Adolf Hitler, who did a lot of good things — although qualifying it, as one does when off one’s rocker, by suggesting that he likes everybody, since everybody has some good qualities. Jones tried to distance himself from the views of the guests he had invited precisely to create such soundbite controversy, by declaring, as one does when protesting too much, that, “I think most Jews are great people.”
First of all, it is obvious at this point that West is a broken man, suffering a serious emotional collapse in public. The last thing he needs is another opportunity to dig himself a deeper hole, and the last thing a humane and respectable media outlet would do is give him one. He is a train wreck — but in this age, when everyone loves a train wreck, people can’t get enough of this show, and the “news media” can’t hold back on any chance to hold him up as some sort of symbol of “the real face of white conservative America,” as though that made any sense.
As for Jones, I for one am tired of people getting themselves out of Dodge by making idiotic declarations like, “I think most Jews are great people.” Really? Most Jews? Great? Sorry, but that is absurd. Most Jews are neither great nor evil, but mediocre, manipulable, and mired in petty vested interests, just like most of any other religious, national, or ethnic group. They are human, and they have the flaws and shortcomings of the species as a whole. It is a disservice to Jewish people, to non-Jewish people, to rationality, to human nature, and above all to greatness, to treat minorities (or majorities for that matter) and victims (or victimizers) as collectively special or praiseworthy beings merely by virtue of their belonging to this or that identity group.
If, however, Jones had said, “Most Jews are greater people than I,” then at least he would have spoken a truth, albeit a trivial one.
