Kanye 2024: Enter the Simulation

Shit just got weird.

‘We are living in the strangest timeline’ is a phrase you hear a lot on Twitter lately, but Kanye bringing Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes to meet Donald Trump is next level.

The closest precedent I can think of is when Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad ) and Count Dankula transcended internet fame to run as MEPs for UKIP. They were and are far less extreme figures, but, as with the recent Kanye developments, the mainstream media had a complete meltdown. Chaos ensued, and the iconic phrase ‘you dirty, dirty smear merchants’ was born.

Now we are witnessing the amped up American equivalent of that episode, as Kanye West, who has legally changed his name to ‘Ye’, has announced once again he is running for president. Except this time he has brought his friends with him. And his friends just happen to be some of the most cancelled people in America.

(Nick Fuentes, in fact, literally has a documentary about his political life called The Most Cancelled Man in America).

Fuentes’s views are certainly radical, for example he thinks America should be a Christian theocracy where women aren’t allowed to vote. But he also has some bad ideas (lol) and seems particularly obsessed with Israel and ‘Jewish power’. It’s almost pointless to list his controversial views as he has basically all of them. The maximum number possible. Women (irrational), interracial marriage (against), Putin (hero), etc.

He is probably the most controversial person of note in American politics, having been placed on the ‘no fly’ list, whereby he was unable to board international or domestic flights. He also had half a million dollars in his bank account frozen due to an FBI investigation. Though it should be added that apparently he was never given specific reasons for either, and both issues now appear to have been resolved.

Presumably the only reason he hasn’t been punished even further is his relative shrewdness. He was at the infamous Charlottesville rally, but didn’t seem to have much involvement, and the January 6th protest, but crucially not the wandering into the Capitol with silly hats bit.

But clearly the ‘are we living in a simulation?’ craziness of Fuentes teaming up with Ye is hard to overstate. I mean, on one level it makes sense — Fuentes is an avid fan of Ye’s music, and they both don’t seem to be too keen on Jews.

Then again, Fuentes is often accused of racism against black people for his discussion of topics like racial IQ theory, and his fondness for using the n-word. The latter in a comical context, but still, um, frowned upon.

And yet, Ye appears unbothered by any of this. Each to his own, I suppose.

The only thing arguably more bizarre than Ye teaming up with Fuentes is Fuentes meeting up with former president Donald Trump. A meeting which seems to have gone really well. Or horribly, horribly badly, depending on who you are and how you look at it.

‘Trump is really impressed by Nick Fuentes’, Ye claimed in a recent video. While Milo reported Trump was ‘dazzled’ by young Nick.

ye @kanyewest

#YE24

Fuentes has since stated on his ‘America First’ streaming show that he took the opportunity to tell Trump he loved him:

I told him at the dinner, I said Mr President, you are one of the greatest Americans that has ever lived. I campaigned for you in 2016, I was there at ‘Stop the Steal’…and I love you, and I’ve supported you for all these years.

He also claimed Trump partially returned the compliment: ‘Trump told me he liked me…he said “This guy’s smart, where did you find this guy?”’ Which does sound incredibly like something Trump would say, especially when confronted with massive flattery.

And it is not necessarily surprising that Trump liked Fuentes. While Fuentes is inevitably condemned for his extreme statements and edgy jokes—the two often blurring together with layers of irony—he is weirdly compelling.

Even The Guardian described him as ‘articulate, charismatic and convincing’, and Louis Theroux struggled to completely undermine him in his BBC documentary series Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, despite the use of dark evil music and Theroux’s portentous, chastising voice-over every time Fuentes appeared.

It has been claimed in the Daily Mail that Fuentes ‘presented as statistician’ at the meeting, was ‘very knowledgeable of polls and Trump's campaign’, and 'able to ‘rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016 campaign’.

That all sounds accurate, and I’m sure Fuentes steered clear of areas like his pro-Putin rhetoric, and his belief that ‘dating women is gay’.

Whether or not it is Trump’s fault that he didn’t know more about Fuentes, ignorance has not saved him from the media, with headlines appearing such as ‘Trump was “very taken” with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes’.

I’m no PR expert, but that strikes me as non-ideal.

The damage limitation soon kicked in. Initial claims that Fuentes was never even at the Mar-a-Lago dinner were quickly proved false, and instead Trump had to resort to distancing himself from Fuentes via Truth Social.

I am sure Trump is telling the truth in his above ‘Truth’. I doubt he knew who Fuentes was, certainly in any detail, and I’m sure he didn’t realise he would be at the dinner, or piece together a name he may have vaguely heard with the person sitting in front of him. As Fuentes himself has put it: ‘I don’t think he knew that I was me’.

Indeed, Trump’s advisors would never have allowed such a meeting, with one anonymously calling the whole thing a f***ing nightmare’.

So, bad for Trump, but whether all this will be good for Fuentes remains to be seen.

In his recent edition of ‘America First’, Fuentes announced he would no longer be doing the show every night, strongly hinting that he would instead be involved full time in the Ye campaign.

As a longtime fan of Ye, and someone who has been banned from just about every platform on earth (as well as in the sky) naturally Fuentes has welcomed this opportunity. But if Ye’s campaign proves to be a short-lived stunt, or goes down in a blaze of infamy like Sargon and Dankula’s UKIP excursion, it may be a mistake. Then again, can you really cancel the most cancelled man in America?

It is not completely clear what Ye actually wants to achieve, perhaps even to Ye. Maybe he really thinks he can win.

Or maybe his campaign will function like the Reform UK of America, holding Trump’s Republicans to account in the same way Farage haunts the Tories.

While Britain’s Conservatives have opened a huge gap by being a left-wing party in all but name, leaving voters with no major party on the right, in the US the conservative schism is more nuanced.

Of course there is DeSantis vs Trump. But there are also now two Trump camps. Firstly, what we could call the DeSantified Trump side, who want to keep Trump, but trim his rougher edges, focusing on the economy and the most insane excesses of the left, while trying to capture the hispanic and black vote.

Then the ‘America First’, Trump 2016 side, who care more about Christianity, immigration, and the cultural battle for the heart of America. They love Trump precisely for the radical, and, let’s be honest, ultimately successful energy of 2016.

On the ‘moderate’ side we have the likes of Jason Miller, CEO of Twitter alternative GETTR (which he has banned Nick Fuentes from). Miller is rumoured, in a text message tweeted by Ye in typical privacy-scorning style, to have written the Trump 2024 announcement speech that the harder edge of the Republican base felt was tepid and low-energy.

ye @kanyewest

#YE24

What Miller saw as ‘a very professional, very buttoned-up announcement’, Fuentes took to be a brutally disappointing betrayal, to the point where he said he could not even support this version of Trump:

Based on the announcement speech that we saw a couple of weeks ago…we have to move forward. We have to move forward in service of Christ, and in service of the truth, and in service of America. We can’t move backwards. A race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump as he is running right now—about the ‘radical left’ and ‘inflation’—vs DeSantis…it just isn’t what the country needs right now. Let’s put it this way: that dialectic—DeSantis and a moderate Trump—it’s a huge retreat from 2016. It’s a huge retreat, and it cedes so much ground. 

Quite a statement from a child of Trump whose entire movement is called ‘America First’.

In contrast to the Trump moderates, Fuentes believes that, in a racialised country like America, voters will always default to their identity when it comes to the crunch. He claims polls show that Hispanic voters who prefer GOP policies will still ultimately vote Democrat, and that even Black voters who explicitly identity as conservative will do the same.

The numbers do seem to confirm that it is very difficult to rid voters of the perception that the Republicans are the party of white people. Quite an extraordinary PR triumph from the Democrats, given that the latter are the party of both slavery and the Jim Crow laws, but that’s for another day.

Of course, even on the ‘2016 Trump’ side, most are not as radical as Fuentes. Milo seems less interested in racial demographics (and we haven’t even had time to point out the strangeness of the Jewish Milo campaigning with two alleged antisemites) but he is vehemently anti DeSantis, and anti the watering down of Trump.

What Ye believes is, as I say, less clear. Like Trump in 2016, he has become the unlikely figurehead for a certain segment of the disaffected. No doubt a much smaller segment than Trump’s base, but there are further similarities: the charisma, the financial self-sufficiency of the maverick billionaire (now former billionaire in Ye’s case), and the suspicion that they are driven largely by narcissism.

It’s hardly surprising that Ye’s favourite part of the Trump meeting appears to have been when he cheekily asked The Donald to be his VP, a purely self-aggrandising piece of trolling that apparently went down about as well as you’d expect.

Then again, he also asked Trump the genuinely hard-hitting question of why he has ignored the January 6th prisoners, who were his most dedicated followers, and who are languishing in jail to this day because of their belief in him. A sign that perhaps serious, if controversial, political statements will also be part of the Ye campaign.

The meeting is said to have gone sour halfway through, following a mysterious call to Trump. Was it from an adviser, perhaps even Jason Miller, asking Trump what the heck he was doing meeting a disgraced rapper, a disgraced political commentator, and a disgraced streamer who made a holocaust joke about the Cookie Monster?

Who knows? But a source told Timcast that Trump returned in a very different mood:

When he comes back, the whole tenor of the dinner changes, and he starts ranting about Kim Kardashian, saying that she’s ‘disgusting’ and all the rest of it. Ye just looked around the table and said, ‘that’s the mother of my children that you are talking about.’

Whatever exactly went down at that meeting, I think it’s fair to say Trump was pushing the limits of his ‘Truth’ brand with his description:

One thing everyone but Trump can surely agree on is that none of this has been ‘uneventful’. It has been eventful AF. And I suspect will continue to be so for the coming months.

I have no idea what Ye will do next. I doubt Ye does either. Nor can I confirm that we are living in ‘the simulation’, as some have suggested.

But I can say that, truly, we are in the strangest timeline.