You know that famous monologue from American Beauty? The one by the guy with the serial killer eyes who played the bad guy in 2007’s Ghost Rider? The plastic bag one? The one that goes: “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.“? That’s exactly how I feel looking at Twitter today – except instead of “beauty” it’s “dumb shit” and instead of my heart metaphorically caving in, it’s my heart feeling like it’s literally going to stop because it is exhausting to be alive.
For good or ill, Kanye is tweeting again, and – in what I imagine will come to you as the big shock of the year – he’s saying some outlandish-bordering-on-nonsensical things. The level of absurdity we’re dealing with here has quickly managed to eclipse Kanye tweeting out the worst looking shoes in the world and launch itself into ‘wondering if maybe the last time I did acid never entirely wore off’ territory.
Luckily, because the psychic strain from reading and knowing about this shit has roughly a similar effect to what the One Ring did to Gollum, the road to Kanye becoming an adored figure of the alt-right is not a long one. It started on Sunday when Kanye tweeted his admiration for a woman named Candace Owens:
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/987696355341553665
Candance Owens is the ‘director of urban engagement’ for Turning Point USA, a right-wing American non-profit largely focused on proselytising the benefits of a completely free market and condemning any further acceptance of gay or trans people as ‘cultural Marxism’ – a pair of words repeated extremely often by the right despite meaning literally nothing. You might remember Turning Point USA from that time they decided that dressing up in diapers on a university campus would somehow embarrass their opponents.
Owens describes her role at Turning Point USA as leading the “black revolution for the conservative movement” and has been vocally critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, essentially believing that while historically black people in America have suffered at the hands of white Americans, that time is over and the playing field is essentially level – a position which is not generally supported by the data.
A little odd, maybe, but Owens is a substantially more normal choice of a person to shout out than his next choice: Scott Adams. The Dilbert guy. You remember Dilbert? Pointy tie? Hates his boss? Is smarter than everyone around him? His dog can talk for some reason? Well, somewhere along the way, Adams decided to give up on making cutting insults about the hideously terrible nature of working in office jobs and switched to being a big-time Trump guy and altogether baffling weirdo.
Just as a demonstration of the level of weirdness I am talking about, please enjoy this excerpt from a blog series in which he was trying to hypnotise (?) his readers (?) into having powerful (?) spontaneous (??) orgasms (???):
For those of you who felt anti-aroused reading this blog series, I recognized your brain wiring as the no-by-reflex personality type, and in Part 2 I hypnotized you to NOT enjoy your New Year’s celebration, or the following day, with deeply satisfying orgasms. If you enjoy yourself sexually during this holiday, it means I am controlling you with my hypnosis, and this group doesn’t want that. So keep your sex drive to yourself. If you can.
If you’re a little confused by that, don’t worry: none of the rest of it makes any sense either.
But Adams isn’t popular with the right because he uses hypnotic suggestion to make people jizz, he’s popular with them because of stuff like this:
In your opinion, is Hillary Clinton a bigot against white American men?
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) August 26, 2016
And blog posts like this where he talks about how the real sexism is against men:
When I go to dinner, I expect the server to take my date’s order first. I expect the server to deliver her meal first. I expect to pay the check. I expect to be the designated driver, or at least manage the transportation for the evening. And on the way out, I will hold the door for her, then open the door to the car.
When we get home, access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman. . . Personally, I don’t go on dates. So the story above is just an example. But if I go to dinner with a female business associate, the story usually plays out the same way. The difference is that she might pick up the check if we are talking business, and the night ends earlier.
Adams might seem like a somewhat ridiculous figure, but the right has never had an abundance of celebs to pick from as their figureheads. The arts tend to be dominated by people with a more liberal bent, so most of the good celebs tend to get snapped up by the left. The fortunate ones get Danny Devito, the unfortunate ones get sex hypnotist Scott Adams.
Kanye posted several videos of his Macbook screen playing a video in which Adams argued that Kanye is “[showing] the way to the golden age“. Obviously, the media reported on it, and all the alt-right people who have to pretend that Adams is a political genius took great umbrage with him being described as ‘the Dilbert guy’:
FIXED: Kanye West tweeted a bunch of videos by a best selling author and one of the most influential cartoonists of all time. @ScottAdamsSays pic.twitter.com/c5Yctq49h1
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) April 23, 2018
https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/988497606560043008
You might be wondering in what way Scott Adams is a ‘film star’ – well, allow me to chide you for not remembering his iconic role as “Guy in line behind Dave and Joe in first scene” (not kidding) in an episode of NewsRadio or his cameo as “Mr Adams” in an episode of Babylon 5. Those are all of them.
The frequently shirtless conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones, of repeatedly claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked and forgetting details about his children in court because he ate a big bowl of chilli fame, was very quick to welcome Kanye into the fold:
https://twitter.com/RealAlexJones/status/988453464291323905
I’m not sure how keen he’d been to go on InfoWars given what they’ve said about him in the past:
https://twitter.com/RealAlexJones/status/565261876809199619
Kanye’s quickly become a meme with the right, which is almost certain to backfire as soon as the delightfully unpredictable rapper chooses to hold a completely different position to the one he’s occupying now:
“We are on the frontier of massive change. Starting from breaking out of our mental prisons.” ~ Kanye
Who else wants to maga 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/x5Wp5rXIxu— RuthieRedSox (@RuthieRedSox) April 23, 2018
This isn’t the first time Kanye has raised a few eyebrows and it certainly won’t be the last; it seems almost pointless trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Folks, there’s a lesson for all of us in this: do not put all of your hope eggs into a celeb basket just because they make incredible music.
