Ye and Thee: A Clash of Egos
– By Ed Kociela –
Oh, to be a fly on the wall the other night when Donald Trump broke bread with Kanye West.
I can only imagine.
West, who now goes by the name Ye, apparently told Donald Trump he intends to run for president in 2024 and asked him to be his running mate.
The evening also presented one of those incredibly rich “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” moments when white supremacist/holocaust denier Nick Fuentes turned up as a tagalong guest with Ye.
Afterwards, Trump called the rapper a “seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black,” that he was simply offering Ye some “advice” because he “has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else.” Trump, apparently, also had some rather unflattering things to say about Ye’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian, who he met when he invited the couple to the Oval Office for a photo op. I could understand if you may have forgotten because Trump was also awash in the glow of such “superstars” as Ted Nugent and Scott Baio at the time.
Ye, for his part, painted a much different picture, saying that Trump “basically started screaming at me telling me I was gonna lose” and that Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes.”
Honest.
We can’t make this stuff up.
Truly.
Trump immediately caught heat, even from some of the party’s more conservative stalwarts, like Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson who said it was “very troubling” for the former president to take a meeting with Fuentes.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or party to meet with (an) avowed racist or anti-Semite.”
Trump, surprise, surprise, claimed to have no knowledge of Fuentes or that he even knew he would be arriving at Mar-a-Lago for the dinner. Now, understanding just how highly the security is tightened around the former president, his comment seems incredulous. I mean seriously, his handlers had to know Fuentes was coming along. You just don’t get through the gates without a bevy of cops, Secret Service agents, and lackeys checking for your name on the guest list. Otherwise, working stiffs like me could walk through the door and take a seat at the table, so it is rather unlikely that Mr. Fuentes came in through the bathroom window.
And, given Trump’s proclivity for the wicked right white supremacists, I would find it equally unlikely that he would not know of him. In his relatively short years, Fuentes has already been booted from YouTube for violating its hate speech policy and has built a name among the white trash racists and idiotic Holocaust deniers.
And, of course, then there’s Ye, who has been losing lucrative endorsements for his anti-Semitic remarks.
Ye and Fuentes are not, of course, the first to deny the Holocaust. A number of other racists and anti-Semites beat them to it. But, none really had the “star quality” of the rapper and his latest sidekick. And, none came in for such a hot landing, asking a former president who has already declared his candidacy for the 2024 race to ride in the second seat on the campaign bus.
If it wasn’t so serious, it would be seriously funny to imagine Trump and Ye talking policy and procedure beyond bedding groupies and espousing radically malicious tenets.
Six million Jews – approximately two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population – came to horrible deaths between the years of 1941and 1945 when Nazis and their twisted allies carried out their butchery in Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
The Nazis called it ethnic cleansing.
The rest of the world called it genocide, except some places, including the United States, did not do enough to protect the innocents by turning their boats away when they landed on our shores seeking asylum and safety.
What the Nazis were up to was no secret as they had perfected their so-called “Final Solution” to the Jewish question years before.
The world looked away, however, allowing the carnage, the torture, the pain. And, while there may have been some “survivors,” those who escaped death and torture, they could not escape the scarred hearts and battered souls that followed them to their graves.
But, that’s not all. Some 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war were killed along the way with another 500 thousand forced into slave labor. The Poles were also part of the body count in obscene numbers. Black Germans were sterilized, incarcerated, and murdered and gay men were subject to murder and other atrocities.
World historians do not dispute this, only those with anti-semitism and racism running through their brittle veins.
It is not possible to disassociate Trump from those white nationalists and white supremacists who took deep root during his administration and sprouted a whole new movement of hate.
There is no place for this behavior, not with what we have all supposedly read and learned and experienced.
And, although we are all free to express our thoughts and beliefs, that freedom does not extend to those who would do harm unto others regardless of intent or reason.
That’s what makes these dangerous times.
We have seen a subtle deterioration of humanity, of compassion, of truth that can be tied directly to the former president and his penchant for lies and his affinity for the hard, hard right. Prove otherwise. You cannot.
The thing about history is that unless you learn from it there is a great chance that it can repeat itself and therein lies the danger, especially when there are the mindless who are more than willing to walk that jagged path with the seemingly charismatic types who lure them.
There is no place in this country for the Holocaust deniers, the white supremacists and nationalists, the truly disturbed who endanger us and our freedoms.
One of the things we learned the first time around with Trump is that he tends to live on the edge of outrage, that he thrives on shocking headlines, that he finds his greatest success in dropping out of the loop of civility and human kindness.
It’s time to put him on the shelf next to fellow washouts Ted Nugent and Scott Baio, allies from the first, and hopefully, last time around.
I mean really, haven’t we had more than enough of all of them?
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