Kanye West wore a lanyard connected to a photo of a baby’s ultrasound during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News this week in which he declared himself pro-life.
Speaking before the prerecorded interview was shown, Mr Carlson said that Mr West was often depicted as “crazy” but that wasn’t the interpretation he had during his Los Angeles visit.
“The enemies of his ideas dismissed West as they have for years as mentally ill, too crazy to take seriously – ‘look away, ignore him, he's a mental patient. There's nothing to see here’. But is West crazy? You can judge for yourself as you watch what we're about to show you,” Mr Carlson said.
“He has his own ideas, we can say that, creative people tend to. That's why they're artists not actuaries. His freeform social media posts give the impression of a man channelling his rawest emotions right onto Instagram,” he added. “The effect can be jarring and it's often used as ammunition against him in the battle for influence over the minds of America's young people. And that battle was intense, but ‘crazy’? That was not our conclusion. In fact, we've rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes.”
Mr Carlson kicked off the interview by asking Mr West: “So you just came from Paris Fashion Week, you just landed and the lanyard is still on from it and there’s a photograph on it, what is that?”
“It’s a photograph of a baby’s ultrasound,” Mr West said.
Mr Carlson inquired as to what the imagery meant, to which the rapper said: “It just represents life. I’m pro-life.”
“So you wear it as a badge, what kind of response do you get? And amen, I agree,” the Fox News host said.
Mr West continued on by declaring that he doesn’t “care about people’s response as I care about the fact that there [are] more Black babies being aborted than born in New York City at this point.”
“Fifty per cent of Black death in America is abortion. I don’t care about people’s responses, I perform for an audience of one and that is God,” he said.
Mr Carlson lauded Mr West for sharing his views and asked when he started to feel the need to speak up.
The rapper said he initially wanted to speak out when former President Donald Trump announced his campaign for the White House in 2015.
“I think I started to really feel this need to express myself on another level when Trump was running for office and I liked him,” he told the Fox News host. “And every single person in Hollywood from my ex-wife, to my mother-in-law, to my manager at that time, to my so-called friends and handlers around me told me that if I said I liked Trump that my career would be over, and my life would be over.”
“They said stuff like ‘people get killed for wearing a hat like that’. They threaten my life ... they basically said that I will be killed for wearing the [Trump] hat,” Mr West added. “I had someone call me last night and said anybody wearing a white lives matter shirt is going to be greenlit and that means that they're gonna beat him up if they wear it. And I'm like, you know, okay, Greenlight me then.”
