The Press Box - The Old Kanye Is Gone | Damage Control (Ep. 460)

Episode Date: April 25, 2018

The Ringer's Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs discuss Kanye West's latest deep dive into the MAGA life (1:38), how rants are his signature art form (9:37), and the parallels between him and Donald Trump (12:15). Then they break down the incel movement, which started as an innocent online community but has grown into a deadly threat (17:40). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. This week, we're talking about incels, otherwise known as involuntary celibates. It's an online community that gained horrible relevancy this week

after a killer in Toronto cited the movement as motivation for his crimes. But first, Kanye West is in the building. He's back on Twitter. He's back promoting new music, but also he's doubling down on his support for Donald Trump, and he's promoting some other unsavory right-wing figures. We're going to step back and assess where exactly Kanye West went wrong, and we should say we recorded this segment slightly before Donald Trump himself entered the fray.

He retweeted Kanye and offered his support for Kanye. He sort of retweeted Kanye, saying, I love Trump, basically. And also, so in our discussion about Kanye, we mentioned that a lot of people have sort of defended him by saying his promotion of Trump might somehow be tied to mental health issues. And I just wanted to make a note that since we recorded this session, Kim Kardashian and Chancellor Rapper have both come out on Twitter and publicly refuted that notion. So with all of that out of the way,

We're on to the show. Easy. We hope you're listening. Last week, Kanye West reemerged to announce via Twitter the upcoming release of new music from himself, from Kid Cuddy, from Nas, and his good music label mates. Unfortunately, Kanye is also doubling down on his fondness for President Donald Trump and now also for other. beacons and pundits on the alt-right or sort of on the right wing in general. So he praised the right-wing punit, Candice Owens, who said a lot of critical and unsavory things about Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement. And Scott Adams, the Dober creator, who's also become a sort of strange right-wing web pundit in his second life.

So weird. It's Kanye's right-wing political drift has unleashed. Great angst into the world, I would say, if my Twitter timeline is any indication. Definitely. It's shocking on the one hand, but it's also very much in line with Kanye's personality, his bombast, his, I would say his general penchant for provocation. So, Kate, what do we think is going on here? Like, how much of this is, it feels like there's a weird divide of how much of Kanye's sort of tweeting about Donald Trump and sort of quasi all rights. slash alt light right wing thought is trolling versus how much of it is sincere, how much of it is

influenced by maybe sort of, I think a lot of assumptions people make about his mind state right now. Like, I can't tell how much of this is real, how much of it is trolling, and how much is just Kanye sort of being in a bad place personally. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of armchair psychology going on and trying to diagnose his mental state and like I don't think anyone knows what exactly is going on in his mind. But I don't, you know, when it comes to like whether it's trolling or whether it's sincere, I don't really care.

I think what he's doing is unsettling because he's like a, you know, pop culture icon that a lot of people look up to and he's endorsing some bad people. but yeah, I don't I don't know if we'll ever like fully be able to understand like whether how sincere he is in his public persona do you think he's trolling? Do you think he's sincere?

Well, it's I think a lot of Kanye fans avail him of this excuse of like well he this is sort of a ruse maybe like it's almost the people sort of gesture at the idea that well he's promoting new music maybe this is just sort of album promotion It's a shitty ruse, though. Right, it's a shitty ruse.

And it also just seems to, like the fact that he, you know, again, he endorses Trump after the election, I should say, in which he didn't vote back in November 2016, right? He just sort of disappears for a while. And it's interesting to me that he reemerges to talk about Candace Owens and Scott Adams because those two people on the right are people who, it's almost like Jordan, Peterson core, right? Like, there's specifically people you would stumble across by spending way too much time on YouTube. I feel like it's only a matter of time before. Yeah, like they are for sure going to have some sort of summit. That's right to have you, Conn.

Yeah. Yeah. That weird accent. A terrible summit. I don't buy the trolling excuse, really. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that he is reappearing on Twitter just as he's promoting new music. But I don't, if he isn't. sincere, it's still

not okay. Right. Maybe someone you wouldn't expect or somebody you would expect who's famous to some decree will pop up in the news because they said something nice about Trump. Or they maybe just in general set some politically

askew or naive thing. So like over the same weekend where Kanye was tweeting about Scott Adams and Candace Owens, Shania Twain, right, comes out of nowhere in this Guardian interview. and says, oh, yeah, I would have voted for Trump. Like, he's Frank.

He's, you know, I, Trump is the opposite of bullshit, and I would have voted for the thing that wasn't bullshit. And Shania, first of all, like, gets his backlash on Twitter and immediately apologizes and said, I don't actually agree with him about anything. You know, I was just trying to suggest that, like, Trump is sincere, and that's why I like him. But people canceled, people canceled, as it were,

that the Twitter term canceled, right? Like, people were. responded to Shania Twain in a very swift, uncomplicated, decisive way. It was like everyone roasted Shania Twain. And then we ought to sort of moved on, right? There was no angst about like, oh, what is this, what does this mean for Shania Twain fandom? And I think Shania Twain is less active than Kanye, obviously. But there's a sense in which Kanye is the only celebrity I've seen this happen to

where Kanye fans who are very vehemently anti-Dunuch. Trump who don't like the sort of post-Trump direction of the country have been kind of ambiguous and ambivalent. And I'm trying to locate what it is about Kanye that would make somebody who would immediately cancel Shania Twain and even cancel Taylor Swift for not speaking out against Trump, but also not voting for him or saying she would have voted him for him like Kanye did. Like what's the thing that would lead even the most vehemently anti-Trump Kanye fan to sort of say, well, wait a minute, we got to sort out the facts here.

What is it? I think there's a few different things. I think when Kanye was on the up and up, he very famously said George W. Bush doesn't care about black people at the Katrina fundraiser. I think this was 2004. Yeah, that was like sort of a lot of people's introduction to the idea of Kanye is like a political pundit in addition to a rapper. And so I think that cultivated a lot of goodwill amongst like Democrats, some left-wing people. So there's a sense of people having this one idea of Kanye and having to now adjust it and be like, oh, he's not the person I thought he was, whereas no one was really expecting Shania Twain to be like a radical.

And then I also think it is the fact that Kanye has had a lot of really public struggles with his mental health and people have this tendency to not want to pile on someone who's having a public struggle. And I think, yeah, I think it's like a combo of people wanting to still feel good about loving Kanye. Like, I want to still feel good about loving Kanye. I can't. I still love him as an artist, but I think he's making some really bad choices as a person. Yeah, so I think that people, you know, have an immense amount of love for him and want to give him out. And there are some reasons to maybe excuse his behavior. I don't think they're justified.

I don't think we should excuse this. Yeah. This is not acceptable. I mean, you were mentioning, right, like this idea that this particular moment in Kanye's sort of quasi-political credibility is basically the opposite of how a lot of people were introduced to his politics. Yeah. With the George Bush comments at the Katrina Telethon. That's true. So that sense of contrast is true in one sense.

But I think in another sense, the way Kanye is thinking and behaving and articulating himself. right now is actually very on brand and very consistent, right? Like one thing, so Rob Harvilla and I wrote about Kanye together. Great piece. Because we were struggling to write about him individually. We wrote about him together in a piece for the ringer. And one thing I honed in on was this idea of like the Kanye rant. Like if you think of Kanye, you know, Kanye at this point, he does fashion stuff.

He pretends to know things about philosophy and is not writing a philosophy book. He's an expansive guy. Right. And to me, outside of just his music, like his big songs, his signature art form is the Kanye rant, right? And the Kanye rant is this thing he sort of develops in media, like the first, like outside of, it's like around the time that Isis is coming out and he's on tour for Yis. And he starts ranting about the media and all this stuff at his shows. He keeps, you know, he does these like 20 minute spiel sometimes at his shows where he's just sort of getting things off his chest. and a very like petty incomplete thoughts that are mostly about just sort of venting

to a captive audience and he's done it in interviews too like I think you know I think of the hour interview he did with Zane Lowe in 2003 that like so many Kanye quotes come from that one interview it's like a video interview

and I just look at the Kanye rant and it's such a like proto-Trumpian rhetorical construct, right? Like one thing I thought about a lot when I was writing the piece of Harvilla is like think of the difference

between a Muhammad Ali rant and a Kanye West rant because like Muhammad Ali, you think of like, you think of his outburst and you think of a guy talking about his superiority in the form that he's a master of.

And also maybe talking about politics, but talking about it in these ways that do seem anchored to a consort for other people and a concern for history, whereas the Kanye version of that kind of outburst is amazingly self-centered and ignorant and sort of sporadic and not connected and I think egomaniacal. Yeah, it's not underpinned by an actual political philosophy in the same, like in the way that Muhad Ali Lee.

Right. And when he gets in the ranting about things outside of music even, it's like, it's not even underpinned by expertise. Okay, you just, like, this conversation is really freaking me out because I am starting to draw more of a parallel between Kanye's rhetoric and Trump's. And the possibility of Kanye actually becoming our president has never been more real to me than in this moment. Like, I'm getting a little concerned. Kim would make a fantastic first lady, but I really, that is not something I want to happen. And yeah, this is, this is freaking.

I'm getting, I'm freaked out. Yeah, but it's, I mean, apart from the, I think, parallels between how Kanye speaks and how Trump speaks. It's just, after you listen to enough Kanye rants, you sort of understand how the terminus for that is, oh, yeah, he gets into right wing YouTube videos that are, that are totally about, like, if you're talking about Jordan Peterson or anyone else in that sort of orbit of right wing, but in denial about the fact that it's right wing is they're particular. and it's just objective truth. But right-wing sort of web communities, they're all about exploiting that sense of grievance. They're all about pandering to that sense of like, you're a genius freethinker,

and the problem is that liberals just want to oppress you with considerations of other people. I really feel like if you were to give someone a quiz of, like, did Connie or Trump say it, it would be a hard quiz. Like, I'm getting freaked out right now. Because I think that they also come, like he was saying on Twitter that they're very similar. And I actually think that they have similar approaches to life. It's just that Kanye makes great music.

Where Trump has never made anything great. No. America, notwithstanding. But they're showmen. Right. And with Kanye, I think for a long time, I think the reason people did not initially, like I would say from 2013 until I think very recently, look at Kanye's rants in that sort of form of Kanye expression as troublesome and distressing is because people could sort of just put Kanye in the context of, oh, this guy is a great performer. Now, I think a lot of people attribute this sort of reputation of genius to Kanye. and they don't just mean that in terms of his music.

I think they take him seriously as a quote unquote thinker. But I think in a broad sense, Kanye, even if you looked at him and saw personal distress, you could sort of not take it seriously because the guy is a performer. I think after a country elects a game show host president with horrible ideas about, well, management for one, but also just horrible ideas about politics and human rights and things like that, you know, Kanye's platform looks a lot more perilous. Yeah, I honestly think that the thing I'm going to take away from this conversation is not to let him off the hook.

I hope if he is having any sort of mental health issues that he gets help, but not to let him off the hook for his public statements and also to be wary of them. Because even if Kanye, even if for whatever reason that you can sort of, there's anything to mitigate Kanye's sort of judgment as like a factor in his drift toward Trump and all these other people, it's still the case that he certainly has a sort of credibility that now these people are going to exploit. Right. And that his fans are going to mistake for something. Like, again, he's a rapper. Like a lot of his fans are young and impressionable. a lot of the people who stumble into like Jordan Peterson videos are young and impressionable. Regardless of what Kanye's intentions are, you know, there is a practical effect of all of this.

Like Kanye is an influential figure. He's an influential performer. And I just think that I think we have to think long and hard about like why Kanye's politics do matter. As much as I wish that the politics of every celebrity on the Sunday. It didn't matter. I think they do. I just think that, yeah, again, it's like Trump is president. Like things are different.

Kanye himself doesn't seem to take it seriously, but I look at Kanye and I look at his platform and think, I think what you think, right? Like I think it is not that much of a difference between Kanye, you know, Kanye leveraging his platform to sell a bunch of albums in June versus Kanye leveraging his platform toward like substantial political credibility in a really bad way. So should we like buy his albums to sort of encourage him to keep just making music and not become a politician? I think I'm going to bootleg his album. I'm sorry. I don't know.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. No. Et cetera. Et cetera. Now to talk about something even more disturbing somehow than Kanye West presidency, I want to talk about in-cell culture. This week in Toronto, a man. drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians deliberately, killed 10 people, injured over a dozen others. And, you know, this attack resembled a lot of different van attacks that have happened in Europe

over the past few years. And the drivers have sort of been called terrorists because they've, you know, either affiliated themselves with ISIS or other sort of known terrorist groups. This time it was different because the killer wrote on Facebook about his motivation and he said, The In-Cell rebellion has begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacey's. All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Roger. And that might sound like a lot of gibberish. I'll break it down.

The important thing to take away is that he was praising Elliot Roger. So that's the guy who killed a bunch of people in California in 2014 and sort of blamed women. He left this misogynistic manifesto on the internet saying that, you know, he had grown crazed with violent thoughts after no woman would sleep with him. And now he is sort of a figurehead in this in-cell community. And so do you know what in-cell means? I do know what it means. I do know it. So it's involuntary solidit.

Yes. I also remember Elliott Rogers. I remember reading the Elliott Roger manifesto. Can you explain to me the quote, the in-cell rebellion has begun? Yes. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacey's. All hail the supreme gentleman, Elliot Roger. So first of all, what is the in-cell rebellion?

It's not a formal thing. I guess, thank God. But it's this idea that involuntary celibates, which is mainly men who believe they cannot have a sexual partner because outside forces have sort of conspired against them, whether it's feminism or. So a Chad is a really stereotypically attractive alpha male in the in-cell parlance. and a Stacey is like a promiscuous woman who only wants to sleep with the chads of the world. Got it. Okay, so the inside rebellion is basically the idea that all of the people who can't get laid should rise up and seize power from the normies, the Chads and Stacey's. So what does that mean?

Because they're saying we will overthrow all the Chads and Stacey's. What does that mean? This seems like one of the more extreme examples of someone inciting the Incel rebellion. But I think it's just the idea that like the people who identify as incels should rest control of society. Right. And I think a lot of times when it's online, people are probably saying this in a tongue-in-cheek way. Like, I don't think that everyone in the insult community is violent or some of them might be nice in real life. But there is this discussion that's been going on and now it seems to have produced an actual act of mass violence.

Right. I mean, okay. Wow. This seems complicated, right? Because I feel like a lot of masculine violence, I feel like the call. I feel like a lot of masculine violence is animated by anxieties that, like, about women, I guess I'd say. I feel like there's a lot of violence that men carry out in the name of being frustrated about women, I guess is what I mean. And I think just a lot of masculine behavior in general could be described as that.

So how much is this, like, I guess when you describe insults to me, I'm trying to situate it in context with or in conversation with like pickup artists. culture and men's rights activist culture. Like, where does this fall in the context of those things, which I also associate with web communities? Yeah. So there, I've seen them classified as all part of the manosphere. They're all interconnected. Like some people who identify as pickup artists, obviously would not be in-cell if they're

successful pickup artists. In-cells are definitely overlapping. If there's a Venn diagram, there's a lot of overlap, like with the men's rights movement. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about this is because I'm seeing all of these explainers of like what is in cell culture, like what does it mean? And I think it's really important to remember and I haven't seen this coming up in the media that this is not some new movement that emerged out of nowhere on the internet. This is part of a tradition of like male violence against women or because of. Because of women. Because of women.

Yeah. And I think it's important. Like I think we should, I think people, more people should know about in cells because it's an example of how how angry young men can get radicalized online. But we shouldn't also, we shouldn't treat it as like a phenomenon without precedent. Right. But how do, I mean, it's, okay, so the insult communities, how do they initially organize themselves? I guess that's the thing I'm trying to imagine, right? Is this really all just sort of men initially finding each other and grouping together based on, you know, pretty standard frustration about wishing they were having more sex than they're having?

It's really interesting because the term inso was actually coined by a woman in Toronto in the 90s. She was a university or graduate student who felt like no one, like she was, you know, sexually unattractive. And so she created this website about involuntary celibacy. And it was like an early web forum. And it was the tone of it. Like was. Apparently, so she did a, she didn't interview with Elle a few years ago. And it wasn't initially like gendered because she was a female.

She was heterosexual. So she, it wasn't, it wasn't what it evolved into at all. It didn't have this misogyny at its core. But then she. sort of apparently sort of just lost interest and sold the website. And people ended up adopting the phrase and turning it into this specifically gendered thing. And not like what she, when she used the phrase in cell, she was just saying like putting a button on the unique or the universal experience of like feeling unlovable, which isn't. only something that men go through.

And then it ended up getting sort of taken over by not only just men with low self-esteem, but men who like specifically blamed women and feminism for their lack of romantic success. Right. I feel like a lot of thinking, especially thinking that proliferates online is parasitic in this way. Because it just reminds me of how. Pepe. Well, that, but. Okay, Pepe, but it also reminds me of how the Matrix, it's like the Wachowski's who these amazingly progressive people, they make the Matrix and it gets appropriated by the scum over the...

They must be so sad about that. Yeah. I would love to know what the Wichowski's think about. Yeah. The legacy of the Matrix and red pill and all of this stuff. Yes. And so the red pill, that sort of phrase is used by Ncells, too. Like, there is a ton of overlap between the men's rights.

activists and the insult community. It's just, it seems like, oh, and so the insult community, like, particularly, they called, this guy called Elliot Roger the supreme gentleman, I believe. Yes, the supreme gentleman. So they've really taken him on as a figurehead. Is it a martyr? Yeah. Or is a, or, yeah, what's it, wait, what's the, wait, hold on, what's the status of Elliot

Rogers? Like, where is he? He's dead. They've adopted him as a martyr. They've adopted him as a martyr. and I feel like with this latest attack, it still remains to be seen. Reddit just banned...

Like they banned an in-cell group after the Elliott-Rogger attack. They've banned another one, I think, in the wake of this one. Right. It's worth keeping an eye on and it's worth people being aware that this movement has sort of turned violent.

It seems to me that a lot of... A lot of things that were once the provenance of quirky, distressing, dark web under current discussion are edging closer and closer to being a part of the national political discourse in a really urgent and stark way, which is, I mean, to me, that's sort of my reason in the situation. I don't know, like, how close are we to there being Senate hearings about incels? I give it six months.

Lord, I'm not looking forward to that at all. Well, in the meantime, I just hope I do not have to see a Donald Trump tweet with the word insult in it. Or a Kanye tweet. With the word insult in it. Oh, Lord. Okay. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibs.

That's damage control. That's it for us this week. We'll see you again in two weeks from now. In the meantime, Kanye, pull it together, buddy. I can't take any more of these tweets. I'm going to be like 50s said. I'm never reading that page ever again. I'm a mute you, bro.

I'm a mute you. you. Also mute the term in cell. Oh my god.