Kanye West has prompted speculation he may already be abandoning his 2020 US presidential run after raising concerns about the “black vote”.
West posted on Twitter saying: “#2020VISION or maybe ‘24… I guess all black people supposed to vote on Biden? Y’all want me to run on nah???”
The rapper told Forbes magazine last week: “A lot of times just like political parties they feel all blacks have to be Democrat. This man, Joe Biden, said if you don’t vote for me, then you are not black.
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“Well, act like we didn’t hear that? We act like we didn’t hear that man say that? That man said that. It’s a rap. We gonna walk, all the people. Jay-Z said it best.
“For the other candidates, I just gracefully suggest y’all bow out - Trump and Biden, gracefully bow out.”
But now it looks as though it may be West bowing out, having failed to earn the 10,000 votes he needed to get on the ballot in South Carolina, according to Metro, despite a bizarre first campaign rally in the state over the weekend.
If he were to stay in the race, West currently has an 100-1 chance of victory, according to Oddschecker.
If he were to overcome those odds and enter the White House, here’s what a West presidency would look like:
Abortion
West set out an anti-abortion stance on religious grounds, saying he is “pro-life because I’m following the word of the Bible”.
He also posted and then deleted a pro-life tweet calling six-month fetuses “souls” that “deserve to live”, feeding an ongoing spat with pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood. He has previously said the group is run by “white supremacists to do the Devil’s work”, the Daily Mail reports.
Vaccinations
Asked about the development of a Covid-19 vaccine, West said: “It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralysed… So when they say the way we’re going to fix covid is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast.
“They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”
Rejecting medical science, West said coronavirus was “all about God. We need to stop doing things that make God mad.”
Education
West is keen to return “fear and love of God” to education, saying prayer should return to schools despite the supposed separation of church and state in the US.
“Reinstate in God’s state, in God’s country, the fear and love of God in all schools and organisations and you chill the fear and love of everything else,” he said.
“So that was a plan by the Devil to have our kids committing suicide at an all-time high by removing God, to have murders in Chicago at an all-time high because the human beings working for the Devil removed God and prayer from the schools. That means more drugs, more murders, more suicide.”
Space programme
West almost immediately received the public backing of eccentric Tesla chief Elon Musk, who replied to his presidential announcement on Twitter with a message of support.
West told Forbes: “We’ve been talking about this for years… I proposed to him to be the head of our space programme.”
Race
West told Forbes that his support for Trump - and the reason he wore a Make America Great Again cap - was “as a protest to the segregation of votes in the black community… other than the fact that I like Trump hotels and the saxophones in the lobby”.
He said he was confortable taking black votes from the Democratic nominee, thus helping Trump: “I’m not denying it, I just told you. To say that the black vote is Democratic is a form of racism and white supremacy.”
In response to the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests, West said he intended to end police brutality, but added that “the police are people, too”.
He has criticised Black History Month as “torture porn” and said: “One time I talked to Jared Kushner, who was saying, ‘We don’t have Black leaders, we just have hustlers.’ Why? Because they killed all the Black leaders.”
The rapper has previously made widely criticised comments about race, referring to the enslavement of African Americans as “a choice” by the enslaved.
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years ... for 400 years? That sounds like a choice. Like, you was there for 400 years, all of y’all?” he said during an appearance on entertainment site TMZ in 2018. “We’re mentally imprisoned.” He added that “right now we're choosing to be enslaved”.
Death penalty
He said he opposes the death penalty, quoting the bible: “‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I’m against the death penalty.”
Foreign policy
West’s foreign policy is still to be confirmed, with the rapper telling Forbes: “I haven’t developed it yet. I’m focused on protecting America, first, with our great military. Let’s focus on ourselves first.”
But despite his reluctance to discuss foreign policy, he did profess admiration for China, says the Los Angeles Times.
“I love China. I love China. It’s not China’s fault that disease. It’s not the Chinese people’s fault. They’re God’s people also. I love China. It changed my life. It changed my perspective, it gave me such a wide perspective. My mom as an English professor taught English in China when I was in fifth grade.”
Taxes
Like West’s foreign policy, his domestic fiscal policy is also still missing some detail. On taxes, West said “I haven’t done enough research on that yet.
“I will research that with the strongest experts that serve God and come back with the best solution. And that will be my answer for anything that I haven’t researched. I have the earplug in and I’m going to use that earplug.”
