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Axios reports that, when Kanye dined at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump, he didn’t come alone. Instead, he brought with him Nick Fuentes, an openly antisemitic, Holocaust-denying, possible White supremacist. When word got out, Trump’s spokesman offered a very weak excuse, which is that Trump didn’t invite Fuentes. Inquiring minds want to know two things: Why didn’t Trump bar Fuentes and why is Kanye (who last I looked was still Black) hanging with a White supremacist? The whole thing is bizarre.
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Here’s what Axios had to say:
Former President Trump dined and conversed with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday night, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Why it matters: Trump’s direct engagement with a man labeled a “white supremacist” by the Justice Department, one week after declaring his 2024 candidacy, is likely to draw renewed outrage over the former president’s embrace of extremists.
- Fuentes, who frequently promotes racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had been spotted with Ye at Mar-a-Lago, but reports erroneously suggested he did not have dinner with the former president.
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What they’re saying: “Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about,” Trump said in a statement.
That Axios or the Justice Department (which calls everything and everybody that opposes Democrat party rule a “White supremacist”) gave the White supremacist label to Fuentes doesn’t sway me. The facts per conservating-hating Wikipedia are fuzzy. Fuentes, who is part Mexican, says he’s not a White supremacist but is, instead, a nationalist who resents open borders and believes America’s traditional “white demographic core” is an integral part of American identity. Unlike the Democrat-affiliated KKK, he’s not arguing for minorities to be killed or denied civil rights but his statements come awfully close to crossing the line separating opposing illegal immigration from White nationalism. Nevertheless, Fuentes’s apparent friendship with Kanye seems to mitigate some White supremacist charges.
Image: Trump meets with Kanye. YouTube screen grab.
Of course, it could be that he and Kanye have a stronger tie that binds, irrespective of race, and that’s antisemitism. Fuentes is an open Holocaust denier and repeatedly denigrates Jews specifically. I wouldn’t let him dine in my house or even enter it. He is neither a nice man nor a good man. And as it happens, Kanye also denigrates Jews in dangerous terms.
The obvious question about that dinner is how Trump couldn’t have known with whom he was dining. But the really big question is why Trump dined with two men who are open in their antisemitic beliefs about an evil cabal of Jews controlling the world—the same beliefs that finally led directly to Auschwitz?
In answer to the first question, a lot of people find Trump’s supposed ignorance suspicious:
Fascinating that nobody would be vetting potential dinner guests for the former President https://t.co/HcshZYvPnO
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) November 25, 2022
You don’t just sit down and have dinner with a former president without him knowing who you are. Please spare us the gaslighting.
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) November 25, 2022
Yup. And in any event, when Kanye went to Mar-a-Lago, Trump knew that Kanye had made an openly antisemitic statement and then doubled down on it. It’s a real mystery given that Trump truly was the best friend Israel’s ever had in the White House and that his favorite daughter and his grandchildren are Jewish.
So, here’s what I think happened: Kanye has 32.2 million followers on Twitter. His support within the Black community is huge and, disgustingly, his Twitter support increased after his antisemitic rants. This leads to the unpleasant thought that, thanks to Black affiliation with leftism, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Israelites—all of which are antisemitic groups—it may be that Trump believes that, to grow his Black political base, he must accommodate antisemites.
If that’s the case, Trump has embraced a dangerous level of political cynicism that I cannot ignore. The Trump camp had better come up with a better explanation for what happened because currently, in the mental list of pros and cons I have about his renewed candidacy, that’s definitely a con.
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