Mark Steyn: Kanye’s Tweets Are a ‘Threat to the Lockstep, Homogeneity’ of Popular Culture

RUSH EXCERPT:

CARLSON: "Rapper Kanye West has been back on Twitter for less than two weeks and he is already brought this social media company to its knees. In an epic four day rampage through cyberspace, he shared videos by Scott Adams posting a photograph of himself in a make America great again hat and earned two retweets from the president of the United States. Progressives are almost unconscious with rage. Rolling Stone magazine calls West’s tweets a real threat. Author and columnist Mark Steyn knows it’s a threat. What are his tweets a threat to?"
STEYN: "There a threat to the lockstep of popular culture in the United States. To some extent, I’m not unsympathetic to that. Some people are mocking us conservatives because when some beatniks dig like Kanye west come on, we all get so excited. He’s giving us the eye. I love the fact that — I remember in the 2000 election going to the Republican convention and being given the folder to show which celebrities celebrities — it was a detective piece of paper with two names on one side. It was Pat Boone and one of the oak ridge boys. Seven of them are Democrats there was something terribly refreshing and having no purchase on pop culture. The fact is, we are not really excited. It’s not so much the excitement from our end. It’s the fact that Kanye is a sick of being told what to think. The celebrity supporters are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And a self-respecting man like this guy is, he doesn’t want to be put in that box. He wants to bust out of that box."
CARLSON: "Are you saying art is not the same thing as conformity?"
STEYN: "I am. Oddly enough, it’s strange because we’re going on about how transgressive we are. We need transgressive artists and then they demand that all of the artists improve the ideology ideology. In a way, it’s obvious correction. Trump is a showbiz figure. He did beauty pageants and a reality show. He’s on the Regis Philbin Christmas album firing blitzen and hiring the Rudolph the red nose reindeer. The man is on the Christmas album. If you think about it from Kanye’s point of view, he walks into a room and there is Chuck Schumer and there is Elizabeth Warren and any other corner is Donald Trump, who is he going to go and talk to a question mark he’s going to talk to trump. In a sense, this is a natural correction to the insanity that the celebrity left has maintained."