Kanye West’s Ignorant Twitter Rampage

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By Shivi Chauhan, Staff Writer

Like any other avid Twitter user, I followed my daily routine of scrolling through my feed, liking and retweeting various tweets, until I stumbled across Kim Kardashian’s tweet, “Kanye will never run in the race of popular opinion and we know that and that’s why I love him and respect him and in a few years when someone else says the same exact thing but they aren’t labeled the way he is and you will all praise them! Kanye is years ahead of his time.”

Curious, I checked Kanye’s twitter to see various tweets supporting President Donald Trump. To say that I was disgusted was a gross understatement. First of all, Kim, Kanye supporting Trump is not exactly something I would refer to as “years ahead of his time,” rather, it would (and should) be labeled as “extremely regressive”. To come out from eight years of progress and be dumped into this seemingly never-ending, scandalous, and idiotic presidency is tiring to say the least. And for a person of color to be openly supporting a man who has enacted housing discrimination policies against African Americans and consistently undermined people of color is the epitome of stupidity and ignorance.

Like any other sane person, I was perplexed and was pleased to see that Kanye lost nine million followers within a span of seven minutes. Of course, the conservative media started lashing out at those who have openly disagreed with and unfollowed Kanye, citing the First Amendment continually. Obviously, he can say whatever he wants, but don’t I have the right to be vocal in my disagreement?

Anyways, Kanye West proceeded to defend himself by stating that he doesn’t subscribe to labels and appreciates Donald Trump’s “dragon energy”, and then stated his discontent with the Obama administration and their lack of action in regards to inner cities. “Obama was in office for eight years but nothing in Chicago changed”, Kanye tweeted.

Since the last time I checked, Kanye, President Obama was not the President of Chicago, and he has done A LOT more for inner cities that Trump has or probably ever will. President Obama has “signed legislation increasing the maximum Pell Grant by more than $1,000 and total Pell Grant funding by 70%, helping millions of low- and moderate-income students afford college every year. He’s also taken steps to reduce student loan burdens, including ending student loan subsidies for private banks and shifting the savings back to students, reducing student loan interest rates to historic lows, and capping student loan payments at 10% of income for all students.

The President also established and made permanent the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides a tax cut of up to $10,000 over four years for nearly 10 million working and middle-class families a year paying for college.” And “[t]he Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has long been an important source of financing for African-American families seeking to buy their first home. In recent years, nearly half of African American home buyers used FHA to get a mortgage. Recently, the President announced a major new step to make buying a home more affordable and accessible for creditworthy families. The FHA reduced its annual mortgage insurance premiums by half a percentage point.

For the typical homebuyer, this reduction translates into a $900 reduction in their annual mortgage payment. Existing homeowners who refinance into an FHA mortgage will see similar reductions to their mortgage payments as well.  Following the reduction in 2015 the number of African American borrowers (new purchase or refinance) with an FHA loan increased by nearly 50%” (http://www.communityvoiceks.com). And these two statistics were just the first few of MANY.

So, Kanye, I hope you educate yourself about what President Obama has done for people who live in poverty-ridden communities like the one you came from. President Trump never has and never will care about people of color and impoverished people. By cutting federal funding for programs that aid people in low-income communities such as Meals on Wheels, spending 30 million dollars of taxpayer money within his first 100 days of office (for his golf trips and keeping Melania in Trump Tower) as opposed to Obama’s 12 million spent in taxpayer money in ONE YEAR, increasing the rent for people living in federal housing projects, and running on a platform of white supremacy, racism, bigotry, and xenophobia, Trump is toxic for this country, and his ideals are the antithesis of the American dream and what this country stands for.

To all of Kanye’s and Trump’s supporters, PLEASE educate yourselves. Ignorance is what brought us to this point and we should not let it be what hinders our progress in the coming years.