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Kanye West

Kanye West (8 June 1977-) was an American rapper and businessman. Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1977, he was raised by his mother in Chicago and Oak Lawn, Illinois and in Nanjing, China. In 1996, at the age of 19, he produced his first rap album, and he was a producer for Roc-a-Fella Records in the early 2000s before releasing his debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004.

He became a successful rapper, but he became a highly controversial figure due to his outspoken views, his bipolarity, his interrupting of Taylor Swift's 2009 MTV Music Video Awards acceptance speech to proclaim that Beyonce had a better music video, his marriage to Kim Kardashian from 2014, his nominal Christian faith (claiming to be born-again in 2019 and releasing gospel hip-hop), and his support for Donald Trump. West spoke out against abortion and birth control by claiming that the Democratic Party and white supremacists were pushing black people to use Plan B as a form of voter suppression and genocide, told black people to stop focusing on racism in November 2016 (only to nominally support the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, paying George Floyd's daughter's college tuition and donating $2 million to help riot victims), opposed capital punishment, opposed COVID vaccines (despite contracting COVID himself in February 2020), claimed that slavery was a choice, condemned "woke" culture as wanting to take Jesus out of schools, supported an "America First" foreign policy, supported gun rights, claimed that the Democrats used welfare to keep African-Americans on a proverbial "plantation", and claimed that equating the black vote with the Democratic Party was white supremacist language.

On 4 July 2020, West announced that he would run for President of the United States as an independent candidate from the "Birthday Party", saying that he would have run as a Republican if Trump was not running, and claiming that Trump's hiding in his bunker during the George Floyd protests motivated him to run against Trump. His campaign submitted its first paperwork on 15 July, long after some states' filing deadlines, but he appeared on the ballot in Oklahoma as an independent. Several media sources theorized that West's candidacy was a Republican strategy to lure black voters away from the Democratic Party. He was one of the first candidates to concede to the Democrat Joe Biden, tweeting, "Welp Kanye 2024". On 8 October 2022, West tweeted "I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda," resulting in West being banned from Twitter. On 11 October, Vice News revealed that, in an interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson a few days earlier, West had claimed that Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan to control "the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, who the people known as the race Black really are." A former TMZ staff member also revealed that West had professed his love for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and CNN reported that he had read Mein Kampf and wanted to name his 2018 album Hitler (it was ultimately titled Ye). West lost his billionaire status due to the termination of several corporate sponsorships of his products, reducing his net worth to $400 million from his real estate, cash, music catalog, and 5% stake in Skims. In February 2025, he reiterated his support for Nazism and his hatred of Jews while defending Elon Musk's Nazi salute and defending Sean Combs against criticism of his alleged sex trafficking.

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