TMZ
Earlier this week, we shared a heated conversation between Kanye West and TMZ’s Van Lathan, who got into it after Kanye said slavery was a choice. The video of the back and forth stopped abruptly, but the rest of the conversation recently hit the Internet.
In the previous video, Van blasted the Chicago rapper for his slavery remarks and said he was out of touch. Then in the most recent clip, he blasted Kanye for supporting Donald Trump and using the term “free thought” to justify it.
“Everyday we have to walk into that truth while you choose to say things, that to be honest with you dog, are nonsensical,” said Van. “You want to think freely, that’s fine. I’ll combat your free thought with my free thought, because mine is grounded in the reality that I have been given, and the reality that I’m going to change, but I’m not going to do it by pretending that the enemies are on the same team as me.”
“Stand on all the coffee tables you want to stand on,” he continued. “Say whatever you want to say but don’t throw a stone and hide your hand like the rest of us are just going to swallow it … Do you but remember the life that I live is as a real person.”
Then Ye walked over to Van but not before he said he was nervous, because he thought Van wanted to fight him.
Besides the heated exchange, the conservative speaker Candace Owens came on and co-signed a lot of what Kanye said about slavery. Owens is also the person who the rapper acknowledged on Twitter last week and said he likes the way she thinks.
Right away, the 28-year-old conservative started talking about slavery and disagreed with Van that it’s something the Black community is still reeling from.
“He gets up and he’s talking slavery, right? I’m not enslaved,” she said. “I don’t mean to insult his reality … I see that there seems to be this like ideological civil war in the Black community. For me I’m getting very tired of the victim narrative. I totally respect the feelings of the people that lived that. I respect your employee that just stood up and said this is what you’re going through, these people want to hurt me, but that’s the reality he’s accepted.”
Owens then said people who study, talk and think about slavery are living in the past and if they continue they won’t be able to move forward.
“I didn’t live through slavery,” she stated. “Obviously, I feel deeply for what my ancestors went through, and they went through that so I have this opportunity today to make something of myself, not see myself different than everyone around me.”
Outside of the conversation between Van, Kanye and Owens, Ye talked about the threat made by Daz. As we previously reported, the California rapper — who’s also a member of the Crips — sent a message out to other Crip members to harm Kanye.
But Ye said he’s not too worried about it, because the Crips think fondly of him and wouldn’t hurt him at all.
“I talked to J. Cole,” he said. “He said ‘How you feel when they said the Crips are going to kill you’ … Then when they said they wanted to beat me up I said ‘That’s great, them my brothers, they love me. They don’t want nothing to happen to Ye, they just want to beat some sense into me.’ I love Daz, I love the Crips , I love the Bloods, I love everyone.”
You can listen to the debate between Ye and Van at 20:22. Candace Owens comes in at 27:18.
