On the latest episode of Nick Cannon’s podcast, “Cannon’s Class,” entertainer and now 2020 presidential candidate Kanye West discussed his recent breakdown over abortion at a South Carolina campaign event. Kanye said he believes, “[God] wants me to say this now,” adding that people decided to keep their unborn children after connecting to him.
“If God didn’t want me to run on stage and say Beyonce had the best video, he wouldn’t have sat me in the front row,” West said jokingly, comparing the most recent backlash to his 2009 controversy with Taylor Swift at the VMAs.
In what is being billed as “Part 1” of their conversation, West and Cannon discussed a range of topics include abortion, his faith, his 2016 hospitalization, fashion design, and his political affiliation called “The Birthday Party.”
When Cannon brought up how media and fans blasted West for his tearful campaign speech in July, West responded that it shows the world is “sick.”
“A world that thinks you shouldn’t cry and be in repentance when you just … you know that is the world that is sick,” he said, before sharing “hard facts that deal with the black genocide.”
West reiterated his previous statements on the racist goals of Planned Parenthood and its founder Margaret Sanger.
“Over 1,000 black babies are aborted every day, so that means we are inside of it as we speak. We are inside a genocide as we speak,” he said, before quoting other abortion statistics as well as the Bible, which says, “I knew you before you were in the womb.”
West said God is using him as a voice to speak for the unborn. “I didn’t even want to have to say that information out loud, but God said, ‘Ye, I need to use you.’ I’m one of the bullhorns.”
Cannon, who has also criticized Planned Parenthood and said his own mom considered abortion but chose life, asked whether speaking out against abortion was critical to West’s 2020 campaign.
“I can only give God the glory because of the connection point to the Birthday Party is dealing with life and pro-life. Because these are kids that are now gonna get a chance to have birthdays,” West said.
For anyone who wants to tear me down for crying, you realize that because of South Carolina, there are people who have decided to have a child? Because they connected. And if they were on the fence about it, they never saw anyone in my position take that position and say, ‘Look at this. This is a 7-year-old right here. And she might have never made it here.’
So when I talk to my father, my father made me apologize to him for bringing this up publicly. He also said that the abortion culture teaches people that a child isn’t a real soul. And it was my wife that said, ‘This is a soul.’ And the scariest thing is, she had the pills—you know, you take these pills, you take them and the next morning the baby’s gone—she had the pills in her hand.
Cannon asked West about the backlash he receives for his pro-life stance, one of the most common critiques being that men should not have an opinion on the topic. “It’s a topic they say us as men, us two men sitting here should not be sitting here having a conversation about abortion,” he said.
West responded that it’s a strategy to take the male opinion out of any conversation. “You need the male and the female opinion. And also, it’s both people’s child.”
I posted a picture because I read … In New York, I heard you can abort after nine months, but I saw on Google they said 24 weeks, and I showed a picture on my Twitter of a 24-week-old fetus and I got backlash. ‘How you going to put up that abortion tweet?’ And you know what it is, I was trying to appeal to humanity, but we could see by the reaction people had to me crying there is no humanity.
In reference to his own recent controversy over antisemitic comments Cannon made on a podcast with rapper Professor Griff, Cannon said he doesn’t want to cause conflict with his words. “When I hurt people with my words, I didn’t mean to do that. But when people come to conflict because of what you said, that can’t be what you want.”
West responded with the observation that black Americans are like “housekeepers.”
“The most influential, strongest black voices have to act like housekeepers—and I like housekeepers—but if one housekeeper speaks up, they say ‘Shut up, you’re going to get us fired’ — that’s our position. We were brought over here in servitude,” West said.
Earlier in the podcast, West discussed the importance of family, and how American businesses profit off loneliness and the separation of families.
“At the beginning, middle and the end of the day, I’m a dad,” he said. “And there’s so many fathers that, you know, they have jobs where their whole point in life is to take care of their family. When you’re supposed to provide only one service—like, ‘We need your new album!’—to be able to just go and provide for your kids but be able to set a tone of morality, a tone of spirituality…”
“People say, ‘I feel closer to God when I’m at the top of a mountain.’ I feel closer to God when I’m on my knees talking to my children.”
Watch the full interview here: