Tucker Carlson went to great lengths to remix Kanye West for his large conservative audience on Thursday night, calling him “an artist”, describing his erratic tweetstorms as “freeform social media posts”, and introducing him as a “Christian evangelist”. If you hadn’t been watching Fox News for the past 20 years, you’d never suspect this was the same network and time slot on which Bill O’Reilly once dismissed West as “the dopey little rapper”.
But the network’s view on West, who now goes by Ye, has shifted markedly in the six years since the rapper-fashionista has made a hard right turn towards conservative libertarianism. Carlson was warming his viewers up to West as a lead-in to an exclusive, two-part one-on-one interview, shot at West’s Yeezy fashion brand headquarters in Los Angeles.
