Whitlock: Kanye West provokes Oscar performances across social media

A platform is a stage. Stages compel performance, acting. Big Tech and its social media apps constructed platforms for everyone with access to wifi and a smartphone.

Big Tech turned us into actors, inauthentic performers.

When news happens, we rush to our platforms and channel Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, and Denzel Washington. We act out the roles that we hope will garner the loudest applause in the form of likes, retweets, and follows.

Over the last two weeks or so, we’ve all been playing roles in a movie about Kanye West, the rapper, fashion designer, and provocateur. He wore a White Lives Matter T-shirt in Paris. He threatened to go “deathcon 3” on the Jewish people he blames for undermining him. He insinuated that George Floyd died from fentanyl, not Derek Chauvin’s knee.

Social media actors took to their stages and pretended West hijacked planes carrying nuclear bombs.

They claimed his T-shirt stunt denigrated black people, his Jewish comment fomented a second Holocaust, and his opinion about Floyd’s death damaged the legacy of a heroic martyr.

Meta kicked him off Instagram. Twitter suspended his account. Revolt TV deleted his "Drink Champs" interview. George Floyd’s family threatened a lawsuit.

For his refusal to follow the script, the social media matrix is using its actors to justify the deplatforming and canceling of Kanye West. We’ve seen it before. It happened to Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump. The social media matrix programmed us to view Farrakhan, Jones, and Trump as existential threats.

The same thing is being done to Kanye, a mercurial rapper.

At what point do we reject the programming and realize it’s an outlawing of free speech and freedom of thought and an assault on truth?

You can’t find the truth without free speech. The rigorous exchange of ideas and opinions unearths the truth. The platforms Big Tech constructed for us compel dishonesty. Athletes, celebrities, influencers, and Joe Blow social media users – many of them unwittingly – are using “their platforms” to lie.

Let’s use George Floyd as an example.

No one outside Floyd’s immediate family and circle of close friends authentically cares about him or his memory. Floyd is a prop, a costume or wig for social media actors. They feign an affinity for a man they did not know, a man they would flee if he approached them on the streets.

Pretending to be offended by Kanye’s insinuation that fentanyl killed Floyd enhances a social media actor’s brand.

Here’s what Kanye actually said: “I watched the George Floyd documentary that Candace Owens put out. One of the things that his two roommates said was they want a tall guy like me, and the day that he died, he said a prayer for eight minutes. They hit him with the fentanyl. If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that.”

It’s not offensive.

How do I know? Because in May 2012, two Indianapolis sheriffs tasered and killed my cousin, Anton Butler, in the pouring rain. I loved my cousin. I helped raise him. He spent summers with me in Kansas City. Several years, I bought his school clothes and Christmas gifts. His mother was my first cousin. We grew up like siblings. Anton was the smartest kid my family ever produced.

As an adult, he was a lot like George Floyd. He did time in prison. He sold and used drugs. He had an incredible heart. Circumstance undermined the direction of his life.

Police claim sudden cardiac arrest due to cocaine intoxication killed my cousin. As a family, we dispute that explanation. Eyewitnesses I personally talked to told a far different story from the police.

I’ve written and talked about my cousin in the past. People have said to me via social media that my cousin was a criminal and died because of cocaine abuse.

None of it matters. People can hold whatever opinion they want. They are not required to adopt my beliefs. I’m not so arrogant that I believe people should be punished for disagreeing with me, even on an issue this personal and painful.

If Floyd’s family sues Kanye West, it will speak to their arrogance and greed.

The people claiming that West’s opinion on Floyd’s death is an example of anti-black racism are clueless and dishonest. The chief medical examiner testified during Chauvin’s trial that the fentanyl in Floyd’s system contributed to his death.

Anyone who denies that drugs played a role in Floyd’s decision to resist arrest and that his resistance contributed to his death is willfully ignorant. Or maybe they’re a social media actor campaigning for an Academy Award.