Trevor Noah is sticking up for Kanye West.
Despite the two entertainers getting into a back-and-forth over West “harassing” his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, during their divorce, the “Daily Show” host is now speaking up for the rapper’s humanity.
Noah addressed the “Heartless” mogul in a long-winded monologue on his show in March. In part, he spoke up because his own mother was harassed by her ex, and Noah didn’t want to see the same fatal ending for Kimye.
However, West didn’t take too kindly to the advice and responded by calling Noah a racial slur on Instagram — to which Noah responded in a lengthy post, telling West that it “breaks my heart to see you like this” at that time.
Now Noah is offering him a heartfelt show of support.
“It’s easy to stand on the sidelines, see a train crash coming and say nothing about it,” Noah stated on Thursday’s episode of Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast.
“And then after the train crashes off the tracks, we say, ‘Oh, I saw that coming!’ Well, then why didn’t you say anything? Especially if you have some sort of platform, you have some sort of obligation to speak a truth. You know, see something and say something.
“And I also understand that human beings are a paradox,” Noah continued on the podcast. “We can love people whom we hate, we can hate people whom we love. Human beings as a whole are complicated paradox. And so, I don’t like to live in a world where we constantly discard human beings like pieces of trash.”
Noah continued to suggest that it is better to speak up than turn a blind eye when someone — like West — takes a negative turn.
“Kanye West is somebody who has an indelible impression on my life. His music has literally taken me through different periods of my journey, but then there are also moments where I go, like, ‘Man, Kanye, you, you’re going off the rails here.’ But I can still say that ‘I care for you as a human being, that’s; That’s why I’m speaking out. I’m not going to not care for you — I’m not going to hate you all of a sudden.’
“That’s how I try and see the world; that’s how I would hope people would see me,” Noah said.
“If I’ve engaged you as a human being, and if you like me, or if you like anyone in your life, I hope you’d have the ability to say to that person, ‘Hey, I think what you’re doing here is wrong. I think you may be headed in the dangerous direction,’” Noah said, alluding to West’s troubling behavior on social media at the beginning of the year.
“’And I’m saying that because I like you. I don’t discard you as a person.’ And I think we have gotten very comfortable discarding human beings, immediately tossing them away and making them irredeemable characters,” Noah stated. “When, in fact, I think all of us should be afforded the opportunity to redeem ourselves.
“All of us should have an opportunity at redemption,” Noah added.
West has been relatively quiet on social media lately — until he posted a doctored New York Times headline rejoicing that Kardashian and her ex-boyfriend, “Saturday Night Live” alum Pete Davidson, had broken up. This week, the father of four was also in the news for defending Yeezy Gap’s trashy clothing display, which was derided by many.
Noah also touched on another disgraced Hollywood figure, Will Smith, and how the public’s reaction to the actor’s Oscars slap “fascinated” him.
“I was shocked at how many people immediately just went, ‘Will Smith is a trash human being and he’s the worst human — he should be in jail.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, wow. OK.’ That was really interesting for me. As opposed to saying, this person whom we’ve loved for so long, who has not put a foot wrong anywhere,” Noah declared.
“Something went wrong here,” Noah said of the March 27 incident televised to an international audience. “Something really went wrong; What went wrong? Should we get into that? Should we delve into the humanity of it? Should we ask, should we question? Should we care? Nope, nope — that’s not the world we live in anymore.”
Data outlining Q Scores, which measure celebrities’ star power and appeal, showed that Smith’s numbers declined greatly in the months following him slapping Chris Rock at the awards show, Variety reported on Thursday.
“People instantly get defined,” Noah added. “And you cannot exist in a gray space. You cannot be a good person who has done a bad thing. And you cannot be a bad person who does a good thing. You’re either a good person or a bad person. And that’s it. And then society flip-flops with you, depending on your last action.
“I try not to allow myself to get sucked into that too much,” he concluded.
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